ORLANDO, Fla. — The DeVos family, the billionaire owners of the Orlando Magic, are in a pickle.
And so, too, is LeBron James.
And Tom Brady.
And Kevin Durant.
And Naomi Osaka.
And Mark Cuban.
And Heidi Klum.
And Patrick Mahomes.
All of these rich, famous VIPs are in the same pickle.
A major pickle.
As in Major League Pickleball.
You heard me.
Major League Pickleball!
Hey, Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Al, move over and make some room on the pickleball bandwagon because the sport that was once the domain of your retirement community is going big-time.
Billionaire sports owners, iconic athletes and Hollywood celebrities all want in on the fastest growing sport in America. Which is why the Magic’s ownership group announced earlier this week the formation of the newest Major League Pickleball expansion franchise, the Orlando Squeeze; a nickname that gives a nod to Orange County’s vast roots in the citrus industry. The addition of the Squeeze brings the number of teams in the burgeoning MLP to 24.
“There are 5 million players currently playing pickleball and the hopes and plans are to use Major League Pickleball as a platform to further that growth even more,” says Ryan DeVos, the sports executive who is leading the Magic ownership group’s venture into pickleball. “The beauty of pickleball is the accessibility. You can get a $50 racket on Amazon and you’re ready to roll. And as a family, we can play it with our kids and we can play it with our parents and we can all be pretty competitive.”
For the uninformed, pickleball is often described as a cross between tennis, ping pong and badminton. It was founded in the 1965 by Joel Pritchard, a father who was on vacation in Bainbridge Island, Wash., with his wife and kids, including his bored teenage boy. That’s when father and son decided to invent a game by lowering a badminton net and hitting a wiffleball back and forth with ping pong paddles.
They made up rules and took the game back home where it caught on in their neighborhood. It has been reported that the game was named after the family dog “Pickles” but that is inaccurate. Because it was a hodgepodge game comprised of ideas and concepts from other sports, Pritchard’s wife, Joan, named it “pickleball” because it reminded her of the pickle boat in the sport of rowing. The pickle boat, you see, is made up of a motley crew of oarsmen who were the leftovers from other boats.
The motley sport grew slowly until the pivotal moment it was introduced in the 1980s to a group of residents at The Villages, the sprawling retirement community in Central Florida. From there, it became the hottest commodity in the senior community since the advent of Viagra.
According to the Villages Daily Sun, the first pickleball court appeared in the retirement community in 1990. Now, more than three decades later, there are nearly 250 pickleball courts in The Villages.
Except now, it’s not just a sport for grandma and grandpa and the sox-with-sandals demographic. It’s become all the rage for every age. Tennis courts across the country are being downsized into pickleball courts, and there are projections that more than 40 million could be playing pickleball in the next decade.
Translation: Money, money and more money. Just imagine the hundreds of millions of dollars in rackets and apparel that will result from such incredible growth.
Why do you think two Texas billionaires — hedge-fund mogul Steve Kuhn and Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon — fought over control of the professional pickleball market for a few years until they finally decided to merge their two leagues recently under the Major League Pickleball name?
And now major investors like the DeVos family and Cuban as well as some of the most famous athletes in the country want a slice of the pickle. Cracked Brady on Instagram a few months ago when it was announced he was investing in an expansion franchise: “Look, I’ve been trying to find a way to extend my professional sports career beyond my 40s, even into my 50s, 60s, 70s. As long as I can, right? And I think I got the answer. Seems like everyone else has the answer, too. Pickleball.”
Would anybody be surprised to see a made-for-TV pickleball showdown in the coming months between Brady and LeBron – two aging athletes who are now going all-in on a sport that was once the territory of aging Americans?
“A lot more young people are getting involved and playing,” DeVos says. “There’s going to be more and more eyeballs on this sport than ever before.”
Hey, Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Al, would you mind moving over just a little bit more?
Orlando literally wants to Squeeze onto your bandwagon.
In fact, you could say the entire sports world is being consumed by this dilly of a pickle.
