A pox on pickleball in SLO County II

August 2, 2022

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “Life On The Mississippi, 1969,” is currently on Amazon.

By DELL FRANKLIN

When I showed up the other morning at the two tennis courts in Morro Bay to hit with my friend Keith, two men I’d never seen before, both up in age, were playing a set on one of the courts. Old as they were, they both appeared to be in good shape and moved well for their ages and chased everything down, competing hard.

As Keith and I walked past them to the next court, we said hello and they paused, huffing and puffing, and asked us if we came over from Cayucos, because one of the two tennis courts over there was ruined by the county, evidently sending an employee to paint new pickleball lines at the behest of the constantly nagging and politicking pickleball pukes who want to convert all courts in the county to fit their entitled needs.

“The one court was unplayable,” said one of the players. “The balls skid on all those goddam lines. We went by, the one good tennis court was busy, so we had to come here. Thank God for these courts.”

“That ruined court needs to be paved over completely to play tennis on,” said the other man.

“Those pickleball pukes should not be allowed to be on the same court with tennis players,” I maintained, “because those paddles and whiffle balls make so much noise you can’t concentrate.”

Both these guys agreed. They were serious players. As were a foursome of women we ran into a couple weeks ago who also hated the sight and sound of pickleball pukes prancing around with their damn paddles, desecrating the courts like an unwelcome scourge.

Back when I wrote my CalCoastNews article excoriating the invasion of the pickleball cult, most of us tennis players felt the momentum switching to this scourge. Now, instead of just setting up their lines on each side of the net and lowering the net to meet their specifications, and taking up one court, the new lines are arranged so that they set up their own nets on each side of the tennis net to create two courts, so that they can play two games at a time and make more noise and drive tennis players berserk with whiffle balls constantly rolling onto their court.

I believe there are tennis players out there who would eventually come close to braining one of these nitwits after enough of this noise and harangue.

“I’m used to those Cayucos courts,” one of the men said. “I live there. These are nice courts, but pretty soon they might do the same thing here and you guys are screwed, too.”

Keith, as mild a person as inhabits this world, mentioned that they might not be able to wreck these courts, which I’ve been playing on for over thirty years, because there are assigned pickleball courts at Del Mar Park in North Morro Bay, where they can make all the noise they want.

We are still smarting from these pukes using one of our courts a couple months ago, forcing us to go all the way to Los Osos because by the time we returned to Morro Bay both those courts were in use. When I think about having to execute this hateful adjustment, I want to grab one of these smug, crazed pickleball converts and strangle them, let them know they are absolutely despised and loathed and detested by the tennis community who considers them an affliction, a disease, a plague, a pestilence!

What pickleball pukes need to do is buy some land miles away from any town in and around San Luis Obispo, and, with all of their money (they tend to be wealthy) build their own courts (perhaps 50!) where nobody has to see or hear them or experience the sickening behavior of deranged cultists gleefully prancing about as if they discovered the Promised Land, and proselytizing about it to anybody whom they come into contact like wild-eyed, accosting religious zealots.

How about Camp Roberts?

PS. It is so bad that The New Yorker, supposedly an intellectual magazine I have subscribed to for over 25 years, has had in its latest issue an article about the nation wide pickleball craze. I started to read it and immediately threw it down in disgust, realizing it was only stoking further rage, threatening my health.