My wife and I started playing tennis during the pandemic, while living in San Marcos, Texas. For my birthday, she purchased off of Amazon a “tennis starter kit,” which included two generic 110 square-inch racquets, a racquet bag, and two cans of balls, all for twenty-five bucks. After the first hour of hitting, I was hooked. Being a gearhead, I immediately wanted to go all in on proper tennis shoes, hats, shorts, that headband that Fed wore, and of course a player’s racquet. But my wife, knowing that I have a tendency to get ahead of myself—I’d already devoted hundreds of dollars to camping equipment, first edition books, cookware, surfing gear—suggested that I stick with tennis for a year before shelling out dough for the nice stuff. I agreed, and for one year we played with those cheap racquets. We also played with those same six balls all year, so inexperienced that we didn’t know what “dead balls” meant or how good it feels to play with fresh ones.
We could have invested in pickleball equipment. Not necessarily in addition to tennis equipment, but instead of it. I was in grad school at the time and could only afford one new sport venture. With its gentle learning curve and easy-to-access community, pickleball seemed in some ways like a viable option. But that’s before considering all this:
At San Marcos’s Rio Vista Park, there are six Laurelhurst-quality tennis courts—but there are also fewer than six, because the city has painted permanent lines for pickleball courts onto two of them: eight pickleball courts in total, with two on each side of each of the two tennis courts. Picklers bring their own portable nets, which are two inches lower than tennis nets at the center point, to fully convert the tennis court to pickleball. The hybrid courts are courts of last resort for San Marcos’s tennis players: the markings delineating tennis’s no man’s land overlap with pickleball’s kitchen, causing quite a bit of visual confusion. And unlike Tennis City, USA, with its plethora of park courts, the courts at Rio Vista are the only public tennis courts in all of San Marcos. Every weekend, the hybrid courts are consistently occupied by no fewer than thirty-two pickleball players. If picklers don’t have a net or the pickle courts are in use, they spill over onto the tennis-only courts and play a modified version of their game with a too-high net. All weekend long, from sunrise to when the lights shut off at midnight, the park is filled with picklers. Those without anyone to play with often take up yet another court, with a backstop, to practice “dinking,” a very unpleasant sound and also sight, given how close they stand to the wall. I know this sounds like a rant, but it was annoying to me as a new tennis player. Between this and the fact that we’d have to buy a hundred dollar net to properly play the game, the decision to play tennis over pickleball was an easy one.
Still, even if it was a pragmatic decision at first, something about pickleball gave us pause from the get-go. Even then, it felt like the tailgating variety of court sports. It lacks elegance. In the end, I think we choose and continue to choose tennis for a deeper reason. Tennis players have a way (or have the capacity, I should say) of moving beautifully.
Three years before I ever touched a racquet, I became infatuated with tennis while observing an amateur player at the Ossington Park courts in Toronto, Canada. I watched him warm up, going half speed, half power. The guy was wearing jeans, running shoes, and a cotton T-shirt, and it was spring, the same kind of spring that hits Portland with tastes of sunshine, cool breezes in the trees, couples holding hands in the park. The player looked weightless on his feet as he grazed the ball with a gentle brush up, scooping his backhand from low to high and then over his shoulder. His volleys, which required him to move his feet and separate his arms for balance, resembled dance. I was enchanted.
To be good at tennis is to be beautiful. To be good at pickleball is to be good at pickleball. Unlike pickleball, it takes years to become a good and beautiful tennis player: thousands of hours on the court, playing people both below and above your level. It requires drills and practice. It takes time and concentration to learn footwork, the fundamentals of the kinetic chain, and how to strike the ball in front of your body. I have now spent countless days on the court, practicing my serve by myself. I’ve devoted dozens of hours to watching YouTube videos on forehands, overheads, two-handed backhands, volleys, half-volleys, split-stepping and strategy. I’m engaged in the learning process because I know that the better I get, the more beautiful I become on the court.
When I play tennis, I get to perform. I move my feet to position my body, use my legs to generate power up through the ball. But also, equally important, I get to see my opponent respond to my actions. I get to witness their beauty while they witness mine. I also get to witness their shortcomings: the moon balls, frame shots, and hits into the net, as they in turn bear witness to my many mishaps. This interactivity and relationality affords my hitting partner and me intimacy and connection. The only experience that comes close to resembling playing tennis, or I should say having a good day playing tennis, is having a deep conversation with someone. The feeling of being truly seen and accepted, while truly seeing and accepting another.
In tennis practice, hitting with our friends, we say sorry when we hit a ball into the net or out beyond the baseline. We say sorry because the unforced error has stopped this connection. But sometimes the connection keeps going despite the error: someone might lob a long ball back, or return a shot after it’s bounced twice to keep the rally going. All of us are after the same thing: beautiful, dynamic rallies. It’s the core reason we’re all playing. In my limited experience, this has never happened in pickleball because rallying in pickleball is kind of boring.
The evolution of tennis, over hundreds of years, has brought into perfect balance performance and communication, which is a very good recipe for beauty. The size and geometry of the court allow just enough time to witness your opponent perform the gorgeous motion of striking a tennis ball; to respond precisely to their play is to carefully listen.
I haven’t felt this when I’ve played pickleball. The dimensions of the game—the shrunken size of the court, the size of the paddle relative to the size of the ball—mask flaws, which makes it easy to confuse pickleball ability with athleticism and grace. There isn’t enough room on a pickleball court for a body to move beautifully. The paddle is too short to accentuate the arm and wrist. Everything feels rushed and cartoonish. If tennis is a conversation, then pickleball is maybe like bickering?
Tennis, even at the amateur level, offers a deeper level of engagement, a more diverse array of possible movements, and more opportunities for true greatness. The early days of tennis with my wife, launching balls three courts down, saying sorry, laughing, cursing each other’s good shots, and then rapidly progressing together as players, are some of my favorite tennis memories. It’s a wonderful place to be: improving, refining, learning from one another. I love seeing a newcomer to tennis hit a beautiful shot, like a cross-court groundstroke that lands just inside the corner, or a well-executed backhand volley. I know quite personally that a beautiful groundstroke or volley doesn’t come easily; it can only be achieved through repetition, performance and hard-earned experience. I could watch it over and over again.
