Pickleball, Y’all!

A small-court sensation is sweeping the nation. What’s all the racket about?

Pickleball. Have you heard of it? It’s that incredibly popular tennis-andPing-Pong hybrid that everyone’s playing, from Ellen DeGeneres (“I’m obsessed with it”) to most of the residents of Naples, Fla., it seems (where one center with 60 courts calls itself “the Pickleball Capital of the World”).

As if pickleball weren’t hot enough already, here’s something else to add to the buzz. America’s bounciest, most-talked-about game is also really good for rhyming.

So says Penn Holderness, co-creator with his wife, Kim, of a viral rap video called “The Pickleball Song.” The Holdernesses recently achieved fame as the winners of The Amazing

Race on CBS. But before that, they were simply a hilarious pair of YouTubers who mined their marriage and family life for comedy gold and a billion views.

In the pickleball video, Penn leans into the camera to rap-shout, “My wife, yeah, she used to be chill / But to her pickleball’s now a really big dill !”

Kim’s right about it being a really big, uh, deal. According to USA Pickleball, the sport has been sprouting like a cucumber vine, growing an average of 11.5 percent a year since 2017 to reach 4.8 million picklers in the United States alone. As Penn Holderness might rap, “This gherkin is workin’.”

If you haven’t yet experienced the sport,

walk by any of 9,524 pickleballenabled parks, community centers and sports complexes across the U.S. and listen for the plink, plonk, plink, plonk sound of oversize whiffle balls bouncing off of composite paddles.

What Jerry Seinfeld once joked about tennis is even truer about pickleball: It’s “basically Ping-Pong, and the players are standing on the table.” But four 20-by-44-foot pickleball courts can fit into the space required for the Sport of Kings. Plus, it’s easy to pick up, requires minimal athleticism and has a fun vocabulary all its own. So maybe there’s new royalty on the court.

We can’t all smash like Roger or slash like Serena, but virtually anybody can play pickleball. “A man I was playing against recently was limping,” says Ann Farrell Pulliam, 55, a recent convert to pickleball in Vienna, Va. “So I asked him, ‘Have you hurt your leg?’ He tells me, ‘No, I have Parkinson’s.’ I felt terrible. Then his team totally killed us.”

Pulliam is a great case study in pickleball’s popularity. She lost her husband to cancer in June of 2021, just shy of their 30th wedding anniversary. She barely left the house for months, except to attend her grief group. “A friend called to check on me,” she recalls. “He told me, ‘Get out of bed. Take a shower. Put on some clothes. Go play pickleball.’ So I went on Facebook and asked if anybody had ever heard of the game. Now I play five times a week and my phone contacts have doubled. It saved my life.”

One reason for Pulliam’s change in outlook: The other incessant noise you hear on a pickleball court is laughter. “The first time I laughed since my husband died, I was on a pickleball court,” says Pulliam. “You