Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America, and a pickle is not a vegetable. It’s a cucumber that got into brine the way certain people get into CrossFit, all at once and with no exit plan. And a cucumber, botanically, is a fruit. The banana in Banana Ball is also a fruit. Worse, it’s a berry, a fact botanists deliver with the smug patience of a man explaining your own thermostat to you, and the worst part is they’re right, which is the most annoying thing a person can be. (The same source, for the record, says cucumbers are berries too, which means pickleball is somehow even more fraudulent than advertised. Or that source is liquored up, and I approve.)
So the two flagship produce sports in this country were founded on botanical fraud. There has never been a vegetable sport. Not one. An entire kingdom of the plant world, the kingdom of fiber, of virtue, of everything your mother threatened you with, has been shut out of athletics entirely while a brined cucumber signs shoe deals.
In America, when a market is built on a lie and growing 20 percent a year, we don’t call that a scandal. We call that a Series B.
I told Karie I was going to close the vegetable sports gap. She asked if this was before or after I replaced the water filter, which is a clear plastic tube under the house that has turned the exact orange of a hazard cone, and which has defeated me eleven consecutive times, because opening it requires torque, and torque requires an athletic anything, and a full inventory of my body has confirmed I don’t have one. I said the filter was a separate matter. She wrote something in her phone, and after fifteen years I know that note said “filter” and nothing else.
Let’s establish the crime scene. USA Pickleball governs a sport played with a whiffle ball on a shrunken tennis court by 40 million Americans, approximately zero of whom can tell you why it’s called pickleball. The founding families have been feuding about it since 1965. One faction says it’s named after a dog named Pickles. The other says the dog came later and was named after the sport, meaning this dog was named after a boat, and I need you to sit with the fact that the fastest-growing sport in America has a paternity dispute involving a dog, and the dog has no comment, because the dog has been dead since the Ford administration.
The Savannah Bananas, meanwhile, took baseball, removed everything your father calls “the strategy,” added choreography, and now sell out every stadium in the country. MLB executives attend Bananas games the way Blockbuster executives once toured Netflix, quietly, in sunglasses, taking notes they’ll present to a committee that will form a task force that will die in Q3.
Both are triumphs. Both are fruit. The correction begins now.
Rutabaga Rugby. Nobody understands the rules of rugby, and nobody knows what a rutabaga is, so this sport ships 90 percent complete. The ball is a rutabaga. The rutabaga does not bounce. This is a feature. It means the game rewards commitment over talent, like marriage, or buying a boat. Complication: the British call a rutabaga a “swede,” so the first international test match triggered a formal complaint from the actual nation of Sweden, whose ambassador described footage of the scrum as “distressing on a level our language did not previously require.”
Kohlrabi Cornhole. A lawn game for people who found regular cornhole too welcoming. The kohlrabi, a vegetable designed by whoever does concept art for alien invasion movies, does not fit in the hole. You lose points for asking why. You lose additional points for googling “kohlrabi” mid-match, a violation the rulebook calls, without irony, “conduct unbecoming a vegetable.”
Leek Luge. Winter sport. You lie on a leek. The Norwegians dominate, obviously, and are already mid-scandal after a routine test found one athlete’s leek was 40 percent butter. Wales has filed a protest on national-symbol grounds, and the IOC has expressed interest, which is how you know the sport has 18 months to live.
Parsnip Polo. Played on horseback with a parsnip for a mallet, which survives one chukker before snapping, at which point play continues with the stub and everyone agrees this is fine, because agreeing things are fine is the entire culture. There’s a blazer requirement, a woman named Bitsy who runs everything, and a waiting list that exists purely to have a waiting list. Karie has stated she will not attend. “Not because of the horses. The horses are the only ones there on merit.”
Artichoke MMA. The only sport where the equipment fights back. An artichoke is a thistle wearing armor, and getting to the heart of one takes 45 minutes of peeling away defenses, which is also true of most of the men in my family. Matches are scored by a panel of therapists.
Competitive Radicchio. Nobody knows what the sport is. That is the sport. It’s just called Competitive Radicchio; it airs at 2 a.m. on ESPN8 between cornhole and the lumberjack thing, and the commentators call it with total confidence. “Oh, and that’s just beautiful radicchio work by the Belgian.” Last season’s match-fixing scandal collapsed when prosecutors couldn’t establish what would have been fixed.
Okra Water Polo. The okra makes the water slimy. That’s it. That’s the sport. Every match ends in litigation, and the litigation is also slimy. The league’s official motto is “You Knew,” which is also its entire legal defense.
Here’s what happens next, because it’s what always happens next. A billionaire, a man who made his fortune on an app that tells you which of your other apps are lying to you, attends one Rutabaga Rugby match at a county fair and experiences the specific religious awakening billionaires get when they see something that hasn’t been ruined yet. It’s the only thing that still gets them out of bed. It’s why they buy newspapers.
Eighteen months later, there’s a league. There’s a streaming deal with a service you’ve never heard of that autoplays at full volume in your kitchen at 6 a.m. There’s a mascot named Baga, a rutabaga with legs whose eyes have been focus-grouped three times because children found the first two versions “threatening” and the third version “worse.” There’s a commissioner, then a players’ union, then a lockout, then a shot clock added to a sport that previously measured time in growing seasons. The rutabaga itself gets replaced with a synthetic composite rutabaga for “consistency of play,” and old men write newsletters insisting the game was better when the ball could rot, and the old men are right, and it doesn’t matter.
And then, the true sign of arrival: ESPN announces a 30 for 30. It’s called Root Causes, and Wright Thompson is producing, because if anyone can find the aching soul of the American South buried inside a root vegetable, it’s Wright Thompson, and the film will run two hours, and forty minutes (a wee bit more 30 than a 30 do) of it will somehow be about his father, and you will cry, and you won’t be able to explain to anyone what you were crying about, because the answer is a rutabaga. You already know the trailer. Slow piano. Archival footage of a county fair. A voice says, “What if I told you... the toughest athlete of a generation was a root vegetable. That a nation fell in love with something it could not name. And that the man inside the Baga suit... was never the same.” Smash cut to a weeping equipment manager holding the last real rutabaga. Sundance loses its mind.
I should mention that while I was drafting this, an actual sporting event broke out on this property, sanctioned by no one.
Trouble, our pig, who currently weighs 156 pounds and has retained counsel regarding the scale, excavated a rutabaga from the bed Karie fenced against this exact scenario, which means the fence is now 0 for 3 lifetime against the pig, and the pig knows it. Trouble carried the rutabaga to midyard. She placed it down. She backed up. Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS, all six pounds of him, approached, and Trouble charged, and Queso retreated to the porch to file a formal protest with whoever handles those, and Trouble reclaimed the rutabaga, and the sequence repeated eleven times with the pacing and gravity of a test match.
Remmi officiated. Remmi is blind, which makes her the first referee in the history of organized sports with an actual excuse. Vinny Van Meow watched from the fence post with the stillness of a cat who has money on the pig and a guy for that sort of thing. Professor Archibald Pickles slept through the entire event, which under league bylaws made him the commissioner, and I’d note he’s already outperforming most of them.
I stood there watching a pig run an eleven-possession match with better pacing than the NFL, clearer rules than cricket, and a more honest relationship with its ball than pickleball has managed in sixty years. No streaming deal. No Baga. No composite rutabaga. Just an athlete, an official with plausible deniability, a gambling element on the fence post, and a ball that was, at long last, an actual vegetable.
Karie came out with her coffee and watched a full possession. “You are going to write about this.” Not a question. These days, they rarely are.
And I’d note the scoreboard on this property is now painfully clear. Trouble went 11-for-11 against a Chihuahua. I am 0-for-11 against a plastic tube. There is an athletic hierarchy at Blue Dog Farm, and I am below the sleeping commissioner.
The rutabaga did not survive the season. But for one afternoon in July, vegetable sports existed, right here, undefeated, unsponsored, and honest, and somewhere a billionaire’s plane changed course, and I went under the house and lost to the filter for the twelfth time, and the water stayed orange, and honestly, at this point, the filter has earned it.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
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