Drive or Drop: Pickleball and Metaphors for Life
MAY 11 · WRITTEN BY RANDY STEINBERG
The most important shot in any pickleball point is the third. Unlike tennis –pickleball’s closest cousin—it is difficult to win a point with either the serve or the return. The smart move is to put your serve in play, and, if returning, do the same.
Some will say it’s the fourth, fifth or even seventh shot that matters, but that’s not the way I see it. The third is the moment in any point when the player taking it has critical options to weigh. The serve is action and the return reaction. The third is deliberation. Split-second deliberation, yes, but more than the one-minded strikes of serve and return.
Rarely is the third shot lobbed and rarer still advised. The more experienced you become in pickleball, the more you will understand there are only two acceptable choices for the third: drive or drop. Try to drive the ball and overwhelm your opponents or beguile them with the finesse of a drop?
Which should you choose? Which do I? What do any of us do when faced with a consequential fork in the road?
***
It is often said sports are a metaphor for life. This is a factoid, repeated often enough to have the ring of truth but misleading. How can football be a metaphor for life when the average NFL player’s career lasts three years? Of course, pro players have longer careers in other sports. Lebron James is going on 22 NBA seasons, but that is rare. The shelf life for a pro in most sports is short and brutish.
And even for amateurs, many sports cease to be playable at a certain age. Golf is the only one where older players can manage a reasonable game. Yet still there are limits.
I am fifty-two. I have a golf handicap of eight. If I play with a twenty-two year old who has the same handicap, I might stay level, but if we move to the back tees his advantage increases. But on the pickleball court, in doubles, I can keep pace with similarly-skilled players thirty years my junior.
At the high-amateur and professional levels youth and strength gain the edge, but for the vast majority of picklers the game is democratic. It combines athleticism, hand-eye coordination, and strategy in a way that it is accessible and seductive for players of any age group, gender, or background.
Is this the reason pickleball has become wildly successful? These physical markers? The metaphor of its kinetics as drawn against the biology of a human life?
What about the spiritual?
Despite a rise in popularity with younger players, pickleball remains dominated by an older cohort, and this is because it gives anyone who feels over the hill a new sense of purpose. A generation ago, these folks would have been shunted to the sideline; told you’re done, old timer. But now they can thrive, compete, learn, improve. My father is eighty-one and still plays a good game against competitors who could be his grandchildren.
Pickleball is also a highly social (and inexpensive) game. Lone wolves can play nine holes at sunset or bike off road, but if you take up pickleball you’ll quickly learn to appreciate its communal nature. You can find the love of your life on a pickleball court or any kind of tribe you can imagine.
These are the psychic parts of the game, but what about the artistic dimension? The metaphorical aspect? This is where we go much deeper than considering pickleball a form of exercise or a social attractor.
Pickleball is extremely popular not only because of its surface metaphors, but also its subconscious ones.
***
What separates man from animal most distinctly? Art. The ability to make it, and the ability to discern it. Art is metaphors: singing, painting, sculpting, acting and writing things that, in the words of a French poet, “are too silly to say.”
The sporting world has long tried its hand at the metaphor game, but in post-modern times, when subtlety takes a back seat to bluntness, metaphors might end up in the hands of AI rather than artists.
Enter pickleball to feed our physical and social desire for metaphors. And within the architecture of the game, there is the third shot: the most metaphoric of moments within any athletic contest.
Some would argue that ones and zeros are the most important numbers in the human cosmology, but I say it is three. The number three is intrinsic to biology (birth, growth, and death), storytelling (beginning, middle, and end), and jokes (set up, contrast, and punchline). The success of pickleball can, in large part, be traced to the third shot, which subconsciously aligns with the thirds of life.
In our everyday lives, we might have only a handful of momentous choices to make. But in pickleball we get the choice again and again. Dozens of times in a typical two-hour session. All starting on the third shot.
***
Some may interpret the rubric of this essay --drive or drop—as yet another metaphor. Keep driving. Don’t drop. Don’t go gently into the night. But don’t go leaping to that conclusion. The drop is the more difficult shot. The drive is lower risk. You are highly likely to get a drive over the net whereas the drop requires poise and nerve. The player who can do both will keep his opponents guessing. The player who can only do one will be, in the main, defeated.
The skeptic in me says fie on all this metaphor business. You’re reaching. The third is an important shot but not more than any others. Miss a serve and you cannot win a point. Blunder a return and you lose a point. It’s not to drive or drop that is the question but a sound and fury matter. Is pickleball merely strutting on the stage, signifying nothing I have made a case for?
My gut tells me no. Pickleball is not a passing fad like racquetball in the 1980s. The sport is here to stay because it offers players so many things beyond exercise.
Clubs such as Boston Pickle understand this. That’s why their efforts go beyond opening doors and handing out a towel. BPC and others like it have divined that pickleball has come along when we need it the most, filling the vacuum of the twenty-first century’s empty, post-modern soul.
And we need it chiefly because of its easy-to-understand metaphors and also its hidden ones. I never threw a touchdown pass and it was never possible for me to dunk a basketball. I can’t hit a three hundred yard drive or snap a curve ball. But I can get a paddle and I can take that third shot, drive or drop, as much as I like.
