Día de Los Muertos: Pickledome IV
South County Recreation Center
Bixby, Oklahoma
November 2, 2024
Pickleball is a polarizing sport. For those who play it and watch it, it’s a fun pastime, a physical and social diversion that doesn’t deserve half the malice it gets. For pickleball detractors, it approaches nearly the level of fascism: diet tennis for people with weak knees and no balance, a dorky pastime for dorks. Pickleball is somehow both derided as dumb bullshit for socialite weaklings and uplifted as an accessible community-creator in a world of hollowed-out third spaces.
Holding such a vortex of discourse in my head, I walked on a cold, gray Saturday morning into the Bixby/Glenpool South County Recreation Center to cover an event with a title I couldn’t resist: Día de Los Muertos: Pickledome. That’s right: a pickleball tournament with a Day of the Dead theme.
For an incongruity freak like me, this is raw beef to a hungry dog. I had to see how these suburb dwellers would incorporate the sacred holiday dedicated to ancestor worship from pre-Hispanic Mexico into their trendy badminton alternative. I suspected that the incorporation would be minimal, and I was correct.
There was very little Día de Los Muertos about the whole affair. Ten to twenty posters of sugar skulls dotted the walls, and some paper skeletons haunted the doorway. The South County Rec Center sold “Day of the Dead: Pickledome IV” shirts with skulls on them. Before the event, I bet that at most two people would be wearing sugar skull makeup. I lost that bet with myself, because not a soul embraced the Day of the Dead theme. Granted, this tournament went on all day, and I only watched the first two hours (Men’s Doubles), but the most “dressing up” I saw involved two men wearing matching pink Kirby shirts, which, admittedly, was cute. The team names were things like “Los Dos Amigos” and “918 Pickle.”
There’s a sweetness to all of this. I talked to Todd, probably in his late 60s, who told me he had been on Jenks’ first-ever high school tennis team, and who subsequently had played tennis his entire life. A recent knee replacement had pushed him out of the sport, and a doctor had recommended pickleball. Todd went from total ignorance to teacher in the span of a few years.
“I’ve taught most of the guys in here,” he told me, a twinkle of pride in his eyes. He cited the camaraderie as a reason to love it. The doubles teams were socializing, smiling and laughing between rounds. The mood was congenial. Unfortunately for the pickleball haters, I walked in as one of you and walked out as, if not exactly a believer, a begrudging admirer.
I can’t fault these guys for not putting a lot of effort into the theme. This was a pickleball tournament, not a cultural education fair, though I wished that it was both. If you’re going to put the name of a holiday on your pickleball tournament, you’d think you’d be willing to do a little bit of investigation into the traditions of that thing. A little ofrenda would have been nice.
Well, I can’t control everything. Todd, the pickleball teacher, probably would’ve preferred not to have a knee replacement. But a few days later, I looked on the South County Recreation Center’s Facebook page to see a gallery of medal winners from Day of the Dead: Pickledome IV, and there was Todd, a brace over his knee, proudly holding a silver medal from his afternoon division. May we all have such patience, such talent, such luck. If we’re fortunate, the ancestors might still look down and smile.
