For many, pickleball is a way of staying active

It stands to reason that Ollie Q. Cumber, the mascot of North Carolina’s Mt. Olive Pickle Company, would list his favorite sport as “pickleball.”

 

But on the surface, the game has absolutely no connection to pickles…although pickleball players find the sport offers a “dill-lightful” way to work out and get some exercise.

 

It’s hard to believe, but 2025 marks the 60-year anniversary of the invention of pickleball.

The game takes its name from the sport of rowing, or crew. Give credit to Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) Pritchard, who came up with the term “pickleball” in the summer of 1965, after watching her husband, Joel Pritchard, and two of his friends cobble together a new backyard activity at the Pritchard summer home on Bainbridge Island in Washington state’s Puget Sound near Seattle.

The men combined elements of badminton, ping pong, tennis and Wiffle ball. Joan Pritchard said she recalled watching college crew “pickle boat races” in Marietta, Ohio, which took place on the Ohio River. These were “exhibition competitions” involving the “leftover oarsmen” who raced just for the fun of it.

Applying the “pickle boat logic,” she said that pickleball teams are frequently “made up of whoever is on hand.”

It was after a morning round of golf when Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell decided on a lark to “repurpose” the regulation-sized, asphalt badminton court at the Pritchard place, dropping the net to ground level.

Using a pair of table tennis paddles, they banged a plastic, perforated ball back and forth…and made up rules as they went along.

The paddles kept breaking, however, causing Joel Pritchard to declare: “We need Barney.”

The USA Pickleball website explained: Neighbor Barney McCallum (show below) lived six doors down and was a bona fide inventor. “He was able to construct more reliable, better-looking paddles. He quickly became an integral part of the game’s equipment, rules and formation.”

Joel Pritchard (shown below) was president of Griffin Envelope Company in Seattle and a member of the Washington state legislature in 1965, when he and Bill Bell teamed with Barney McCallum to invent pickleball.

Pritchard went on to serve 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as eight years as Washington state’s lieutenant governor.

Bill Bell (shown below) earned a law degree and served as managing director of the Seattle World Trade Center. Later, as an executive with INCO Ltd. (International Nickel Company), with responsibility for Southeast Asia and Australia, Bell established one of the first industrial partnerships with the Republic of Indonesia.

He left the private sector to become legal counsel for the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Bell retired as an attorney at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded nonprofit organization in Arlington, Va.

Barney McCallum ran his own business, McCallum Envelope & Printing Co., in Kent, Wash., and he created the pickleball slogan: “Say Goodbye to the Sidelines.” It encouraged people to get active and learn to play pickleball.

“Through his work making paddles, balls and creating Pickle-Ball Inc., McCallum was instrumental in keeping the sport alive. For decades he was the only one manufacturing and marketing pickleball equipment and products,” according to USA Pickleball.

Interest in the game continues to escalate. On April 30, 2025, Hall of Fame tennis champion Andre Agassi (now 55) made his professional pickleball debut. He was the mixed doubles partner of the world’s No. 1-ranked female player, 18-year-old Anna Leigh Waters, at the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships in Naples, Fla.

You had to root for them. Waters learned to play pickleball while growing up in eastern North Carolina (in Clinton in Sampson County).

(The team of Agassi-Waters won its first round match but was eliminated in the second round of the tournament.)

Pickleball was the star of the show during the cavalcade of Super Bowl LIX commercials that were rolled out during the big game on Feb. 9, 2025.

Actors Willem Dafoe, 69, and Catherine O’Hara, 71, were featured as mixed doubles pickleball players who execute “The ULTRA Hustle” to perfection, crushing younger, hot-shot competitors on the court…earning refreshing Michelob ULTRA beer as their prize.

Brewed by Anheuser-Busch, Michelob ULTRA is now the No. 2 beer in the industry. “With just 95 calories, it is a superior light beer that celebrates the active, balanced lifestyle of its drinkers that includes both fitness and fun,” said Ricardo Marques, senior vice president of marketing for Michelob ULTRA.

“The 60-second advertising spot follows the iconic pairing of Dafoe and O’Hara – as an unassuming duo who take to the pickleball court and dink, shake-n-bake and hustle their way to beating the competition and collecting an ample stash of Michelob ULTRA.”

“Play for an ULTRA?” O’Hara coyly asks the next pickleball team on deck.