No Pain, No Game
Misery as merit, in another realm
Why would a fun, easy, social game be controversial? As far as I can tell, that’s why.
The other week, my wife and I and a couple of her old coworkers signed up for some pickleball classes at an indoor facility, out in one of those dreary one-story office/light industrial parks that are all over Northern Virginia. (They’re home, however, to all sorts of quirky businesses in addition to actual offices and industrial operations, like my favorite coffee shop.) And one of them is this large facility with a whole bunch of pickleball courts, and a reservation system for lessons, practices, and games.
I’ve never played pickleball before, though I’ve played a little bit of very casual tennis here and there, of which pickleball is a sort of simplified version. It’s tennis-like—really, ping-pong-like—and it’s quite fast-paced, fun, and learnable.
I am aware, however, that pickleball is controversial. There are endless threads on Reddit about it, and there have even been a number of news items about these issues, which center around pickleballers using tennis courts, parks revamping tennis courts into pickleball courts, arguments over court etiquette and noise, etc. Many have noted the unmistakable NIMBY tone of a lot of the anti-pickleball commentary. This writer compared it to the resistance to housing for homeless people. This story from Arlington, Virginia, on opposition to a new set of pickleball courts, reported this:
In a flyer that’s now being disseminated around the neighborhood, opponents are leveling accusations of “bullying of our children by pickleball players,” “public urination on playground and sensory garden,” and causing “excessive continuous noise from dawn to 10 p.m. every day.”
There’s a lot of this. Without following this at all, I’ve seen it many times. But I did a little bit of reading after I got home from my lessons, and I sensed a theme: too crowded, too much noise, players are impolite and immature and act “entitled,” they play too much or too long, the game is too easy, real sports weed the casuals out.
It’s exclusionary, it’s elitist, and it’s NIMBY.
It’s really hard not to read something like envy and resentment into the anti-pickleball sentiment. In addition to housing NIMBYs these folks remind me—based on the Reddit threads, anyway, and what I’ve read in the news items—of the subset of sport cyclists who are so disliked by a lot of ordinary bike commuters or errand-runners. The sport cyclists often don’t want protected bike lanes—they claim to sort of like the danger and the confrontation with motorists, or else they’re riding in open areas without constant traffic. They often dislike e-bikes, because they see it as taking the work out of bike-riding.
In other words, the pain and discomfort are the point. The misery is the merit. If you’re enjoying it, you’re cheating. And this is precisely the lurking attitude in so much of the commentary against building housing, driving down prices, making homes in desirable places in reach of normal people. This unstated but widely prevalent assumption that making something easier is illegitimate.
That sentiment seems to lurk in the tennis-pickleball commentary—this sense that tennis is a superior endeavor because it’s more difficult, has more refined etiquette, and is more about the game than the social element (or because it’s “one-on-one combat” distilled or a “psychological game” or whatever they say.)
First of all, I don’t think this is true. Pickleball strikes me as something like Tetris, of which it’s often said that the game is “easy to play but difficult to master.” To that I’d add pinball, or arcade games generally. Most players aren’t very good, but that’s not the point. You can refine your skill to an almost insane degree—ever seen competitive video gamers?—but you don’t have to be a pro to have a great time.
This sort of dovetails with something I’ve often noted, and other urbanists I’ve chatted with have noted. The way I’ve put it is, for people who see themselves as having “fled the city,” the lack of amenities in their exurban communities is an amenity. Or that people who don’t like cities can’t distinguish between delightful street life and suspicious activities. It all feels kind of suspicious. What feels dead and eerily quiet to people like me feels like respite to others. (And look, that’s okay—but it’s not the appropriate attitude if you live in a place like Arlington, a stone’s throw away from the city.)
But maybe contradictorily, I’ve also wondered whether Americans refuse urbanism because we like it: because our culture has deeply trained us to avoid pleasure, to mistake pleasure for leisure and leisure for laziness.
Maybe I read too much into this, but I feel like that’s lurking under some of this pickleball controversy, which seems completely outsized compared to the thing in question. It’s hard not to wonder, do people object to it because it’s popular and enjoyable? Is it just that hard to shake that mental habit that says, high barriers to entry are good, adversity is good, hanging out and enjoying yourself is suspicious and soft and lazy and entitled? It feels sometimes like Americans live in a sort of interminable secular Lent, denying ourselves good things and viewing it as meritorious.
It’s not surprising, then, that anti-pickleball folks often get called NIMBYs, and that some housing advocates have grokked that there’s a certain overlap between the scarcity mindset of tennis (or golf) versus pickleball, just as there is between NIMBYs and YIMBYs.
More specifically: it’s hard not to think of housing debates when you look at tennis’s large and sparsely used courts versus pickleball’s smaller, more popular, and more densely packed courts. When you see pickleball NIMBYs opposing a public entertainment investment because too many people use it. It’s hard not to think of some comfortable homeowner who bought their house for $200,000 in 1980 telling you to just work harder and quit asking for a handout, or some Victorian domesticity cosplayer telling you you’re a person of bad character if you live in an apartment building, when you hear some snooty tennis guy telling you pickleball isn’t a real sport because it can be picked up, played, and enjoyed.
This odd sports debate ends up being a sort of proxy in miniature for the much bigger question of whether we view our cities as fortresses to protect or as dynamic, open, inviting places. Whether we want to share or hoard what we love. Whether the default attitude should be to batten down the hatches or to lift up the gates. I think there are a lot of intellectual errors here: we mistake scarcity for worth, we mistake misery for merit, we mistake rest for laziness, we mistake easing a burden for giving a handout.
It isn’t a shameful thing to have a good time. It isn’t an entitlement attitude to want to help build a society that makes good things easier and more abundant. It’s a shameful thing and an entitlement attitude to gatekeep, to impose scarcity, and to think that making things harder for other people somehow raises the value of your work. Or play.
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Didn’t expect to be saving quotes from an urbanism blog to discuss in THERAPY but here we are
Pickleball looks like fun and a number of my city's community centers have converted aging tennis courts to pickleball courts. I guess I've managed to avoid hearing how it's turned into yet another culture war issue. In fact, the only complaint I've read about is from people who live in close proximity to these courts, who say the constant thwacking sound for hours on end gets to them.