Rick Barry, Pickleball and Elite Athletes’ Endless Appetite for Competition

In a way, Rick Barry is a rookie again. With his 80th birthday approaching in late March, the NBA legend is eligible to be among the youngest players in the oldest age group in a sport that he is starting to dominate as he did long ago in basketball.

Like many septuagenarians over the past few years, Barry gave up his other post-retirement athletic pursuits, in his case tennis and golf, for another sport once widely associated with slow-moving retirees: pickleball.

“When I retired [from the NBA in 1980], I needed to find something else to compete in,” Barry said recently. “Tennis was beating me up too much. It just got too hard on my body.”

After winning four world Long Driving golf championships between 2007 and 2013, Barry found himself at another athletic crossroads when he said “the old farts divisions” for that niche competition were eliminated. His wife, Lynn, a former college basketball star herself, had a suggestion.

“Why don’t you try pickleball?” Barry recalled her asking, chuckling at the memory of their conversation. “I said, ‘What the hell is pickleball?’”

Pickleball was more foreign to Barry, who turned the underhand free throw into an art form during a basketball career that spanned 15 years, two leagues and one NBA title, than the traditional foul shot.

Yet with his height, wingspan and the racket skills he brought from tennis, the 6ft 7in Barry caught on quickly as he learned a sport with a funny name and quirky rules.

And as often happens, he struggled to master, or even embrace, pickleball’s most integral shot: the dink. Taking balls off the bounce inside the kitchen – a 140-square foot rectangle area in front of the net where volleying shots in the air is not allowed – became the bane and eventually the boon of Barry’s education.

“When I first went out and I tried it, I hated the kitchen, but then I realized that without the kitchen, you couldn’t play pickleball [at a high level],” Barry said.

Barry made the two-hour drive from his winter home in Bradenton, Florida, to play at The Villages, the retirement community that is home to 200 dedicated pickleball courts and hundreds of addicted players, many of them nationally recognized.

“I got to play with some really good people, which is the only way you’re going to get better,” he said. “My goal was to get good enough to be able to try to win a national championship.”

Barry has now done that, winning the men’s doubles in his age group at last year’s US Open in nearby Naples as well as the Huntsman World Senior Games in St George’s, Utah. Barry has also medaled in mixed doubles at several other national, regional and local events.

After three years of tournament play, Barry will take a 99-45 record into his next national event, the US Open in April. For the first time, Barry is going to play singles with his sights set on winning a triple crown: three golds in the same tournament.

The biggest obstacle for Barry achieving his latest goal is that he is running out of players his age to compete against. Typically, the 80-and-over division gets the fewest number of entries because players have to play multiple matches – as much as six or seven in the span of 10 hours – in order to medal.

“You try to make the older divisions, but the older people just don’t come out for competitive tournaments because of the grinding. It takes a lot out of you if you’re not in shape,” said Carl Foster, who runs tournaments around the country and is the president and co-owner of a professional team based in Florida.

Barry, who was the second player who starred in both the NBA and ABA to be elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, is not the only sports legend to join the list of former and current professional athletes playing pickleball.

At 63, tennis Hall of Famer Ivan Lendl recently won two straight tournaments in the 5.0 men’s pro doubles division (the highest level aside from professional) in the 50-and-over and 60-and-over brackets.

Carling Bassett-Seguso, 56, who rose as high as No 8 in the WTA rankings in 1985 before injuries and what turned into a decades-long struggle with depression derailed a promising career, has become a fixture on the courts in Delray Beach along with her son and daughter.

Bassett-Seguso took up pickleball two years ago, but tore her ACL and MCL seven months into her new sport while playing in a tournament. Those injuries added to other serious setbacks including a broken hip, shattered pelvis and several concussions while riding horses for a decade after her tennis career ended.

“I’ve broken everything in my body,” she said during a break in recreational matches in Delray Beach in early February.

She also spent three years getting treated for clinical depression, including being administered psilocybin mushrooms. But pickleball has been the ultimate drug to help her recover.

“I love life,” she said. “I was in a bad space and I found pickleball and I love it even more. I just think it’s the most healing sport there is to date for myself. I have like 100 friends who I can call up and they will be there for me. I don’t think there’s any sport like it.”

Two more recent top 10 players, Jack Sock and Genie Bouchard, have transitioned to professional pickleball as their own promising tennis careers stalled.

Rick Barry in action on the pickleball court. Photograph: Rick Barry

Sock, 31, won in his debut event last May in mixed doubles with the game’s top female player, teenager Anna Leigh Waters. Bouchard, a Wimbledon finalist as a 19-year-old in 2014, lost in the first round of doubles, mixed doubles and singles in her January debut.

“Your average [professional] tennis players aren’t coming in and dominating, that’s a misconception,” said Foster, the tournament director for one of the Florida events Lendl won. “You see a lot of the young players switching early who weren’t making it on the tennis tour.”

The biggest issue among older pickleball players at any level is that the sport is trending younger.

Ben Johns, who grew up in Maryland, is the top male player at age 23 while Waters, a Floridian who turned 17 in February, has been a dominant player and No 1 on the women’s side for a few years.

Waters won her first tournament at age 12 while playing with her mother, Leigh, a former college tennis player. Both Johns and Waters, who recently won their 30th mixed doubles title playing together, come from states that started becoming pickleball hotbeds during the pandemic.

Given the sport’s new demographics, Foster believes that what Waters did as a preteen will never be duplicated. Others are trying.

“You won’t see another 12-year-old dominating like she did,” Foster said. “Others are catching up to her and Ben Johns. Like any sport, they’re getting upset. You see athletes from a lot of different sports that have that athletic ability and hand-eye coordination. That’s why pickleball is growing so fast because people can jump in pretty quick and be competitive. How far they can go depends on how they learn the game.”

Then there are also those athletic legends who are helping promote the sport by investing in Major Professional Pickleball franchises, including LeBron James and Tom Brady or by playing in made-for-television events as John McEnroe and Andre Agassi did in Pickleball Ball Slam I and II.

McEnroe and Agassi recently competed for the second straight year in the ESPN event at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino near Fort Lauderdale. McEnroe played with Maria Sharapova against Agassi and Steffi Graf in the night’s featured match.

Asked about his involvement, Agassi said after he and Graf won their mixed doubles match, “I hope it helps grow the sport, that’s the intention. The sport is going to grow anyhow because it’s such a community based activity. You’re with friends, you’re talking, you’re engaging, It’s a great equalizer, you can find a lot of matchups that make it work.”

Despite the quality of the matches at Pickleball Slam not being at the highest level, Foster said, “Anytime you can bring a celebrity into a new sport it adds some credibility. You see a lot of current athletes playing pickleball, but not in competition. Some of them are taking it seriously but others are doing it for exercise.”

Steve Rose, a former multi-racket sport player who took up pickleball eight years ago, said after teaming with Lendl to win a 60-and-over pro event, that tennis players are seeing a less daunting path to success in pickleball.

“At the beginning, the tennis players didn’t want to come over to pickleball,” said Rose. “Now, you get people like Ivan and Jack Sock and they’re definitely attracting other tennis players, which is raising the entire level of the game, the popularity of the game and [bringing] more recognizable names to the masses.”

Lendl doesn’t look at his status as a tennis legend helping grow the game’s popularity as the reason for playing.

“I’m bringing fun for myself and my friends,” Lendl said after helping Rose win their riveting down-to-the-wire gold medal match in February. “To me, whether I play here or in the backyard makes no difference. It was that way in tennis. I enjoyed playing tennis in my backyard. If I was hitting the ball well, it gave me a lot of satisfaction.”

Foster said that Lendl made his debut in the Boca Masters because of its location, not far from his new home in Vero Beach. His victory came more than four decades after Lendl won his first ATP tournament in Houston at age 20. There would be 93 more, including eight grand slams.

“He said he’ll never forget Boca as his first [pickleball] title.” said Foster, who is trying to get Lendl to join his professional team later this year.

Though not serious about the game himself, McEnroe said that it’s a great outlet for older former athletes who still like to be pushed competitively.

“There are crazy lunatics like Rick Barry who compete at signing his name [while giving autographs],” McEnroe said with a smile.

Rose, who has seen Barry play at tournaments, said, “A lot of the older professionals like Rick Barry, now have an outlet and go back and win again.”

Unlike his pro basketball career, which included 13 All-Star selections between the NBA (eight) and ABA (five) as well as being named as one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players on its 50th and 75th anniversary teams, Barry is competing in near anonymity except for the looks of slight or even startled recognition among some opponents.

Barry, who led the Golden State Warriors to a four-game sweep of the Washington Bullets in 1975 and was named NBA finals MVP, is as feisty as he was 50 years ago when it comes to his – and others’ – newfound obsession. The only issue now is finding fellow octogenarians to play against. The pickleball equivalent of Elgin Baylor or Julius Erving is not walking on the court, waiting to dink rather than dunk Barry into submission.

Barry will keep playing, even if it’s against players decades younger.

“I’ve won some tournaments playing against 50-year-olds, I love the competition,” Barry said. “It’s a nice social thing for people to do, but for me, if I step on the court or do anything athletically, I’m out there to try to win.”