A Pretty Big Dill: Welcome to High(ish)-Stakes Pickleball
At last April’s inaugural Pickleball Slam, a doubles event pitting tennis greats Michael Chang and John McEnroe against Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick, McEnroe decided his team needed a boost. He trotted off the court and flipped his paddle to Stefanie Graf (the owner of 22 Grand Slam singles titles stopped going by Steffi years ago) and told her to go play.
Graf gamely took the court and proceeded to duff a few shots from her husband, Agassi, before finally winning a point. Everyone had a good chuckle, and that was that.
“Goodness, I’m still trying to unlearn [tennis],” Graf says of her transition to playing pickleball.
Courtesy of Brenton Ho
Fast-forward 10 months: Graf will be on the court with Agassi again, but the stakes will be higher. They’ll be partners for Slam 2 (ESPN, Feb. 4 at 8:30 p.m. ET), facing off against McEnroe and Maria Sharapova. “We will be pretty serious,” says Graf.
The event marks the intersection of two recent phenomena: pickleball (America’s fastest-growing sport five years running) and made-for-TV matchups between personable-yet-competitive pairs (such as golf’s The Match franchise). Last year’s Slam drew nearly 800,000 TV viewers at its peak, beating out several MLB, NBA and NHL games that week.
Graf is relatively new to the game. She and Agassi found it to be a good way to spend active time with their kids during the pandemic. While there are superficial similarities between pickleball and tennis, the overlap can prove to be a disadvantage for a seasoned pro. “Goodness, I’m still trying to unlearn [tennis],” says Graf. “I have not had an easy time. I want to move around. I want to hit the ball. I don’t want to slow down and be patient, waiting for the right moment to attack. I tend to want to keep my feet moving. That’s what I learned in tennis. My mind knows what I should be doing, but my body is not quite ready to let that tennis mind go.”
So while Agassi hones his game playing against his tennis buddies when they come through the couple’s hometown of Las Vegas, Graf has been taking lessons.
Then there’s the matter of playing against the notoriously feisty McEnroe, with whom she has a little history. In 1999 they were mixed-doubles partners at Wimbledon. They advanced to the semifinals, but Graf, who was still alive in the women’s singles draw, had to default, much to the chagrin of McEnroe, who had been retired for seven years. McEnroe was salty at the time, but all is forgiven now. Still, you can expect him to be his usual intense self. As for Graf? “I have a bit of a hard time getting back into that [competitive] mode,” she says. “I want to enjoy it. I love the challenge of it. I do like the competition, but I also don’t want to get too competitive.”
That doesn’t mean her practices with Agassi (with whom she rarely plays tennis) have never gotten interesting. “We know when we get to our boiling points or when we get upset with ourselves,” she says. “We are able to pick each other up pretty well. But it has happened the last few months that a paddle kind of, you know, slipped out of the hand and just kind of went into flying into a corner. But that’s because we’re mad at ourselves. It’s been a challenge for me—a good challenge.”
