Do Pickleball Prayers Get Answered?

The Pickler 2 weeks ago 10 views

We here at Murmurs from the Losers’ Bracket are always looking for ways to improve our game.

Maybe we’ve overlooked something. Maybe there’s a magic new paddle out there we haven’t demo-ed yet. Maybe we’re just one set of overlooked tips away from going from a 3.39 to a 3.43 DUPR rating.

So, naturally, our ears perked up with the news from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the Little League World Series, the annual baseball tournament for 10-to-12-year-old kids.

In the championship game between a team from Florida and another one from Chinese Taipei on August 25th, the ESPN broadcast from the game captured an unusual pep talk from the coach of the Florida team to his players during the game.

The coach, Jonathan Anderson, told his team that the outcome of the ongoing game was already decided because God had ordained in advance that the Florida team would win the tournament.

“One of the first days that we got here, I came down here, a man prayed over me. OK, he saw my dad later, he said, ‘It’s already been written.’ We are already the champs,” Anderson said. “The Lord put it in his book. We are just going to finish the story right here, right now.”

And then his team went on to come from behind and win 2-1 in extra innings.

Anderson explained to ESPN after the game that the recipe for victory was simple after God foreshadowed the outcome.

“All we had to do is just believe,” Anderson said. “Do everything we were created to do, what we built ourselves to do, what we practiced to do, and here we are.”

Divine intervention! Why didn’t I think of that?

This could be bigger for my pickleball game than trying to master topspin.

Even though I am built to hit a lot of balls out of bounds, there could be hope for me yet. With a supreme being keeping a “book” and deciding outcomes on Little League tournaments among children, maybe there’s hope for my pickleball ladder success among retirees.

Hint: My wife and I would like to book a few more wins against the Fettermans once you have a free moment from overseeing the famines, border wars, and natural disasters.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic.

I mean, I don’t necessarily want somebody who is beating me 10-4 to be felled by a blue-sky lightning bolt. But maybe a well-timed gust of wind during his serve would be helpful, or a Moses-like parting of the net to allow one of my low-ball returns to make it safely across the court.

Judging from all the end-zone acknowledgments of divine help in the National Football League, I figured that God was already manipulating the scores of pro-football games. And all those Major League Baseball players who look to the heavens after getting a key strikeout or homerun clearly imagine that a divine helper has guided their ball or bat.

But until this Little League story, I never allowed myself to imagine that a supreme being might be willing to get involved in pickleball games.

After all, it’s a relatively new sport. And if I were a supreme being looking to expand my sports meddling, I’d probably just fool around with manipulating cornhole games – just for laughs.

The way I see it, in the hierarchy of divine intervention, pickleball ought to rank higher than Little League baseball.

After all, it’s best for kids to learn how to be good losers. We here at Murmurs from the Losers’ Bracket don’t need any more instruction in that regard.

We need divine help to win some games.

Also, it would be nice to know in advance if my upcoming pickleball game made it into “the book”, so I could do some full-throated trash-talking before the game.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking for a sign.

Zero-zero-amen.

MURMURS FROM THE LOSERS’ BRACKET

Read past editions of Murmurs from the Losers’ Bracket, including:

Frank Cerabino is a long-time columnist for the Palm Beach Post in Florida, a pickleball addict like the rest of us, and a newly published author. Check out Frank’s newly released book, I Dink, Therefore I Am: Coming to Grips with My Pickleball Addiction (available on Amazon and a great read (or gift!) for any pickleball player), for pickleball tips and laughs!

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