»ANNOUNCER: To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of
pickleball, we go back in time to Bainbridge Island, Washington,
the birthplace of the sport, to hear the origins of the game from one of its founders,
Barney McCallum. ♪♪ upbeat music ♪♪
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» "I Heart Pickleball" is powered by Hyland's Leg Cramps, proud supporter of
pickleball players everywhere. »BARNEY: Well, once upon a time
there were some people that lived on a beach on Bainbridge Island.
An active bunch of people. My neighbor
and good friend, Joel Prichard, we worked together in the
envelope business. He was a politician, pure and simple.
But he was pleasant about it. Joe was a great American.
He was a United States Congressman, and he was in the second
World War, as I was too. And there were four families that
were there every weekend: the Brown's, the McCallum's,
the Prichard's and the Bell's. It was a typical bad weather day
on this beach. You know, rainy and wet. And so
kids were driving the adults crazy, so Joe said
take this paddle and this ball and go up to the badminton court and
hit it around. »DAVID: I'm David McCallum, Barney McCallum's son.
And I remember back in the early years of pickleball, Bill Bell
and Joe came back from playing golf one day, and the kids were moping around,
not doing anything. So Joe and Bill got fired up and
went out back to the old badminton court, had some wooden paddles
and a plastic baseball that was hanging around. So, Bill and
Joe started messing around with the paddles and the ball and
inventing this game. They just wanted to show these kids how to keep busy.
»BARNEY: And they were playing what is now pickleball. But
it didn't even look like what we do now. »DAVID: It became very soon
an adult activity rather than a kid's activity. »BARNEY: Well, frankly,
the early kids got pushed out. They did.
And I'm down there playing pickleball, or I'm playing
this thing that we're playing. This is on a Saturday.
Then the next day I couldn't get out of bed fast enough to go down and play.
And they said, "Gee, Barney, we found some fun things to do."
And it was arguing about how
pickleball was going to be played. So, I joined the argument.
»DAVID: The adults were down there playing. And these were charismatic men.
They were always up to something, and they got this game going,
and it just kind of took on a world of its own.
Making up rules as they went. »BARNEY: The scoring, that was a big argument.
We tried them all. From ping pong to badminton
to tennis. If you can think of another one, we tried it. »DAVID: So, the rules
just got developed on an as-needed basis. Dick Brown is a
large man, he's about 6 foot 4. And aggressive. And he would run
up to the net and spike the ball. So, there was the short serve line
on this court for the badminton at 6 foot 6, and they just kind of
made up the rule. They said, "Hey, Dick, you've got to stand behind that line to hit it in the air."
So, that was the start of the non-volley zone. The net height
was established at 36 inches. The reason it ended up at 36 inches
was that was the height of Joel Prichard's waste. Because the net kind of
sagged and people would mess around with it. So, before they'd start playing, Joe would walk
over and check the height of the net to his hip. »BARNEY: I
realized after the first weekend, ping pong paddles weren't going to cut
it. For one thing, you'd break them. So, I had a band saw
in the basement of my house. I got a piece of paper, and I drew
three different models. Then I got the plywood, drew them down on the
plywood and started cutting. The next weekend, that's what we used.
There was no build-up on the handles, no nothing.
But they worked. They worked very well.
The shapes have changed slightly, and it's basically that
paddle, that first paddle that I made. We had no purpose
Nobody said, "Let's sit down and make this a game."
There was no conversation like that. It was strictly
for our own pleasure. Pure and simple. And we would take
friends that were visiting us and go down to Prichard's and play pickleball. That got
to be the thing. »CAROL: I'm Carol Stover, and I was very fortunate to play
pickleball back in the beginning of when pickleball started
in the early 70's. Our family would come from the Queen Anne
area, and we would move over to Bainbridge for the summer. And we played
pickleball on Barney's courts, and we had games going all the time.
And it was very competitive, and we were on and off the court all the time.
And it was lots of fun. »BARNEY: This is the pickleball court in the McCallum
property on Bainbridge Island. »SCOTT: I'm Scott Stover and
I first played pickleball in the late 60's and early 70's down at the
McCallum court. We had wonderful family games, and we learned the game
down there. And what we developed right away was the soft, the dink game.
And so we could get it just enough back over the net and
we would dink it into that area, it would pop up in the air, we'd smash it and win the point.
»PATTY: My first memories on this court, I was probably maybe
12 with Barney McCallum's youngest, Betsy. We
were just two peas in a pod. And walking up this hill and
the court would just be loaded with moms, dads, teenagers.
It would be Betsy and Barney against me and dad. So,
you could take two people that were much more skilled with two youngsters
and it was still a ton of fun. »DAVID: But it captured their interest,
and they kept messing around with it. It didn't get dropped like most games do.
And it just kept going that summer. »BARNEY: But when Labor Day
came, everything changes here because these are basically summer
living places. So, pickleball moved to my
place, Magnolia Bluff, in Seattle. »DAVID: So, the game started
to make it's way over into Seattle, and that group of
people were craving exercise in the winter time. »BARNEY: I lived on
a kind of a cul-du-sac. And the width of a city street
happens to be very accommodating for pickleball. »DAVID: A city
street is roughly 20 feet wide, which worked perfectly for a pickleball court.
And we used to play it out in the street out in front of the house. A neighbor saw this going on,
and they were doing a bunch of work to re-do their yard and decided
to put in a court across the street. »JIM: We moved to Magnolia in
1954, shortly
thereafter, why, Barney McCallum and I became
pretty close neighbors as well as close friends. So, he called me one
morning and said, "Why don't you come over and we're going to play some out in the street."
So, I went over, and of course I caught on very quickly.
He soon realized that he had a player for life if he could
get me over there and could put up with me. »DAVID: One example of
how pickleball got off the island was a frequent guest of Bob and Dorothy O'Brien
was Father Fitterer. He was the president of Seattle University. And so
he got a pickleball night started at the new Connolly Center at Seattle University.
Another really instrumental thing that helped the game get off the island was
Joe was running for Congress at the time, and they used to set up the game
and play it at his political events. Joe would get the microphone. He'd
say, "We're going to play a little pickleball now." And people would go, "What?"
He would explain the rules. He would find four people who were kind of hearty souls.
So, that's another way this game got off the island were at Joe's
fundraisers and political events as he was running for Congress.
»BARNEY: Pickleball was strictly part of a family recreation.
The business angle part of it crept in.
I got telephone calls from people from all over
everyplace. "Barney, I want some pickleball paddles." People
wanted these things and I'm not going to give them to them. So, we were just
forced into business. »DAVID: We had to create a little company because my dad needed
to buy the raw materials, the plywood, the handle build-up's. So, there needed to be
some kind of an entity to kind of handle the money. People wanted to pay for
the sets and you needed to buy the raw materials. So,
my dad started a company really just to facilitate handling kind of
the money. »BARNEY: Who's going to be in this thing? We all talked.
Three people wrote a check. Joel Prichard, Bill Bell and Barney.
»DAVID: So, that's when they formed Pickle-ball, Inc. »BARNEY: So, that was the start of
the commercialization of this game. One of the players
was the publisher and the president of the Times
newspaper. And he mentioned to a guy in
New York, "You know, there's a game that we're playing in Seattle
that you guys ought to take a look at.
Call this guy Barney McCallum and have your reporter talk to him."
And he came out to Seattle. And so I arranged for him
to play with some of the people that I considered the best players, and
he goes back to New York. A couple days later I get a phone call
from him from New York. "Would you consider selling a
starter set?" And I said, "Well, yeah,
sure." And he said, "How much would it be?"
I said, "Well, I really don't know." And he said, "Take a stab at it."
And I said, "Okay, I will. Around
30 bucks." And he says, "How about $29.50?" And I said,
"That's a deal." And about the next following Monday
and Tuesday, our mailman at the envelope factory
couldn't believe the mail that he had. There were all these
sacks of envelopes with $29.50
in them. And,
wow. What was I to do? I bought every badminton net
that I could locate in America. I bought all the Kazaam
balls there were. Now the next thing was the paddles.
There was no fancy handle. It was just a shape out of
a piece of plywood. And that's what we shipped. There were four balls,
four paddles and a net. $29.50.
We put the money in a cigar box.
And it stayed on that kind of a basis for
a year. But that article, it was never
any turning back from that. »DAVID: I became the first employee of this pickleball company
that had been formed in 1977. And we formalized the
paddles. We designed a box so that you could put four paddles,
a net and six balls in the box. »CAROL: I was one of the people on
the box, the original box. »SCOTT: There's a picture of me on the original pickleball
box back when I had a little more hair, and I was doing an overhead smash with a yellow
and blue rugby shirt on. »CAROL: We had a great time playing over on
Lake Washington and they filmed and produced that box at that time.
»DAVID: We'd been successful with the schools, so we became focused on
going to school shows and setting up and demonstrating the game
in the state of Washington, Oregon, Idaho. And we went to the National Physical Education
Recreation Show in Kansas City that year, and were pretty successful in getting
teachers to take on the game in their PE classes.
»JANET: My name is Janet Valentine. I have known Barney for about
35 years now, and I've worked at Pickle-ball Inc
for 27 years. Barney is what I call a
real person. There's nothing phoney about him. He adores
everybody. »BARNEY: See, this is the original... »PATTY: He's just one of
the greatest people that I've ever met. Him being out at the
tournaments and/or at the physical education
shows - anyone who meets him, he will tell you the story of how pickleball
came to be which people love to hear. He's just real.
»BARNEY: I never saw the big picture until
I went two years ago to the National Tournament in Phoenix.
People asked me for my autograph. I was almost embarrassed about that.
As an envelope salesman? You want
my autograph? But I've got sense enough to realize
that there were 650 people there on their own dime.
It was working. »DAVID: Well, the game that started out as just a fun thing
for families over on Bainbridge has continued to grow,
and it's just turned into a well-rounded activity that a lot of people are
enjoying now. »JANET: Without Barney there wouldn't be pickleball because he's
the one that took it from just a family game, nationwide.
And I'm waiting to see what's next from Barney. »JIM: Barney is
a one of a kind. »DAVID: I'm glad that those
young guys were so entrepreneurial and stuck with it - Joe, my dad
Bill Bell. I wish Bill and Joe could see what this thing has turned into.
The reward for my dad is not the business side of this. The reward
for my dad is that people are playing this and having fun. »BARNEY: There's no turning
back for me. I love the game.
And so I'm in it forever.
»ANNOUNCER: No matter where you are,
pickleball can bring us together to celebrate community, learn new things and have fun.
If you know someone we should feature on a future episode, we would love to hear from
you. All you have to do is send us an email and tell us your idea.
This episode of "I Heart Pickleball" has been brought to you by Hyland's Leg Cramps,
America's #1 over-the-counter leg cramp medicine.
For more information go to Hylands.com
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