Pickle my fancy

Pickleball is in. Before there was running, badminton, and triathlon, in no particular order. The latest sports craze threatens the declining sport of tennis. Lawn tennis, not table tennis, one of the fastest sports, close to badminton, where top speed of a shuttlecock is said to be faster than an F1 racing car. Incredible. Let’s leave it to physics, not to physique. Science is fact, appearances deceive. Just look at the scare crow in the rice fields and politics, intimidating with nothing inside them, especially between their ears.

Tennis is threatened, the empty stadiums are visibly invisible, except where Alex Eala plays at a place peopled by Filipinos forced to leave their family at home to work abroad, only to return to children who feel like strangers or spouses who have become philanderers. Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder, sometimes it alienates. Or there was no love to begin with.

Worry not, pickleball might just be a fad. If it does not sustain its intense popularity, it disappears in time or dies a natural death. Exactly why society should not agonize to control the way people look, or what they wear, it withers especially when a new fad replaces. By then they would cringe how and why on earth did they follow the hideous trend. Bandwagon, like election surveys, or the fear of missing out, like those who always seek validation, otherwise known as the inadequate and the insecure. Should have been easier to stick to the timeless, for less time to style.

Tennis needs a rivalry like the trivalry among the now retired kings of clay and grass and the still active king of kings. Or better yet the stars like Andre Agassi who was more popular than Pistol Pete, the American with the most number of slams before the trivalry shrunk his numbers to bare minimum.

Well, there is Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz among the men and Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina among the women. Top players are not always the top drawers though. Eala is outside top 10 but people watch her live and alive with the loudest cheers and thankfully, no jeers. Filipinos are the meanest, but outside their country they are restrained, and surprisingly most disciplined. Must be because some of the strictest laws in their country are the least enforced, except that the shirtless are jailed while those who strip the country naked are free or freed. But tennis cannot be denuded in sports history. It should stay, it is a sport of a thousand thrills. So should its slower clone, the pickleball, it is a sport of thousands thrill