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Oct 2, 2024

The New Pickleball-Tennis-Squash-Paddleball?

Hailing from Mexico, this hybrid sport is trending

By Ed Goldman

If you’re a pickleball enthusiast but feel it just doesn’t offer you enough on-court injuries, ambulance rides and physical therapy opportunities, maybe you should direct your focus to the most exciting Mexican import since the singer Thalía and the mid-day siesta: Padel! (Or should I say, ¡Padel!)

Padel is played on an enclosed tennis court—but smaller, meaning if the interior design of your house includes a “great room,” you may be on your way to hosting an in-home padel “open” if the room doesn’t contain a built-in china closet filled with Hummel figurines. Porcelain tends to shatter when hit by even low-pressure padel balls and senior citizens experiencing low blood-sugar episodes.

Edgy Cartoon

Thank you for your service

That last sentence brings to mind another question we trend spotters should be asking ourselves: Is a “padel ball” just a “paddleball” with a better publicist? And while we’re at it, does porcelain kitsch, like Hummels, shatter worse than porcelain conveniences, like toilets? It’s worth contemplating only if the “great room” design of your home features a stand-alone, open-air bathroom. (And if it does, just how weird are you?) 

Unlike tennis, but very much like racquetball, handball and solitary confinement, a padel “court” has four walls and a ceiling. If you’re playing it in a white-collar prison, throw in a few armed guards, a watch tower and, for night games, a spotlight. 

You may also want to pronounce the name correctly, since it’s not an English word and one most always assume there’s a nearby DEI consultant waiting to pounce on you for cultural misappropriation. It’s pahDELL. But if you’re going to do that be ready to pronounce my city and state as Sah-cruh-MEN-toe Cahl-ee-FORN-ya except behind closed doors, when you can freely say “Sackatomatoes” and “Cali.” 

Quick aside: There’s no truth to the rumor that the familiar abbreviation for my state, Calif., stands for Come And Live In Florida.

Just two years ago there already were “more than 25 million active (padel) players in more than 90 countries,” giving the game a market value of about two billion bucks a year “and growing fast,” according to Wikipedia (Whih-kuh-PEE-dee-ya). 

In the city of West Sacramento—which is across the Sacramento River from the city of Sacramento and also in a different county, possibly because the original settlers of the area drank during the day—padel-court construction is nearing completion along the Sacramento River-bank. This is worth noting because West Sac is where most of the produce is grown that allows Regular Sacramento to proclaim itself the Farm-to-Fork Capital. Ergo, it may not be long before Regular Sacramento takes the credit for being the Northern California birthplace of padel.  

If you accept an invitation to play padel, you’ll be a big hit by knowing the rules in advance instead of interrupting the game after each point by asking for a ruling from the line umpire. For example, scoring is just as asinine as it is in tennis. Is there another sport in the world that uses game lengtheners called “ad-in” and “ad-out” or presumes when you earn zero points in a game you leave it with “love?”

But even though you can use the walls to bounce the balls against and off, padel isn’t “squash,” either. And unlike tennis, which you play with a stringed racket—which can also do duty as a spaghetti strainer, grease-spatter catcher or multiple-fly swatter—you play padel with solid board-like things (often called bats or, yes, “paddles”).

Like many people in my general age bracket—those who know the Beatles weren’t Paul McCartney’s first backup band, for example—I’m starting to think that as the bloom fades from pickleball, padel will be the new sport I tell everyone I’ll never play. I pride myself on staying current.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).