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"You should try pickleball. It's fun."
I could not believe the words I was hearing from my longtime friend Ron Dusendorf, with whom I have played racquetball for better than 35 years, two or three times a week, at the East Liverpool Y.
Another friend, Michael NoAngelo, the best player in our group along with Cookie, had been playing with us almost as long, but Mike's Monday-Wednesday-Friday appearances at the racquetball court had tailed off. Bad knee, sore foot.
He, too, was trying pickleball.
"There's a regular group that plays indoors Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Ron. "All kinds of people are playing. There's this one old lady who beats everybody. She's 92."
"Ron," I said, looking him straight in the eye and speaking very slowly, "I don't want to play pickleball. I especially don't want to play pickleball and lose to a woman who's 92."
For years I had been telling Ron that we have to keep playing racquetball. "We quit playing, we die," was my mantra.
That conversation happened a year ago. This past April, I quit racquetball. I didn't die, but I miss the hell out of it.
All last fall and winter, while keeping up my own participation in racquetball, I directed my remaining time and energy to re-roofing our geodesic dome house. Everyone in the family feared I'd fall off and kill myself. My fear was I'd fall off and not be able to play racquetball.
Turned out, it was racquetball that caused me to quit racquetball.
I was reaching to make a forehand shot when something gave in my right shoulder. Yeowwwwwwouch! The date was April 10; the moment is etched in my memory.
I laid off racquetball for a couple of weeks, thought I was better and tried again. Forehand and overhand shots hurt. A lot. I paid for my attempted return with an aching shoulder that disrupted sleep for days.
Our family shoulder orthopod, Dr. Dennis Phillips at AGH, had fixed our son Worshrag's shoulder after a high school wrestling injury years ago. Worsh had to keep his shoulder immobile for many days. I have a picture of him sitting forlornly in the bathtub, wearing his gym trunks so his mother and I could help him bathe..
Dr. Phillips gave me a shot and said to come back if the pain returned. When the shot wore off, the pain returned, but at a manageable level so long as I avoided motions like throwing overhand. I wasn't afraid of surgery, but I had a roof to finish and a garden to get in.
"Maybe this winter," I told my wife.
Roofing and farm work are good exercise, but they don't equal the running frenzy of racquetball. There had been days when I could wring a quart of sweat out of my shirt after playing for two hours. Pickleball is a milquetoast replacement for a real sport that I played for nearly four decades and never got tired of. I was not the best but I won my share. I had a style. I had a game.
I will never play pickleball enough to be any good at it. My obit will not read, ". . . and he loved to play pickleball."
I miss the friends I played with: Mike, Ron, Cookie, Jimmy Italiano, Tommy Boy, The Price is Right Glenn. The ones I played with years ago: Jan Burke, Bruce Nielsen, Mike Stambola, Doc Bartolovich. And guys who didn't play, but I ran into at the Y, like Mike Varish, who kept saying he was going to play but only came into the racquetball room to argue politics with me, loudly. He called me a fascist, I called him a communist, but friendship transcended ideology.
It was a social outlet; my only one, I admit. We played to win but didn't take winning or losing seriously. We rotated partners and welcomed new players. We laughed and joked and remained friends even as we routinely hit each other with shots so hard they left red rings with white centers on backs, legs and butts, which invariably were pointed out in the shower room by the perpetrator. I especially had a reputation for hitting people. The other guys would say, "Sorry." My standard response was "You were in my way."
During rest breaks we talked news or sports, but more often swapped stories about funny things that happened, and shared news of the deaths or illnesses of mutual friends. We almost never talked about wives and kids. (No offense, girls.)
Dusendorf and NoAngelo finally pressured me into trying pickleball. Once.
We played doubles on the spiffy new outdoor courts the Y built on an under-used parking lot. Suzy at the Y desk gave me a pickleball membership card, entitling me to play and borrow paddles. The other players were welcoming and patient with my lack of skill and ignorance of the rules. My partners and I lost every match.
Back home, my wife asked, "So, how did pickleball go?"
"It was, uh, fun."
"You don't sound like it."
My gripe about pickleball isn't so much about what it is, but what it isn't. It isn't racquetball, just like it isn't golf or tennis or other sports that people have to give up at some point.
Maybe Doc Phillips can fix me. I can learn to play left-handed. There's gotta be a better option than pickleball.