For most of its 60-year history, pickleball was the domain of senior citizens too achy in the joints to scramble around full-size tennis courts. But OfficialPPATour commissioner Connor Pardoe wants to turn it into a primetime event. girinathan reports
Photo: Kim Raff In the summer of 2019, Connor Pardoe was trying to persuade Life Time, Inc., a health-club chain and the largest private operator of tennis courts in the U.S., to embrace a different game. Pardoe, then 26, was peddling pickleball: a racquet sport similar to tennis but played on a much smaller surface, over a slightly lower net, with a squarish paddle and a perforated plastic ball.
“2021 was huge for us,” Pardoe, now 28, tells me in December, video-chatting from PPA’s offices just outside his native Salt Lake City. The group’s tournaments did record ticket sales. TV and streaming deals started moving. “Today, I get a call every day from at least three to five people saying, ‘How can I bring a pickleball event to my city or to my club?’”
Pardoe is an apt pitchman for a game intent on shaving a few decades off its average enthusiast’s age. Unlike the typical commissioner of a professional sports league — sexagenarian, clean-shaven, encased in a suit at all times — he shows up to our interview in a hoodie and a black cap bearing the electric-blue initials CP . He speaks with the polish of a newly minted M.B.A. and the self-assurance of an affable jock.
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