Pickles or Discs?
Whether you are a moviemaker or a meme-ist, a novelist or a new product developer, it’s hard to introduce something new that gets the attention of the cluttered modern-day American mind.
The same is true with sports. Football dominates the American consciousness, followed by basketball. The second tier of sports is pretty well-established too. Golf, baseball, tennis, hockey and soccer lurk through most of their seasons, then pop when major events or playoffs hit.
The third tier is more fluid – cycling is mostly a once-a-year phenomenon; the “Olympic sports” every four years. Cornhole is, apparently, in; bowling is out.
Cable and YouTube have made it easier than ever to put your sport “on TV,” but if you want to grow beyond a niche audience, you’ve got to have sharp elbows, great marketing and a good serving of luck.
That’s why I’ve been interested to watch the different paths that two of those wannabe third tier sports have been taking since 2020.
Quick survey: which of these two sports is doing better at attracting new viewers and players?
· The first one involves players flinging and following a disc along parabolic arcs, through tree-lined trails, toward a basket, to the accompaniment of birds and babbling brooks. We’ll call that one “disc golf.”
· The second one involves players standing on exposed asphalt hitting a ball as hard as they can at an opposing player, the sound of a nail gun detonating beside your head each time you strike the ball. We’ll call that one “pickleball.”
If you guessed pickleball, you’re right, of course, but how does that make any logical sense? Here’s my best guess:
James Conrad’s 2021 “holy shot” went viral — for a few minutes. Disc golf has been looking for a comparable moment since.
A war is better than a shot: Disc golf’s potential breakthrough moment came in 2021, when James Conrad, trailing by one, holed out a 247 foot shot on the final hole to force a playoff (which he won, beating World #1 Paul McBeth) at the Professional Disc Golf World Championships. What came to be known as “the holy shot” made ESPN’s Top Ten Plays of the Day. Since then, on the national consciousness … disc crickets.
Meanwhile, a juicy billionaire war was escalating between two professional pickleball leagues. By 2023 the two billionaire owners, Tom Dundon (who also owns the Carolina Hurricanes and the Portland Trailblazers) and Steve Kuhn (his motto: “100 millon players by 2030”) were showing off the size of their pickles, and the competition had a name, “tour wars.” Player salaries skyrocketed as the two tours bid up the price: the tours ended up paying players more than the league was taking in. By the time the leagues reached a cease fire in 2024 (the two tours basically merged), there was more prize money, more tournaments and more advertising.
Adding to an existing brand is easier than establishing your own: Both pickleball and disc golf have exclusive channels, available to subscribers to watch their sports, with ads. But pickleball has an additional deal with the much-more-visible Tennis Channel, making it easier for people with cable subscriptions to watch the sport live without paying additional fees, and making it easier for people not familiar with the sport to “bump into” it unintentionally. CBS has started airing occasional celebrity pickleball tournaments. You have to go looking for disc golf.
Star power draws attention and money: The $75 million raised from investors during the 2024 pickleball merger got the attention of some very high profile people with money to invest. Sports stars Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Michael Jordan, Naomi Osaka, Tom Brady, and Patrick Mahomes, the rapper Drake and high profile entrepreneurs Mark Cuban all bought in as owners or partial owners of pickleball Major League Pickleball franchises. Former tennis players like Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and John McEnroe and other former pro athletes like Dirk Nowitski and Drew Brees started playing exhibitions. Stars like Jamie Foxx, Emma Watson and George Clooney started talking up their games. That star power in turn increased the value of the franchises, even if none of them is making money yet.
When I search for “celebrities who play disc golf,” I find a chef, a UFC fighter, and actor and a major league pitcher I’ve never heard of and none of them is investing in the tour. And, since the tour operates more like conventional golf, with players competing as individuals, it’s not clear how a celebrity could invest even if they wanted to.
Pickleball is winning on celebrities, coverage and money. Disc golf is winning on birdies and trees and chill.
Money follows money: Pickleball’s smash began when billionaires started competing to establish a league. It built off of an existing racquet brand and network – tennis and Tennis Channel. And it got enough visibility from stars that sponsorships followed. This year the combined league, United Pickleball Association, is expected to generate a total of $74 million – about half from sponsorships of companies like Anheuser-Busch and DoorDash. The Professional Disc Golfers Association scored a major new sponsorship from Powerball this year (details are not public, but estimated to be about $1 million), with total tour revenues about $10 million. but is expected to will generate about $10 million.
Powerball alone can’t finance a tour. You need some star power… any maybe a good old-fashioned billionaire feud.
An obvious fan base with room to grow: Pickleball has a couple of advantages when it comes to building its fan base. First, there is a huge, ready-made supply of new entrants from among former tennis players looking to scale back their exercise. Growing infrastructure is easy – it’s just a matter of drawing new lines on tennis courts. And there’s almost no way for casual passers-by to avoid seeing – and hearing – pickleball.
Disc golf, by contrast, is played quietly and invisibly – the discs fly silently until they hit the basket and, unless you’re on a walk in just the right woods, you aren’t going to see players and get curious about what they are doing. And there’s no obvious sport from new players to transition from – ultimate frisbee has even fewer participants than disc golf.
It’s a vibe thing: There’s one other intangible advantage pickleball has as it continues to grow. It’s confrontational. It’s personal. It’s loud. It’s fast and conclusive. And that’s kinda who we are these days.
Disc golf can be all of those things at its highest level, but mostly it’s not. It’s slow and mellow. Trees, not asphalt. Clinks in a basket, not nail guns in the ears. Near the end of every round, as players stand on the 18th tee, they quietly high-five each other to celebrate the round and the camaraderie. Then they fling their discs through the trees another time.
This kind of vibe is awfully countercultural.
If they get their release just perfect, the discs will arc upward, dodging trees as they bank left, then sneak over a brook as they flex back to the right, before nestling to halt near a basket. But who wants to watch that?
-Leslie
Notes:
“The holy shot”: https://www.facebook.com/reel/753819730328764
Tour wars: https://huddleup.substack.com/p/pickleballs-billion-dollar-potential
Tom Dundon pickleball investments: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/dallas-billionaire-embraces-pickleball-fever-as-the-national-championships-arrive-in-dfw/3380112/
Pickleball merger: https://www.sportspro.com/news/major-league-pickleball-ppa-tour-vibe-league-merger/
Disc Golf Network: https://www.discgolfnetwork.com
Pickleball/Tennis Channel teamup: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/professional-pickleball-tennis-channel-broadcast-partnership.html#:~:text=Professional%20Pickleball%20is%20getting%20a,as%20entertainment%20surrounding%20the%20sport.
Pickleball on broadcast TV: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/pickled-is-a-celebrity-pickleball-tournament-thats-the-world-cup-meets-snl/