OPINION

In a pickle with Bubba

I called Bubba McCoy and told him a woman came running over from the adjoining pickleball court the other day to say that it looked as if our match was about to wrap up and that she didn't want me to get away without hearing her request for more articles on Bubba.

I told him she proclaimed him "quite the character."

Bubba replied totally off-point, asking, "She came runnin' over from the what?"

I said to forgive my insensitivity to the likelihood that pickleball has not yet emerged as quite the thing on the shores of the White River.

I explained that pickleball is a national rage--to the point that some have begun to refer to "pickleball voters" as a major new factor in politics.

They tend to be older, medium-high in income, consistent voters, health-conscious, socially active and progressive culturally but concerned about government spending and economic indicators. They might vote for Asa Hutchinson or Nikki Haley for president. They'd vote for Joe Biden only if he was the pitiable best the Democrats could do to shield them from Donald Trump, whose policies they might accept except on abortion but whose behavior offends and alarms them.

"I don't give a rat's hind-end about politics," Bubba said. "I want to know what kind of a game you play with a pickle."

You play with a hard plastic Wiffle-like ball and a paddle. To oversimplify, it is micro-tennis and macro-ping pong.

The smallness of the playing arena puts less stress on the body than tennis while providing plenty of opportunity to raise the heart rate and break a sweat. It also facilitates socialization when you get four people in the small space playing doubles.

I looked up the other day to see four adjoining courts filled with 15 smiling people, four per court. Only one guy, me, wasn't smiling. I never smile when score is being kept and there's a chance I could wind up on the short end.

I mean that literally for pickleball and metaphorically for life.

Bubba seemed frustrated, saying, "I'm gonna ask you one more (expletive deleted) time what a (expletive deleted) pickle has to do with it."

I don't know, man. It's just a fun name, OK?

I was a partner of a good and veteran player the other day and we got ahead 7-to-0 on his service streak, and he said, "Are you smelling the vinegar?" That referred to its being called a "pickle' when you beat somebody 11-0. I said I indeed could smell vinegar and that the odor must have been coming from the "kitchen." We ended up barely holding on because I choked away a bunch of points.

The "kitchen" is the strip nearest the net that you are not allowed to step into unless the ball has bounced in there. It's a rule that vexes me, as does the one saying you can't hit the ball in the air until it's bounced once over there and once over here. In tennis you want to charge the net at the first opportunity. In pickleball I spend all my time counting ball-bounces and fretting about my location in relation to the kitchen.

There was a pause and then Bubba said, "I'm sorry. For a minute there you bored me to death. I think I slipped into a micro-coma or a macro-doze-off. The last I remember, you were looking for vinegar in the kitchen."

I told Bubba that I was simply trying to answer his question.

"I appreciate that," he said. "It's just that somewhere between 'Wiffle' and 'paddle' I quit giving a (vulgarity deleted)."

He asked whether I was quitting tennis. I said not altogether, but the fact remained that I had so feared the surgery for the rotator-cuff tear that I never got it, and that I couldn't serve overhead with any power, but that pickle ball commonly required an underhanded serve and placed no premium on power.

"Do you have any idea," Bubba asked, "how plumb sissy you sound?

"And let me ask you this: You called because a woman came over to you to ask you to write about a real man. And here you are giving her an article about a wuss game she already knows about on account of she was playing it at the time she expressed her fascination with me."

I told him where to go and that I'd give her a column next time on the real man's latest exploits in sitting in a squeaky recliner in a trailer office watching "Andy Griffith" reruns or getting down in the floor to put a Christmas tree in a stand and not being able to get up and crawling over to the couch for leverage and pulling it over on himself.

He said that cut it between us.

I said we were like those guys in "Brokeback Mountain" because he couldn't quit me.

We apparently lost our signal at that point.


John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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