Every summer brings its controversy, and this summer, as in several recent summers, it is pickleball: the noise of it, the spread of it, and the question of whether a nation of free people should have to hear the sound “pock” every 1.4 seconds from dawn until the streetlights come on.
As always, I turned to the Founders.
The Founders, we know, prized tranquility. They wrote it into the Preamble, directly, among the six great purposes of the whole enterprise: to “insure domestic Tranquility.” They did not write “insure domestic pock.” A people who went to the trouble of capitalizing Tranquility would not have tolerated a plastic ball with holes in it being struck by a paddle at the edge of a public park at 6:15 in the morning. On this, I felt, the Founders were clear. Pickleball was out.
Then, in the interest of fairness, I read the rules.
Pickleball, I learned, was invented in 1965, on an island in Washington State. Its central and most sacred rule concerns a seven-foot area on each side of the net, which is called, for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained, the kitchen. In the kitchen, a player may not volley. The ball must bounce first. No one may strike anything out of the air in the kitchen. It is the one place on the court where violence is forbidden by law.
I put down the rulebook. I picked it back up. I read the Preamble again. “Domestic Tranquility.” Domestic, from the Latin for home. And what is the heart of a home, if not the kitchen? The Founders had not banned pickleball. They had invented its most important rule, 178 years in advance, and placed it in our founding document, where it waited for us. Pickleball was in.
A lesser columnist would stop there, pleased. I could not, because the argument would not let me.
If the kitchen is the only place on the court where tranquility is protected, then the rest of the court is not. The baseline is lawless. The service area is a frontier. Every moment a player spends outside the kitchen is a moment spent outside the protection of the Preamble. The only player who is truly keeping faith with the Founders, therefore, is one who stays in the kitchen at all times, never volleys, and lets everything bounce.
And if one is going to stay in the kitchen at all times, one should be honest about which kitchen.
I now play pickleball exclusively in my own kitchen. My partner, a woman from my book club, stands on the patio. I serve through the open window over the sink. The ball must bounce once on my linoleum before I may strike it, and I have not volleyed since June. We have not completed a point. We have not needed to. Tranquility is not a thing you find on a court. It is a thing you bring to the kitchen and refuse to volley.
I did try, at first, to bring the principle to the public courts. On my last visit to the park I placed an unplugged toaster, a bread box, and a small spice rack in the non-volley zone, for authenticity, and stood among them for the duration of a doubles match, letting every ball bounce. A gentleman on the other team said I was “not playing.” I told him I was playing exactly as the Founders intended, and that if he wanted to volley, he was welcome to do it out there, in the wilderness, with the British. The park district has since sent me a letter. I have placed it on the counter. I am letting it bounce.
What would the Founders have said about pickleball? I believe they would have said what they said about everything: that a free people must know where the kitchen is, and must stay in it, and must not hit anything out of the air, no matter how much they want to, no matter how slowly it is floating toward them, no matter how clearly it is asking.
Next week: what the Founders would have said about the leaf blower, and why I have taken up the rake as a protest against the rake.