CNN
–
Despite realizing that she has played many times during her decorated tennis career, the nerves of her decorated tennis career have been It was rarely a problem.
“I did something very comfortable. I did it for the rest of my life,” Graf won 22 Grand Slam single titles and spent 377 weeks of female record as the world’s number one, but CNN I’ll talk to sports. “I knew everything in and out.”
It was probably a surprise to me 25 years after retiring from tennis, Graf suddenly caught his nerves whilst playing in front of a large crowd. This time, the situation was different from what she experienced during her professional career. The courts were small, the rackets were lighter, and the game was happening at a Lightning pace.
This was not tennis, it was a pickleball, and Graf was only familiar with it for a few years. To give the sport a sense of burgeoning popularity, nearly a million Peak ESPN audiences when she and her husband Andre Agassi defeated John McEnroe and Maria Sharapova in Hollywood, Florida last year was watching over him.
“It’s a very fast game. Things can happen very quickly. There’s no time to spend a simple time in a match,” Graf said of playing in the 2024 Pickleball Slam 2 event. “You didn’t know the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy, so it was completely unknown.”
Graf, 55, is not completely disrupted by the experience, and will feature a sequel competition, Pickleball Slam 3 in Las Vegas on Sunday, playing alongside Agassi, former tennis stars Andy Roddick and Eugenie. I’ll face Bouchard. A $1 million prize will appear, and the action will also be performed live on ESPN.
Many Americans probably never heard of pickles before the Covid-19 pandemic, but now they claim it is the fastest growing sport in the country for the fourth year in a row. An estimated 48.3 million adults performed it at least once between 2022 and 2023, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP), which is almost 19% of the total population of the US population.
It’s becoming more and more common to see megastars like Graf and Agassi engage in pickleballs. Beyond tennis, Tom Brady and LeBron James invested in professional teams, while Hollywood actors Katherine O’Hara and Willem Dafoe filmed the court in a recent Super Bowl commercial.
Graf believes that many of this popularity considers pickle bowls to be extremely accessible.
“We can see progress much faster than tennis,” she says. “The fun factor is right there, and the game is a little more equal to each other, playing and mixing more doubles… It feels like everyone you know can jump.”
Graf and Agassi aim to play once or twice a week. Perhaps build-ups to events like Pickleball Slam will go a long way, but perhaps a lot helping you out there, not only years of experience in professional tennis, but also excellent in the sport. Not as much as you think.
The small, 20ft x 44ft court means pickleballs are played with a more urgent feeling than tennis and are loaned out to people who rely on the quick response and soft hands of other racket sports. In other words, it’s not graf.
“For me, it was really a lot of unlearning and it was actually one of those things I really enjoyed because I really challenged me,” she says.
“I like hitting the ball in tennis, but no, not in this game. That’s much more important about the feel of choosing to reset and slow down the speed rather than driving the ball. So patience isn’t my strength. I really enjoy it taking me out of my comfort zone many times.
Graf quickly admits that Agassi, who played in all three of the pickleball slams, is a great player between the two.
“He’s very good,” she adds. “And he played a little more, he’s physically much stronger and faster. His sense of the game, how quickly he picked it up, was absolutely phenomenal to see.
“It’s not that he didn’t see him as very good in other sports, but he picked up it and loved the analysis of it from the start by looking at the videos and other clips. When you go out and play with some of the experts, he will ask very specific questions that need to be answered to in order to get better.”
Agassi, an eight-time Grand Slam singles champion on the tennis court, has become a vocal advocate for Pickleball. He recently promoted sports in India and defended tennis as the “the most difficult racket sport in the world” but praised pickleball as a more accessible alternative.
“I’ll grow up to the point I can’t imagine,” Agassi said.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether tennis is threatened by the growth of games such as Pickleball and Padel, which are particularly popular in Europe. They are undoubtedly some of the easiest racket sports to play, but tennis as a sight brings more historical importance, with its top players being the most persuasive, skilled and physically in the world He is an impressive athlete.
In Graf’s view, tennis and pickle balls complement each other, and the latter growth only creates “more options” for recreational players in racket sports. And nearly 30 years after retiring from tennis, she leaned on events like pickleballs to cultivate her competitive instincts.
“We can’t take away our competitiveness,” Graf says of playing and playing against former tennis stars. “It tends to just do that.”
And with that in mind, there will be plenty of nerves again, without question, once she steps into the Las Vegas courthouse on Sunday.
