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07/14/2021 08:30 AMThe official history of the game of pickleball—a rather odd amalgamation of tennis and badminton—says that in 1965, Washington Congressman Joel Pritchard and local businessman Bill Bell improvised it one summer afternoon when their families were bored and didn’t have the equipment for either tennis or badminton. The name came from either Pritchard’s dog, named Pickle, or as a reference to the “pickle boat” in crew races, where rowers are chosen hodge-podge rather than planned as a team.
Guilford resident Patrick Smith, who grew up spending almost a decade’s worth of summers off the coast of Seattle with his family, which frequently hosted Pritchard at their summer home, says he doesn’t want to take anything away from the people who codified the sport.
“I just wanted to tell the story of how [Pritchard] would have been exposed to it by my family,” Patrick says.
Pickled: The Official Unofficial History of the Birth of Pickleball is Patrick’s attempt to tell the “pre-history” of the game, which has exploded in popularity both nationwide and locally. It is a story that begins almost a decade before the earliest reported pickleball contests, steeped in his family’s history and character, occasionally dark and sordid but always tinged with humor. It’s a snapshot of boozy life at the blurred confluence of money, family, and politics in the Pacific Northwest, an environment that somehow catalyzed a game now popular across demographics.
Patrick, who moved to New England in the 1980s to attend college and settled in Guilford around 2000, says his childhood memories slowly re-surfaced as he watched his wife playing pickleball during vacations to Frye Island in Maine. The game seemed “oddly familiar,” Patrick says, and through more exposure and conversations with his wife, recollections of these early childhood summers in the late 1950s and early 1960s slowly reawakened in his mind.
“The experience was burned into my memory because of the characters that were in it, and what went on that was not on the court,” Patrick says. “By the time I was six, almost seven, it was burned into my psyche.”
Pritchard was a frequent guest of his family, which Patrick says was “very politically active” in the Seattle area and held frequent fundraisers and summer getaways on their several properties. These elbow-rubbing vacations, which started when Patrick himself was born in 1956, involved various movers and shakers in the political scene, along with Patrick’s larger-than-life family, many of whom were alcoholics and found spectacular ways to make these summers memorable.
“It’s a fun little story...It was all a very tight group,” he says.
The “pickle” in pickleball didn’t refer to a dog or to any other sport, according to Patrick. Though he recalled his family enjoying gherkin pickles, which could have been part of the etymology, it was “pickled”—as a euphemism meaning drunk—that gave the sport its name initially.
Pickleball was “broken down yard dart nets, cut-off handles from tennis rackets...and random stuff,” applied to a sharply mowed lawn by a handful of usually intoxicated aunts, uncles, and other relatives, according to Patrick, with haphazard shots bouncing through windows and plenty of time dedicated to taunting and ribbing each other.
“The original ball was a Wiffle ball from a softball set,” he laughed. “They would set up a net about half the height of a badminton net...and they would volley the ball back and forth and yell at each other.”
The kind of heavy drinking and carrying-on that often took place at these sorts of getaways was never spoken about “in polite company” at the time, Patrick says. Though he acknowledged there were elements of these memories that have a “dark background,” more than 60 years later, the story he wanted to tell in the book is one of silliness and nostalgia.
“I wrote the book with a tone that it can be read to any one of any age,” he says. “My intent was to have it be fun.”
All of Patrick’s family who took part in these games have since passed away, he says, leaving him as the last person who has direct, firsthand knowledge of these games, to which Pritchard was certainly privy—though Patrick again added he has no desire or intention of taking anything away from the official inventors of the game.
Patrick provided an excerpt from his book, describing one of his earliest memories of “pickled-ball,” involving Uncle Chesty, Father John, Uncle Chuck, Aunt Ermine, and a bevy of other memorable faces:
“Chesty dealt the first ball underhanded with a hidden grace born of experience. Chuck received and returned with equal skill and the game was on. To my surprise, they were all smiling and laughing as the ball traversed the space between them in its oddly slow arching tangent. Traveling far slower than a tennis ball, the two teams had ample time to react and move to positions of advantage on the Pitch. A pleasant and resounding THWOK when The Whiffle was squarely hit with the Ping-Pong paddle punctuated their every move, the sound sadly absent with Chuck’s racket. I had never seen them so happy. Even father John had a slight upward tilt to his lips. The remarkable grace of their intricate and combined moves, in spite of their meaty frames, bordered on something nearly artistic.”
While admitting that some of the second-hand stories in the book are likely apocryphal, Patrick says that he felt his history—an alternate mythology of a now ubiquitous game—is a fun excuse to talk about a bunch of other history, including that political landscape of the Pacific Northwest and his own unique childhood, along with detailing the backgrounds and greatest hits of his various family members.
Patrick says he was also inspired to read more about the nuances and evolution of the game, which fill a few chapters in the book, “tipping [his] hat” to Pritchard and everyone else who has contributed to formalizing it as a sport.
“It’s great for family dynamics,” he quipped. “The elders can hold their own against the youngsters, and vice versa.”
Appropriately, the book, which is still in the editing phase, includes a bonus section of cocktail recipes named after and inspired by his “pickled” family members and their stories, Patrick says, from an Aunt Ermine Rump Slap to an Chesty Upset Apple Cart.
Here in 2021, Patrick described himself as a “happy bystander” to the game of pickleball as it currently stands, only participating occasionally even as his wife remains a consistent, somewhat serious player. He says he would be more than willing to get involved locally, assisting the town in dedicating new courts that are currently under construction at Bittner Park, for instance.
His story, though, which gives pickleball a cartoonishly charming, larger-than-life creation myth, born accidentally to a family boasting a profound excess of spirit and vigor, along with an exceptional dearth of athleticism, is something Patrick says he felt is unique and interesting to anyone who has (or hasn’t) played.
“It’s a fun little story,” Patrick says again.