Padel vs Pickleball
Two upstart racket games are the fastest-growing sports in Europe and America. They’re fun, fast and addictive. But with Andy Murray and Leo Messi backing padel, and George Clooney and Jamie Foxx cheering for pickleball, which heavy hitter will achieve world domination? And should tennis, squash and ping-pong be worried?
‘Have we got a serious player here?’ asks Andrew Castle, the 59-year-old former number-one British tennis player and now the BBC’s voice of Wimbledon, looking me up and down. His gaze goes down my Richie Tenenbaum polo shirt and lands on my Veja trainers, which have solid eco credentials and non-marking soles but unmistakable weekend-dad energy, and he winces. ‘Hmm, I guess not.’
We’re at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton, west London. But we’re not here to play tennis. Instead, we’re limbering up beside a padel court, which is 20m long and 10m wide, or roughly three-quarters the size of a tennis court. It’s enclosed at the back with glass and on the sides with glass and mesh. Padel, which was devised in 1969 in Mexico, borrows some core traits from tennis: you bash a furry ball over a net, and use the same scoring system; and some from squash: the back wall is in play, so long as the ball only bounces on the ground once.
Padel, which is believed to be the fastest-growing sport in Europe, is almost always played in doubles and I’ve teamed up with my coach (who introduced me to the sport all of 45 minutes ago), James Rose, a tennis lifer who now works for Game4Padel, an ambitious operation backed by Castle, Andy Murray and Liverpool FC’s Virgil van Dijk. Castle is paired with Benedict Newman, who’s in his early twenties and, ominously, is wearing a tracksuit with a Great Britain flag on his right pec.
Castle covers the base of his Wilson racket and asks whether the logo reads ‘M’ or ‘W’. ‘M?’ I guess. Castle shakes his head, ‘W, fuck off!’ He elects to receive serve and, to everyone’s surprise, Rose and I hustle into a 3-0 lead. At the change of ends, Castle brushes my shoulder and mutters, ‘I’ve had some tough losses in my career,’ perhaps reflecting on the time he went down to Mats Wilander, the number-two seed, in five sets at Wimbledon in 1986, or defeat in the 1987 Australian Open mixed-doubles final. Or perhaps not. ‘But this,’ Castle confirms, ‘would be the most embarrassing.’
Still, you don’t reach the last 32 at the 1987 US Open by just rolling over and having your tummy tickled. Castle comes out swinging, or maybe he’s just actually trying for the first time, and starts playing lights-out padel. He and Newman take four games in a streak to go up 4-3, then 5-4 in our one-set match. When I blaze an ungainly forehand out of the court complex, Castle snorts, ‘
