At the risk of losing my audience in the opening paragraph, pickleball looks faintly ridiculous, the kind of game invented by a kindergarten kid with too many crayons.
I can see him in the class, all pleased with himself after combining a zebra, an elephant, and a hippo, and calling his painted creation a “zeleppo”, and saying, “teacher, now I’m going to mix tennis, badminton, and table tennis and call it pickleball!”
At which point, the teacher makes a mental note to cut back on the kid’s sugary drinks.
Pickleball is the platypus of modern sport. Apparently, the story goes that when the earliest white settlers in Australia sent illustrations of the platypus back to England, animal experts thought the sketches were a joke. To be fair, the platypus does look like four other animals stitched together for a giggle.
Pickleball follows similar principles. It uses a paddle that looks like a seal’s flipper, a perforated plastic ball that primary school kids use for indoor hockey, a badminton-sized court, and a modified tennis net. Naturally, the sport sounds preposterous. Naturally, Singaporeans are loving it.
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Singapore's love for pickleball
What I’m loving is the fact that Singaporeans are loving the quirkiest cultural fusion since the first western stall cook decided that putting coleslaw beside baked beans was a good idea.
As a naive, idealistic, and increasingly unemployed sports writer across four decades, I’m delighted when any sport becomes popular (and, no, queuing up outside a Singapore Pools outlet before a Liverpool game doesn’t count, even if you do get your steps in).
So I’m all for pickleball. I’m all for any sport that gets heartbeats up, cholesterol levels down, and reminds the nation that a sport should ideally involve more than a video game controller, as long as it’s played within specific timings and with appropriate noise levels.
Because this is Singapore. And in our society, sport and community often go together like Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. We never hear about the relationship until there’s a demand for a separation. But somehow, pickleball is not following the Singaporean drill.
Normally, sports facilities go viral only after they’ve been demolished. Turf City gets bulldozed and we complain. Farrer Park gets bulldozed and we complain.
The Kranji racetrack gets bulldozed and we complain. And then we collect the keys to our new BTOs and condos on the sites of those former sports venues and stop complaining. That’s the Singapore way.
But pickleball has turned that tried and tested formula on its head. Pickleball facilities are growing. They’re like Labubu dolls on handbags. They’re bloody everywhere.
Pickleball courts are participating in a nationwide whack-a-mole game. Whenever someone tries to whack one, another two or three pop up elsewhere: in housing estates, at community centres, and even at enterprising Singaporean hotels.
Where there’s a will – and there’s always a will to play pickleball, it seems – there’s a way. And there’s always a way to a pickleball court in Singapore.
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The pickle with pickleball
But non-pickleball players are not happy about this development. The moment those balls start banging, the neighbours start complaining about the noise. No wonder our fertility rates are through the floor.
Still, 700 complaints are no joke. That’s where we are right now. Between January 2024 and August 2025, HDB estates received 700 complaints about all that bat and ball action.
That’s fewer than two complaints a day, which is still twice the number of Singaporean Olympic gold medallists. Who says we don’t have our priorities in the right place?
Of course, complaints are a serious business in Singapore. The powers-that-be tend to react to a complaint the way the Manchester United defence reacts to a ball through the middle. It’s like a scene at Halloween Horror Nights.
As a result, a few town councils have told players to avoid games before dawn and after dark (which is sensible) and have locked up community courts after hours (which is reasonable).
The majority prevails, as always, in a country that has long adhered to the Benthamite principles of the greatest happiness to the greatest number, a prudent approach for six million people stacked on top of each other in ever smaller boxes.
And we’ve been here before. I’ve written previously about playing football at my Toa Payoh void deck with my kakis. They were around eight or nine years old. I was 25. But age is just a number in sport.
Soon enough, there were complaints from neighbours, forcing the police to step in, stop the game, and remind me that I was a Straits Times sports journalist at the time.
Gradually, void deck football, which essentially replaced kampong football, was eased out as our public (and free) playing spaces shrank. As a consequence, the Singapore Lions now qualify for the World Cup on a regular basis, right?
Flippancy aside, sport is supposed to be a release – from work, from school, from cost of living pressures, from the geopolitical, existential crises that threaten to engulf us all, and heaven knows what else.
Sport also relieves the pressure on an ageing population. If we can’t play now, we’ll all pay later. A sedentary population is an expensive one. For all of us.
On the flip side, we also have the right to escape all of the above in our homes, too, and relax with a cup of tea without the persistent ball banging from a nearby pickleball court. That’s a fair and reasonable request.
But if the participants are playing within the accepted timeframes, does the noise really feel so incongruous?
Because I hate to break the news to pickleball critics, but only our richest folks living in their black-and-white compounds have anything resembling a peaceful, idyllic home life.
The rest of us endure car horns, accelerating motorcyclists, incessant drilling, loud TVs, piano lessons, crying babies, door-slamming teenagers, vegetable choppers, and early morning phlegm-clearers.
And we accept it. We compromise. We tolerate the varied decibels of city life and recognise that we all participate in our chaotic Singaporean orchestra. Honestly, it’s a testament to our remarkable tolerance that we do live together, all 6.11 million of us, and make it work.
So what’s a little pickleball among friends and neighbours?
As a nation, we should stand in solidarity and champion those valiant men and women who want to stay fit and healthy by playing a sport first invented for children.
