This is a seismic day for the rapidly growing business of pickleball at all levels.”
The Gold Coast Pro is currently underway, you, me and a few of our friends very much enjoying the action from Snapper Rocks. This is, of course, the third stop on the World Surf League’s top-tier Championship Tour and the first with waves. Ronald Blakey, Joe Turpel and the rest of the booth gang calling the conditions “all-time” and “wow you’ve got to love it” though, and to our Coolangatta-adjacent friends, is it really? I covered the show back in 2009, or thereabouts, and remember it cleaner, not so wonky, but maybe that is simply a product of my faulty memory.
Professional surfing, in any case, sure has been on a ride since the billionaire Dirk Ziff “purchased” the Association of Surfing Professionals, back in ’13, and rebranded it as the “World Surf League.” There were big promises of turning the game into an international powerhouse, a rival to the National Football League and its 400 million fans or maybe even World Cup soccer and its countless more.
Alas, bullish dreams have not quite come to pass, that dagger twisted hard, over the weekend, when it was revealed that Pickleball Inc. had just landed a $225 million dollar investment for its Major League Pickleball and Professional Pickleball Association tours.
According to MarketWatch, “The funding values Pickleball Inc. at $750 million and brings together assets including equipment retailer Pickleball Central, tournament platform PickleballTournaments.com and court installer Just Courts. The strategy centers on combining leagues, media, equipment and infrastructure into a single ecosystem that can be more easily monetized.”
The World Surf League’s valuation is currently in an undisclosed location.
PPA Tour founder and Pickleball Inc. CEO Connor Pardoe was hyped, declaring, “This is a seismic day for the rapidly growing business of pickleball at all levels.”
But are you one of those who scoffed at pickleball and its dumb name and its old participants only to try it out and be won over? That will never be me. I’m a tennis man and cannot abide the destruction of tennis courts to make way for pickleball courts. Tennis is to pickleball what surfing is to sitting in a jacuzzi.
Prove me wrong.