Dinks and Smashes

Now that Pennsauken has the new courts on River Road, I am somewhat nostalgic remembering the start of my pickleball playing at the Browning Road courts. Cookie Sey introduced a number of us to the game including Rita and Art Lattanzi, John Babcock, Bill M., Celeste Bub, Fran Mick, Lisa Heisler, Shira Carroll etc. Lots of good memories, great people…Browning Road was our entree to other pickleball venues like Lions Den etc.

Every local pickleball venue (DeCou, Berlin, Hainesport, Pennsauken, Runnemede, Willingboro, etc.) has its own unique personality and characters. There are varieties of competitiveness, social interaction, formality, protocol and atmosphere. Each site is blessed with a good Meet-Up host.

Finally a pickleball player whose BMI is closer to many of us! Eden Lica is 6’5 and about 250 lbs. Despite his size, he has very good foot movement on the court as a singles player and he offers a nice touch and a finesse game to go with his power shots. Watch Lica’s recent singles match against Frank Anthony Davis at Delray Beach to get an idea of his agility and touch. Video starts with Lica-Davis match and continues for about 21 minutes. Note: lots of good action of other players including Ben Johns throughout video…

Experiment of one: I’ve played with a $150 Selkirk paddle but it doesn’t translate to a 100% performance improvement from playing earlier with a $75 graphite paddle. It’s often the archer, not the arrow.

Locally, informal scouting reports on players are being shared even at the intermediate level. The word of mouth reports are not only based on a player’s skills and performance but also, ominously for some, about their attitude and temperament on the court. Anecdotally I’m sad to hear stories where some players are made to feel uncomfortable because they may not be at the playing level of their fellow or lady competitors.

I commend Mindee Goldstein Hewitt for her continued improvement. She’s a pickleball dynamo and whirlwind. Not big in size, but big in heart. I’ve played with her on the Pennsauken courts. She is about a foot smaller than me but possesses a spirit and enthusiam for the game that complements her ever increasing level of skills and performance. She always has a smile on her face and has an energy level that belies her age.

If you measure your game solely by wins and losses instead of the opportunities for improvement, having fun and meeting friends/new people then you don’t understand the game.

The current performance gaps between Ben Johns from other men’s professionals and Simone Jardin from other women’s professionals are huge. Both are dominating pickleball like an early Mike Tyson with boxing and Simone Biles in gymnastics. Both players need rivalries and with new talent moving in from tennis and other sports, they soon may find it. Johns is dominating current pickleball like Bjorn Borg dominated tennis in the 1970s.

I’m amused that some of the topics (paddles, illegal serves, rules interpretions) on various Facebook pickleball forums draw as much heat as those on political topics.

I’m noticing that the streams and commentary on YouTube and Facebook from different pickleball venues and tournaments continue to improve. Those improvements will generate a wider audience and interest from casual fans.

The one exercise that may be most helpful for pickleball players is hitting a speed bag. Many pickleball shots, at the net, are like a boxer’s jab, requiring no wind up but quick flicks, reactions and jabs. Advanced pickleball players need the hand speeds and reflexes possessed by top amateur and professional boxers when parrying hard shots and volleys at the net.

My pickleball goals for this spring and summer are simple. I want to reconnect and play with old friends who I have not seen due to the Covid outbreak, improve my serve, try singles play and stay healthy.

See you on the courts!

Thoughts on the Fly

Close friends, family and even spouses may know 60-80% of who we really are. No one knows 100% of us, not even ourselves.

Emotionally it is easier to give help than to accept it. Giving is an expression of the heart; accepting often requires the surrender of ego and pride.

The endings of most friendships and relationships are not mutual decisions decided concurrently. Often one of the parties finds it an unpleasant surprise…

Strangely enough in retirement, what I miss most are not the paychecks or the benefits but the memories of the joys and anticipations of a two week vacation from work.

A very useful and unique skill I possess is the ability to quickly retrieve my wife’s train of thought, without prompt, from a conversation or point she was making from a day, weeks or months before.

Does anybody remember the excitement and feeling of accomplishment from the first time they were able to ride a two wheeled bike? Does anyone remember their first bike like they remember their first car?

A great coach teaches not only how his team should win with class but also to lose with dignity.

After one retires, does one really need a watch? It’s like a prison ankle bracelet that serves little purpose once one escapes the confines of working 8 to 5.

Sage wisdom from a New York Times Article 7 Questions 75 Artists 1 Bad Year

I’ve made peace with myself. I chose to no longer stress over the things I have no control over.

Tiwa Savage, musician

I have to have a thousand bad ideas before I can get to a good one.

Aaron Sorkin, writer and director

I’m writing a book, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started over from scratch. But the bad ideas lead to the best ones. Sometimes you have to break down to break through.

Amanda Gorman, poet

What They Said

Smart commentary and analysis by writers much smarter and more thoughtful than yours truly…

Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science. (Those didn’t used to be liberal values, but that’s what they are in America 2021.)
Unfortunately, identity politics can do a lot of harm when it gets in the way of dealing with real problems. I don’t know how many people will die unnecessarily because the governor of Texas has decided that ignoring the science and ending the mask requirement is a good way to own the libs. But the number won’t be zero.

Unmasked: When Identity Politics Turns Deadly Paul Krugman New York Times
***

The Pew Research Center found that the number of nones in the population as a whole increased nine percentage points from 2009 to 2019. The main reasons that nones are unaffiliated are that they question religious teachings, or they don’t like the church’s stance on social issues.
There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can possibly provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Instead of helping us to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church?
Contrary to what you might have seen on Instagram, our purpose is not to optimize our one wild and precious life. It’s time to search for meaning beyond the electric church that keeps us addicted to our phones and alienated from our closest kin.
Influencers Are the New Televangelists Leigh Stein New York Times

***

Evangelicalism in America, however, has come to be defined by its anti-intellectualism. The style of the most popular and influential pastors tend to correlate with shallowness: charisma trumps expertise; scientific authority is often viewed with suspicion. So it is of little surprise that American evangelicals have become vulnerable to demagoguery and misinformation….. In 1994, Mark Noll, a historian who was then a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, the preëminent evangelical liberal-arts institution, published “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” In the opening sentence of the book’s first chapter, he writes, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
Recently, some pastors and other evangelical leaders have begun to express alarm at how unmoored some members of their congregations have become. More leaders in the American church need to recognize the emergency, but, in order for evangelicals to rescue the life of the mind in their midst, they need to acknowledge that the church is missing a vital aspect of worshipping God: understanding the world He made.
The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind The New Yorker · by Michael Luo · March 4, 2021

***

The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.
I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their “leading cadres,” including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing “NATO” and “revanchism” with “antifa” and “radicalism.”
The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.
The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · February 25, 2021

Month: March 2021

Dinks and Smashes

Thoughts on the Fly

Recommended Reading

What They Said