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    Can a Tennis Player Share His Heart, and Courts, With Pickleball?

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    Our columnist grew up playing competitive tennis on Seattle courts that are now caught in the middle of a turf war with pickleball. He took up a paddle to see what all the fuss was about.Allow me to begin with an admission. I haven’t exactly been a fan of pickleball, the sport that is sweeping America like thorny tumbleweeds blowing across the windswept plains.I’ve always been jarred by the sound of it: Thwack!Though pickleball, a hybrid paddle sport, is increasingly sharing space with tennis at many courts and clubs around the country, it has nothing like the feel of tennis or the booming sound of that fuzzy ball on the strings, struck just right.Instead, graphite pickleball paddles careen against yellow plastic balls, emitting a high-pitched bleat.Thwack!For a lifelong tennis player like me, that high-pitched wail is an insult to the ears, the auditory equivalent of a root canal.Then, there’s the aesthetic. The look and feel of pickleball. In contrast with the elegance of tennis, this sport appeared to me to be a simple something parents would dream up to keep the kids busy on a lazy summer day. Turns out that’s pretty much how the game began back on Bainbridge Island, Wash., in the 1960s.Pickleball? Why not read a book, walk the dog, take a nap or just go ahead and play Ping-Pong?I had intentionally and assiduously avoided it until last week.Then pickleball sucked me in.Pickleball players of varying skills and ages pack the courts at Green Lake Park in Seattle.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesI went down to one of the game’s new meccas in my hometown, Seattle, a sliver of courts in the verdant park that wraps around the aptly named Green Lake. To describe it with better accuracy, these are three tennis courts that have been more or less commandeered by pickleball.It’s a turf war that’s become common nationwide in recent years as the pandemic drove demand for both sports. Pickleballers are clamoring for respect, more resources and courts, creating a sensitive balancing act for parks and recreation departments around the country.I naturally landed on one side of the battle. Way back when — read, during the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Clinton — I was one of the better players in the Pacific Northwest and often the best for my age division in Seattle. From ages 14 to 30, I won the city championships a half dozen times, sometimes playing matches or warming up on the three Green Lake courts.On my pilgrimage to the transformed (pickled?) venue, I quickly found a shepherd. “So, do you want to give it a try?” asked Peter Seitel, a former owner and manager of a computer-engineering firm who is now known as the mayor of these courts. He’s an organizer, champion of pickleball and one of the locals trying to get the city to pay more heed to the sport.I played my first games with Seitel, 68, as he taught me the rules and strategies. And I was hardly the only newbie greeted with open arms that day. Everywhere I looked, experienced players were guiding rookies with welcoming patience. The scene felt open and democratic compared with my experience with tennis, in which you often must prove you’ve got game before you can really be accepted.There were intense games and relaxed ones. A 60-year-old woman held her own against a muscular 20-something. A fourth grader was just learning the ropes, moving from court to court to face off against people he’d never met. The racial and age diversity of the people playing pickleball felt refreshingly cool for a part of the city with a mostly white population and teeming with youthful tech workers.Anita Gulrajani, a Green Lake pickleball regular, serving the ball.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesIf you can play Ping-Pong and run eight feet in any direction, you’ll be rallying within a single day.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesPickleball’s cozy community partly owes to the low barrier to entry. The time between learning the game and having fun with it is almost negligible. If you can play Ping-Pong and run eight feet in any direction, you’ll be rallying within a single day. Seitel and I played a few games, and I immediately held my own. It was competitive but not so rigorous that I couldn’t wear my straw, wide-brimmed hat while playing. Don that hat during a tennis match and it would have fallen off during every other serve and sprint across the court.Still, there were nuances. The scoring and positioning for instance. I’m used to hitting 120-mile-per-hour tennis aces, but the pickleball serve is a floppy underhand shot that barely leads to an advantage. During rallies, that pesky little plastic ball seems to have a mind of its own. One of the game’s biggest weapons is a soft knuckler that barely clears the net and is known as the dink. Not exactly my style.Nicole Bideganeta urged me on. If Seitel is the mayor of the Green Lake courts, Bideganeta is the chief of staff. She can also talk a lot of smack to opponents and back it up so, of course, I wanted her as my partner.Bideganeta, 28, might have regretted saying yes.In our second game, I got tired of dinking around. “I’m gonna poach, just like in tennis, and take this thing over!” I told myself.This was not the smartest move. Or the safest.When a floater came, I dashed for it, coiled, swung — and my racket collided with Bideganeta’s elbow, right on the funny bone. “Ouch!” She winced in pain. I felt embarrassed, like a bull in one of those ever-shrinking tennis-racket stores.Kurt Streeter, left, chatted with Nicole Bideganeta as she iced her elbow. With its small court and swinging paddles, pickleball can be a little dangerous.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesThe score was tied, but we had to end that game. I got my partner some ice and a mango popsicle to soothe her pain.Lesson learned. With its small court and swinging paddles, pickleball can be a little dangerous.No sweat, Bideganeta assured me. “We’re going to get back out there. You’re not done yet!”And sure enough, we returned, only this time with more focus. I didn’t want to let her down — dink, dink, curveball, smash to the feet. I was getting into it now.Thwack! — that paddle-against-plastic sound I had thought was so obnoxious? Well, in the heat of the moment, I didn’t even notice it. What I did notice was that I couldn’t stop smiling as I played. And I saw way more smiles and joy all around me than when I’m playing tennis, where intensity and furrowed brows dominate.We won that game, 11-0, which I learned is known as “a pickle” and isn’t easy at any level. “You’re just getting started,” my new partner said. Several other stalwarts surrounded us, urging me on.I’m not giving up tennis. No way. A good match is like a flowing waltz — and a much more demanding workout. But I’m ready to make some room for pickleball in my life.Just don’t tell my tennis friends.Luca Campese, 9, put down a paddle to reserve a spot in line for the next available court.Lindsey Wasson for The New York Times More

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      in Soccer

      Sounders’ Concacaf Champions League Title Boosts Seattle’s Soccer Stature

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      Sounders F.C. captured M.L.S.’s first CONCACAF Champions League title with a win over Pumas U.N.A.M. Our columnist remembers the day soccer took root in Seattle.SEATTLE — Everything broke right for the Sounders, who were prodded for nearly two hours of grinding action by a sea of Seattle fans in blue and green who pushed their trademark electric energy to the pitch.This was history — and it felt like a joint effort between a team and its supporters.For over 20 years, no Major League Soccer team had ever won the CONCACAF Champions League tournament, which includes the best teams from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. But the Sounders ended the drought with a Pacific Northwest downpour: a 3-0 win over the Pumas of Mexico on Wednesday.How important was the win?Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei, the tournament’s most valuable player, raised the championship cup after Seattle’s win. Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesDuring this week’s run-up to the match, Sounders General Manager Garth Lagerwey called it a chance at soccer immortality.In a promotional hype video, none other than the retired Seahawks icon Marshawn Lynch called it a “big (expletive) game.” At halftime on Wednesday, with the Sounders ahead 1-0, M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber stood in his suite at Lumen Field, looked me steadily in the eye, and called this match the “biggest game in the history of the league.”Since its inception in 1996, M.L.S. has sought to become an American league of such quality that it could stand toe-to-toe with world powers. But until now, failure was a regular rite of passage for M.L.S. in this annual tournament, with teams from the rival Mexican league having won the last 13 Concacaf tournaments.Well, the Sounders buried those failures on Wednesday.Initially the match was choppy and bogged down by physical play that forced a pair of key Sounders, João Paulo and Nouhou Tolo, to leave with injuries. But Seattle flashed its trademark resilience. Goalie Stefan Frei, named the tournament’s most valuable player, backed up a stout defense, and Sounders kept up the attack until forward Raul Ruidiaz scored on a deflected shot late in the half. In the 80th minute, Ruidiaz added another goal off a smooth counterattack.Nicolás Lodeiro sealed the victory with a goal in the 88th minute and ran toward the stands to celebrate among a frenzy of fans.Winning qualifies the team for the FIFA Club World Cup, a tournament stacked with soccer royalty. The Premier League’s Chelsea won it last. Either Liverpool or Real Madrid will represent Europe next. Just being in the same draw as teams of that pedigree is entirely new for M.L.S.It’s fitting, then, that the Sounders will lead the league to this new precipice. Since entering M.L.S. during a wave of expansion in 2009, they have enchanted this soccer-rich city by winning two M.L.S. Cup championships in four runs to the finals. Seattle has led the league in attendance in all but two seasons, with area fans bringing the same fervor to Lumen as Seahawks fans have come to be known for. Maybe more. A tournament-record 68,741 fans showed up to watch the home team play the Pumas. On a Wednesday night.How did Seattle become an American soccer behemoth?Fans cheered a Sounders goal during Wednesday’s match.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThere is no single answer. Part of it is the city’s history of embracing the unconventional and outré — which still describes professional soccer in the American sports context. Seattle birthed Boeing and Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It gave the world grunge rock and Quincy Jones. Jimi Hendrix went to high school three miles from Lumen Field. Bruce Lee sharpened his martial arts skills just a short walk away.One of its great works of art is a troll sculpture that sits underneath a bridge. It’s become customary to drape it in a mammoth blue and green Sounders scarf before big games.The love felt by this city for soccer in all its forms — from the Sounders to O.L. Reign of the N.W.S.L., to colleges and junior leagues — is also the product of a specific past and a specific team: the original Seattle Sounders of the long-defunct North American Soccer League.From 1974 to 1983, those Sounders teams were part of the first bona fide effort to bring big-stakes, U.S.-based competition to professional soccer within this hemisphere.If you ask me, a Seattle native who grew up in that era, I say the love began, specifically, with a single game.Since I was 9 years old I’ve called it the Pelé Game. That’s when I took a city bus downtown to watch that original iteration of the Sounders. The date was April 9, 1976, the first sporting event ever held at the now-demolished Kingdome.A crowd of nearly 60,000, then the largest in North American soccer history, watched Seattle host the star-studded New York Cosmos and its leader, the greatest player the game of soccer has ever seen: Pelé. The Black Pearl, as he was known, had come to the N.A.S.L. to celebrate a last stanza of his career — and as an ambassador to spark the game in North America. I don’t remember details of that match as much as I remember being in awe of the lithe and powerful Brazilian.Pelé didn’t disappoint. He scored two goals in a 3-1 win.The game was a harbinger. Those first Sounders players quickly became local legends, deeply woven into the city’s fabric. In those days, it seemed to me that a Sounder visited every classroom in every public school. In 1977, the Sounders made it to the league’s Soccer Bowl title match. Played in front of a full house in Portland, Ore., a three-hour drive south, they lost to the Cosmos, 2-1, in the last non-exhibition game Pelé ever played.Pele, center, looked on as his New York Cosmos teammate Giorgio Chinaglia, left, ran at the Seattle Sounders defense in 1977.Peter Robinson/EMPICS, via Getty Images“I still have his jersey,” Jimmy McCalister said in a phone interview. I could almost see the smile in his voice. A defender on that Seattle team and the N.A.S.L. rookie of the year in 1977, McCalister told me how he’d somehow summoned the nerve to ask Pelé for his fabled No. 10 jersey. The legend obliged. The jersey now sits in McCalister’s lockbox.“People call me from time to time, wanting to buy it,” he said. It’s not for sale. Some things are worth more than money. The jersey contains memory and soul.McCalister loves the modern day Sounders. He hailed their cohesiveness, blue collar work ethic, and their growing talent. Raised in Seattle, he is one of many Sounders who remained in the city after their playing days were over. These days he runs one of the top junior development clubs. Many others stayed to teach the game, coaching in clinics and at high schools and colleges. Some helped guide a now-defunct minor league team — also called the Sounders.They kept soccer alive in the fallow pair of decades between the N.A.S.L.’s demise and the birth of M.L.S.Fredy Montero met fans who stayed nearly an hour after Sounders’ win.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night, nearly an hour after the game, fans remained in Lumen Field. Vast swaths of them. Joyful chants rumbled down to the confetti-covered field. Players responded by lifting the gold Champions League trophy high. Unlike that Kingdome game of 1976 — the original Sounders versus the glitzy, star-studded Cosmos — this matchup wasn’t memorable because of the opponent. It was memorable because of the home team, which just put itself on the international map. And that would surely make Pelé, long soccer’s proudest ambassador, more than a little proud. More

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      in Basket

      The Time Dad Locked Down Elgin Baylor

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      Elgin Baylor’s N.B.A. legacy will loom large in basketball history. But the time our columnist’s father managed to defend Baylor for a half became a cherished part of family lore.Memory fades, but simple tales we hear as children can drill so deep down into us we do not forget. It’s because of such a tale, short and sweet and told with some regularity by my late father as I grew up, that I will always hold tight to the memory of the basketball great Elgin Baylor, who died this week at 86.“Did I ever tell you about the time I played Elgin Baylor?” my father would say as he looked into my eyes, filled with wonder no matter how many times he’d begun this way.“Elgin couldn’t score on me, no he couldn’t. Not in that first half he couldn’t.”There would be more to this parable, which my three older brothers also grew up hearing. It would turn into a lesson about humility and a meditation on witnessing greatness, but that start was how dad hooked me in the years not long after Baylor’s 1971 retirement from basketball, when the Lakers’ great was still widely known as a star. With that opener, and the account that followed, Baylor came to be one of the great pillars of my early imaginings.This week, there will be many fond remembrances told about Baylor. Most will focus mainly on his All-Star years in the N.B.A. This is as it should be for a player who helped revolutionize basketball with his high-flying athleticism and all-around skill. Baylor’s decade of dominance in the 1960s foreshadowed Julius Erving, Michael Jordan and the dazzling, acrobatic game we love today.Less attention will be given to Baylor’s unusual college years in the 1950s, spent far from well-known training grounds like Kansas, North Carolina or U.C.L.A.Raised in Washington D.C., Baylor was overlooked by the major powers during an era when segregation was rampant in basketball and integrated teams tended to have no more than one or two African-American players. He ended up playing for the College of Idaho. Yes, the College of Idaho.Then he transferred to another western school, Seattle University, a small Jesuit university with a lightly regarded basketball team that he promptly led to the finals of the 1958 N.C.A.A. tournament.Memories fade. Baylor, one of the most superb men’s basketball players in history, graced Seattle with his talent for years. But in the city of my birth, the city where I grew up and now live, few outside of old-timers and rock-solid sports fans know of his history here.Elgin Baylor in a game against Gonzaga while he played for Seattle University.Associated PressAlso fading from collective recall are the 1950s years when A.A.U. basketball — then a nationwide league backed by local businesses and stocked with ex-college stars who could hold their own against counterparts in the still-fledgling N.B.A. — was a force.That’s where my father went shoulder-to-shoulder with Baylor.Mel Streeter was a talent in his own right then. He had played at the University of Oregon in the early 1950s, when he was the only Black player on his teams. (Imagine that as you watch the Ducks, bursting with Black talent, in the Sweet Sixteen of the men’s tournament.) After moving with my mom to Seattle, he thrived in the fast-paced, wide-open style favored in Seattle’s powerful A.A.U. league, where games were played in front of packed crowds and were often featured prominently in the sports pages.Baylor was a part of that mix. He suited up for a powerhouse A.A.U. team: Westside Ford.I wish now that I had asked my father more about his one-and-only game against Baylor, more about that league and those times. But dad died 15 years ago. As close as we were, some of his history will always be cut off from me. I don’t know what team he was on when he played against Baylor. I don’t know if it was a big game with high stakes — like the battles that helped decide who would head off to the A.A.U. national championship.Thankfully, I have a firm recollection of the look on my father’s face as he spoke of how, in a head-to-head matchup between two tall, lithe and powerful forwards, he held Baylor to two first-half points. Oh, and dad never let any of his four sons forget that while he was holding down Baylor, he was lighting up the scoreboard. Even before my older brother Jon knew I was writing this column, the moment he heard about Baylor’s death he sent me a text with his own recollections of our family’s well-told tale: “Dad scored 11 in the first half!”But how did the game end?Whenever he came to the story’s backstretch, my dad would always smile and bring me close, letting me know that this short fable was not actually about him.As it turned out, angered at being shown up, Baylor came out in the second half determined to teach Mel Streeter a lesson. As dad told it, the entire back half of the game was essentially a blur as Baylor whipped past my father for layups or arcing, orbital jump shots. Baylor didn’t just turn the tables: He made known that he was simply a different kind of cat. He shut down dad with lockdown defense, and torched dad for 24 points.Whenever my father told this story, which was usually while we shot hoops on the basket that hung over our old garage, he never ended it sounding defeated. His smile widened and his face lit up as looked straight at me and spoke of Baylor with awe. “There was nothing I could do,” dad would say. “He was just too much.”Dad had witnessed true genius, true athletic genius, right up close, shoulder-to-shoulder under the rim inside a packed Seattle gym. And he had loved every second of the opportunity, even as he got scorched.That’s what I’m left with. My father’s thankfulness.If only he’d still been alive to hear about the first time I met Baylor, who I crossed paths with while in my role as a reporter roughly a dozen years back. It happened in Los Angeles, at the old training center for the Clippers, which Baylor struggled to run as general manager for just over 20 years.As I introduced myself, he thought for a moment about my name.“Streeter, huh?”I could see he was thinking back, working his memory to make a connection.I nudged him a bit. Without going into details, I reminded him that he’d played Mel Streeter in an old A.A.U. game.Then he put it all together.“Your dad,” he said, “let me tell you, he could play. He could really play.” More