Pickleball! It swept the country, with its plinks and plunks, at an unequaled speed. The smaller, slower, lamer version of tennis is everywhere you look. It has been taken basketball courts. It has been taken the rink. It has been taken the old Bed Bath & Beyond. It expands at a parabolic rate and maybe it’s fake. The rise of Pickleball has upset many people, some of whom think it’s a psyop—cui bond?—but I find it hard to be too sad, because it provides exercise and socialization for a cadre that might not get them otherwise. And those who play it often insist that it is actually a lot of fun. But playing it is one thing, and here lies the biggest obstacle to fully taking the game to the country:
Pickleball is perfect KILLINGS to look.
I can’t really fault a sports network with 168 hours of programming per week to fill for chucking something on the air that is at least recognizable as sporty and has very cheap broadcast rights, but this shit boring. This is not the next tennis. It’s not even the next jai alai, because you can’t bet on it. Pickleball is a black hole of excitement as a spectator sport.
The plastic ball is too light and the court too small for anything but endless rallies that look like the players are deliberately trying not to win. It’s fine for the casual player who isn’t skilled enough to make the mistakes needed to end a point, but professional pickleball just doesn’t cut it as a live or televised event. Unless. Unless?
Unless we mash up the pickleball of the sport eschaton from Unlimited Laughter.
I’m probably pissing everyone off right now, because David Foster Wallace is probably the only thing as polarizing as pickleball. (If you care, I’m lukewarm on some of his works, tall on others, definitely not smart enough to understand some, but I think Unlimited Laughter slaps.) But these are two acquired tastes that taste great together.
Eschaton is a game invented and played by the students of the tennis academy in the novel, especially in an exciting sequence in the middle of the book that runs for 20 pages, moreover, in typical Wallace style, a math-heavy endnote that runs three damn full pages of little endnote. font. Eschaton is about tennis, part War GamesABOUT risks. The space of several tennis courts represents a world map, and various pieces of clothing are scattered to represent submarines and missile launchers and so on. The game is nuclear war, and tennis balls representing ICBMs will be lobbed into opposing territories, maybe deflected, maybe returned. The goal is survival.
It’s more complicated than that. Much, much more complicated. (The dungeon master class in an eschaton game wears a propeller beanie whose color represents the global level of risk. If a “worst-case-&-completely-out-of-control-Armageddon-type situation ” reach, he spins the propeller as fast as he can. You can skip the beanie if you want to play it in real life.)
People THERE tried to play eschaton, or a quidditch-esque simplified version of it, and failed. It’s too complicated and too big, with too many moving parts to appreciate or enjoy on its own merits. It makes for a better setpiece in the novel, where the complexity is the comedy, than it is a play. Although it makes for a fun Decembrist video.
I submit that the pickleball saves the eschaton, and the eschaton saves the pickleball.
The tennis-eschaton is very difficult and takes a lot of space to use (in the book, the map takes up SIX courts, not the four in the graphic above). But if we bring things down to pickleball scale—maybe, say, four smaller pickleball courts, with two teams—we have something more viable. The slowness of the ball both takes the tension out of the incoming missile and makes the action of returning it far more difficult. The whole thing becomes easier to follow. Players, unlike in actual pickleball, have to run around. International teams representing their actual geo-political regions will provide more drama and more emotional connection than some fit Gen-Xers from Tampa. Did you tell me you weren’t going wild when Team USA vaporized Chile into a radioactive crater? Don’t even try to tell me that.
on Unlimited Laughter, the game of eschaton turns into a battle when players go rogue and start directly targeting their rival world leaders. This is a remarkable feat of physical comedy:
Timmy Peterson took a ball to the groin and went down like a sack of fine flour. Everyone is taking spent warheads and completely falsely referring to them. The fences shook and sang as the balls rained against them. Ingersoll now resembles some kind of animal that has passed through the road. […] Ann Kittenplan dropped her racket and charged McKenna. He took two contact-bursts in the chest-area before he could get to him and put McKenna in with an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles Todd Possalthwaite from behind. It looks like Struck wet his pants in his sleep. JJ Penn fell into a grounded warhead near Fiji and fell spectacularly. The snowfall makes everything gauzy and incredibly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the action on the map seems clear and surreal. Nobody uses tennis balls anymore. Josh Gopnik punched LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yelled that he had been punched in the stomach. Ann Kittenplan put Kieran McKenna in a headlock and punched him repeatedly on the top of the skull. Otis P. Lord lowered the beach umbrella and began to push his crazy-wheeled food cart at a diskette-rattling clip toward the open gate of 12 south, still furious with the propeller of the red beanie.
I’m OK with seeing that on ESPN, too.