What a Pickleball Slam with Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf says about pickleball and tennis

New York Times

16-02-2025

It's a relatable story. A pair of 50-somethings with various aches and pains finding solace in an accessible and socially distanced sport during Covid-19 lockdowns. They played pickleball with their kids in the spring of 2020 and then got hooked, just like more than a million other Americans, according to the USA Pickleball Association.
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The difference between this couple and the million others with a similar story is that they have 30 Grand Slam singles titles in tennis between them — and now they are playing pickleball on television.
Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf are two of four tennis stars headlining one of the biggest events in pickleball, the Pickleball Slam. Sunday Feb. 16, from 4 p.m. ET, Agassi and Graf will take on Andy Roddick, the former world No. 1 and U.S. Open champion, and one-time Wimbledon finalist Eugenie Bouchard, who is now a professional pickleballer. It's the third edition of the event, which this year is in Las Vegas and broadcast by ESPN. It follows Agassi and Roddick defeating John McEnroe and Michael Chang in 2023, and then, among other matches, Agassi and Graf beating McEnroe and Maria Sharapova in Florida last year. The event is produced by Horizon Sports & Experiences and Inside Out Sports & Entertainment (ISE).
Those events, like this year's, saw the winners taking home $1million (£803,682) in prize money, with charitable donations optional. The event will also feature Agassi taking on Roddick in singles, and Graf teaming up with former world No. 7 Mardy Fish against Bouchard and one-time world No. 8 John Isner.
Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the U.S. An estimated 48.3 million adults dinked, hit and volleyed a small polymer ball over a 34-inch net between 2022 and 2023, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP). Its casual players include Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio, while Jack Sock, Bouchard and Donald Young are among professionals who migrated from tennis. Sock reached a high of world No. 8 in tennis, while fellow American Young reached No. 38.
Graf and Agassi are brand ambassadors for Joola, a pickleball and table tennis company. Tom Brady and LeBron James have invested in professional teams, while Roddick will feature alongside Ben Stiller in a pickleball comedy film called 'The Dink.' Ahead of last year's U.S. Open, prominent tennis players Carlos Alcaraz, Taylor Fritz, Elena Rybakina and Caroline Wozniacki took part in an invitational competition at the Lotte New York Palace hotel. Focused on control and reflexes less than strength and movement, at least in its doubles format, it has become an on- and off-ramp to tennis for novices or players with physical issues as well as a sport in its own right.
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Three or four pickleball courts fit on one tennis court, and the two sports have been uneasy bedfellows during its growth. 'Where does the hostility come from? I think there's a pride that tennis players rightfully take in tennis being the Mount Everest of racket sports,' Agassi said in a recent video interview.
'I'm not shy of telling the pickleball world that tennis demands the most of any racket sport. Emotionally, physically, mentally.'
Graf added in a phone interview last week: 'On the professional side you can't compare the sports. The traditions, the tournaments, the history of the sport. The watching of a match, it's a totally different experience.'
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Since their retirements in 2006 and 1999 respectively, Agassi and Graf's general absence from the tennis world has been lamented. Agassi, 54, has done some coaching and commentary stints, but becoming the Team World Laver Cup captain this autumn will be his most significant tennis role in the nearly two decades since his final match. Graf, 55, has been almost entirely absent. They have focused on their respective foundations (his which aims to transform American public education for underserved youth; hers which provides therapeutic treatment to traumatized children and their families) and their children — Jaden, 23 and Jazz, 21. They've tended to live a pretty quiet life, at home in Las Vegas.
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Agassi insists that tennis 'can play very nicely in the sandbox' together, referencing the gateway to and from tennis that it can represent. Roddick told a story on his Served podcast last year of his son initially choosing pickleball over tennis. He was forced to turn to his dad's sport after six months, because the courts were unavailable.
Part of the uneasy relationship between the two sports has been the site of pickleball courts popping up at tennis clubs, sometimes supplanting the sport or creating conflict over availability and court time. Tennis participation has grown alongside its new relative, with global participation rising from 84.4m in 2019 to over 100m in 2024, according to an ITF report. But the acceleration of pickleball and padel — which mixes the principles of tennis and squash — has led to clubs adding the sports to their roster in an attempt to capitalize on their popularity and associated revenue. Build pickleball and padel courts and they will come, or so it goes.
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'In many respects, pickleball and tennis have been complementary,' United States Tennis Association (USTA) chief executive Lew Sherr said in a video interview last week.
'Tennis has experienced five consecutive years of extraordinary growth participation in the United States. And that's at the same time that pickleball has grown, so it is not a zero-sum proposition.
'When we do come into conflict with pickleball, it's typically about a court being repurposed. While tennis is growing, it's much less expensive to repaint a tennis court into two pickleball courts than to build new ones from scratch. That's where you tend to see some conflict on the professional side of the sport.'
Sherr said there won't be any kind of pickleball event at the U.S. Open anytime soon; the Australian Open hosted a padel tournament this January. The lower barrier to entry in both sports is one place where they hold an edge over tennis. In the latter, it takes longer to 'get to the fun part,' in Sherr's words.
Agassi and Graf, two of the finest tennis players in the history of the sport, might not seem like obvious beneficiaries from this. But in their different ways, this is part of pickleball's appeal to them. 'Tennis is too damn hard,' for beginners, Agassi said, adding that tennis was less appealing for him in retirement because he had already experienced its highest highs.
'I can hit balls well whether I play once a week or whether I play once a month or whether I play three times a week,' he said. 'It's hard for me to get better in tennis and it's hard for me to get worse.'
Pickleball, by contrast, has that tingle of constantly getting better. 'There's not a lot of things that you can do in life that you can get better at at this age,' he said. 'In (pickleball) doubles you have half a court and I move well enough to compete, on a level that I keep wanting to push myself towards.'
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For Graf, playing tennis is 'very rare' nowadays. Hip and knee injuries have taken their toll, but pickleball is more manageable. She and Agassi both play pickleball about 10 times more than they do tennis, with the latter pointing to the rotations of tennis being particularly damaging to the body of someone in their mid-50s with a lot of miles on the clock. Still, tennis instincts can get in the way of what pickleball requires.
'I tend to want to hit the ball. Sometimes resetting or dinking a ball instead of driving is still sometimes not so easy,' Graf said. She had to do some 'unlearning' from tennis as someone who naturally wants to hit through the ball, because pickleball is a sport that relies on deftness of touch, with all four players in a doubles match typically close to one another at the net.
As for her famed backhand slice, it's 'not so easy' to hit the shot in pickleball. 'I use this a little bit on the return. But other than that, it's not a good option.'
For Agassi, one of the biggest differences between the two sports is their relative energy levels. In tennis, the constant movement to the ball and to the correct court position precedes an explosion on each strike. In pickleball doubles, that energy stores up as the ball pings around, but when it comes the time to play a shot calm is needed.
'When somebody speeds it up, the instinct as a tennis player is to go really aggressive back. So it's so weird to change your blood pressure level. If somebody winds up in tennis and I'm at the net, there's a certain timing to that aggression. In pickle you have that timing, but it's a small racket and you find yourself having more time than you realise. You have to kind of just dial it down a little bit from a blood pressure perspective.'
Despite their differences, the overlap between pickleball and tennis is clear in the high number of former tennis players now on the pickleball circuit. Imagining which of tennis's current stars would be best suited to pickleball, Agassi mentions Carlos Alcaraz, Spain's hugely inventive four-time Grand Slam champion. 'I think ideally you're looking at anywhere from six feet, to six feet two inches, and then you're looking at somebody with really quick hands,' Agassi said. 'Because you don't have strings. So to manipulate the ball takes a little extra snap. So what a shocker I would pick Alcaraz.'
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Pickleball participation is expected to keep growing, but there remain questions over how well it works televisually — and how much its professional stars can become sporting ones. Having four ex-tennis players headlining an event expected to attract over 1m viewers on ESPN tells its own story. Federico Staksrud, the top-ranked men's player, has just over 20,000 Instagram followers. Anna Leigh Waters, the 18-year-old American who leads the women's rankings, has just over 90,000. Waters won 42 gold medals in 17 tournaments (which incorporate singles and doubles events) on last year's professional pickleball circuit, the PPA (Professional Pickleball Association) Tour.
Roddick, an analyst for ESPN at the 2024 event, said last year that he thinks the rhythm of the sport doesn't work as well for TV.
'The pacing is weird, right?' he said on his Served podcast in March 2024.
'You get into it and everything feels like it's kind of in a rush and you don't actually have the ability to digest. From where I sit, it's almost as if the better you get, the slower the entire game gets, but it's slow during the points and then everyone's in a rush to start the next one again, so the pacing just feels a little strange.
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'Whereas if you're watching Rafa (Nadal) in the fifth set, it's a shorter point, but then you can actually explain, digest and then kind of build some anticipation with the crowd. In pickle it just seems like the wrong parts are slow and the wrong parts are quick.'
Roddick's guest for that episode was Kim Clijsters, a former tennis world No. 1 and four-time Grand Slam champion. Since retiring, Clijsters has become another pickleball convert, picking up the sport and then in 2022 founding and becoming the co-owner of Major League Pickleball (MLP) team the Las Vegas Night Owls — backed by Brady and Knighthead Capital. She told a story to Roddick of donating an hour's tennis lesson to a charity, and then getting a call from the winner, an elderly woman, asking if they could do two hours of pickleball instead as she used to play tennis but had now switched.
It was another illustration of how many people are switching to pickleball, which at present is very much a participation rather than spectator-led sport. Tennis, in some countries anyway, is the other way around. Whether pickleball can continue its growth in participation terms while becoming more of a spectator sport is unclear, but either way, Agassi and Graf are likely to be at the forefront.
(Top photo of Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi: Media Punch / Associated Press)