To celebrate the 50th anniversary of pickleball, we go back in time to Bainbridge Island, Washington, the birthplace of the sport, to hear the origins of the game from one of its founders, Barney McCallum. I Heart Pickleball is powered by Highlands Leg Cramps, proud supporter of pickleball players everywhere. Well once upon a time there were some people that lived on a beach on Bainbridge Island and an active bunch of people, my neighbor and good friend Joe Pritchard, we worked together in the envelope business. He was a politician, pure and simple, but he was pleasant about it. Joe was a great American.
He was a United States Congressman and he was in the Second World War, as I was too. There were four families that were there every weekend. The Browns, the McCallums, the Pritchards, and the Bells.
It was a typical bad weather day on this beach, you know, rainy and wet. And so kids were driving the adults crazy. So Joe said, take this paddle and this ball and go up to the badminton court and hit it around.
I'm David McCallum, Barney McCallum's son. And I remember back in the early years of pickleball, Bill Bell and Joe came back from playing. playing golf one day and the kids were moping around not doing anything. So Joe and Bill got fired up and went out back to the old badminton court. Had some wooden paddles and a plastic baseball that was hanging around.
So Bill and Joe started messing around with the paddles and the ball and inventing this game. They just wanted to show these kids how to keep busy. And they were playing what is now pickleball, but it didn't even look like what we're doing now.
very soon an adult activity rather than a kid's activity. Well frankly the early kids got pushed out. They did. And I'm down there playing pickleball or I'm playing this thing that we're playing. This is on a Saturday.
Then the next day I couldn't get out of bed fast enough to go down and play. And they said gee Barney we found some fun things to do. And it was arguing about how pickleball was going to be played.
So I joined the argument. The adults were down there playing and these were charismatic men. They were always up to something and they got this game going and it just kind of took on a world of its own.
Making up rules as they went. The scoring, that was a big argument. We tried them all from ping-pong to badminton to tennis. If you can think of another one we tried it. So the rules just got developed on an as needed basis.
Dick Brown is a large man, he's about six foot four, and aggressive, and he would run up to the net and spike the ball. So there was the short serve line on this court for the badminton at six foot six, and they just kind of made up the rule. They said, hey Dick, you gotta stand behind that line to hit it in the air. So that was the start of the non-volley zone.
The net height was established at 36 inches. The reason it ended up at 36 inches was that was the height of Joel Pritchard's waist. Good. because the net kind of sagged and people would mess around with it. So before they'd start playing, Joe would walk over and check the height of the net to his hip.
I realized after the first weekend, ping pong paddles weren't going to cut it. One thing, you'd break them. So I had a bandsaw in the basement of my house. I got a piece of paper and I drew three different models.
Then I got the plywood, drew them down on the plywood and started cutting. The next weekend, that's what we used. There was no buildup on the handles, no nothing.
But they worked. They worked very well. The shapes have changed slightly, and it's basically that paddle, that first paddle that I made.
We had no purpose. Nobody said, let's sit down and make this a game, and there was no conversation like that. It was strictly for our own pleasure, pure and simple.
And we would take friends that were visiting us and go down. to Pritchard's and play pickleball. That got to be the thing.
I'm Carol Stover and I was very fortunate to play pickleball back in the beginning of when pickleball started in the early 70s. Our family would come from the Queen Anne area and we would move over to Bainbridge for the summer and we played pickleball on Barney's courts and we had games going all the time and it was very competitive and we were on and off the court. all the time and it was lots of fun. This is the pickleball court in the McCallum property on Bay Bridge Island.
I'm Scott Stover and I first played pickleball in the late 60s and early 70s down at the McCallum court. We had wonderful family games and we learned the game down there and what we developed right away was the soft to dink game and so we could get it just enough of back over the net and we would dink it into that area, it'd pop up in the air, we'd smash it, we'd win the point. My first memories on this court, I was probably maybe 12 with Barney McCallum's youngest, Betsy. We were just two peas in a pod and walking up this hill and the court would just be loaded with moms, dads, teenagers.
It would be Betsy and Barney against me and dad. So you could take two people that were much more skilled with two youngsters and it was still a ton of fun. But it captured their interest and they kept messing around with it. with it. It didn't get dropped like most games do.
And it just kept going that summer. But when Labor Day came, everything changes here. Because these are basically summer living places. So pickleball moved to my place, Magnolia Bluff, in Seattle. So the game started to make its way over into Seattle.
And that group of people were craving exercise in the wintertime. I lived on a kind of a cul-de-sac. And the width of a city street happens to be very accommodating for pickleball. A city street is roughly 20 feet wide, which worked perfectly for a pickleball court, and we used to play it out in the street out in front of the house.
A neighbor saw this going on and they were doing a bunch of work to redo their yard and decided to put in a court across the street. Well, we moved to Magnolia in 1954. Shortly thereafter, I... Barney McCallum and I became pretty close neighbors and as well as close friends.
So he called me one morning and said, why don't you come over and we're going to play some out in the street. So I went over and, of course, I caught on very quickly. He soon realized that he had a player for life if he could get me over there and could put up with me.
One example of how pickleball got off the island was a frequent guest of Bob and Dorothy O'Brien was Father Fittier. He was the president of Seattle University, and so he got a pickleball night started at the new Conley Center at Seattle University. Another really instrumental thing that helped the game get off the island was Joe was running for Congress at the time, and they used to set up the game and play it at his political events. Joe would get the microphone.
He'd say, we're going to play a little pickleball now, and people would go, what? He would explain the rules. He'd find four people who were kind of hardy souls. So that's another way this game... Got off the island, we're at Joe's fundraisers and political events as he was running for Congress.
Pickleball was strictly part of a family recreation. The business angle part of it crept in. I got telephone calls from people from all over every place.
Barney, I want some pickleball paddles. People wanted these things and I'm not going to give them to them. And so we were just forced into business. We had to create a little company because...
My dad needed to buy the raw materials, the plywood, the handle build-ups. So there needed to be some kind of an entity to kind of handle the money. People wanted to pay for the sets, and you needed to buy the raw materials.
So my dad started a company really just to facilitate handling kind of the money. Who's going to be in this thing? We all talked. Three people wrote a check, Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney.
And so that's when they formed Pickleballing. So that was the start of the commercialization of this game. One of the players was the publisher and the president of the Times newspaper. And he mentioned to a guy in New York, you know there's a game that we're playing in Seattle that you guys ought to take a look at. Tell this guy Barney McCallum and have your reporter talk to him.
And he came out to Seattle. And so I arranged for him to play with some of the people I considered the best players and he goes back to New York a couple of days later. I get a phone call from him from New York. Would you consider selling a starter set? And I said, well, yeah, sure.
And he said, how much would it be? I said, well, I really don't know. And he said, well, take a stab at it. And I said, okay, I will.
Around 30 bucks. And he says, how about 29.50? And I said, that's the deal. And about the next following Monday and Tuesday, our main... The mailman at the envelope factory couldn't believe the mail that he had.
There were all these sacks of envelopes with $29.50 in them. And, wow, what was I to do? I bought every badminton net that I could locate in America.
I bought all the Cosm balls they were. Now, the next thing was the paddles. There was no fancy paddles.
It was just a shape out of a piece of plywood. And that's what we shipped. There were four balls, four paddles, and a net.
$29.50. We put the money in a cigar box. and it stayed on that kind of a basis for a year. But that article, there was never any turning back from that.
I became the first employee of this pickleball company that had been formed in 1977, and we formalized the paddles. We designed a box so that you could put four paddles, a net, and six balls in the box. I was one of the people on the box, the original box.
There's a picture of me on the original pickleball box back when I had a little more hair. I was the only one on the box. and I was in an overhead smash with a yellow and blue rugby shirt on.
We had a great time playing over on Lake Washington, and they filmed and produced that box at that time. We'd been successful with the schools, so we became focused on going to school shows and setting up and demonstrating the game in the state of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and we went to the National Physical Education and Recreation Show in Kansas City that year, and we're pretty successful getting teachers to take on the game in their P.E. classes.
My name's Janet Valentine. I have known Barney for a long time. I've known Barney for about 35 years now, and I've worked at Pickleball Inc. for 27 years. Barney is what I call a real person. There's nothing phony about him.
He adores everybody. See, this is the original. He's just one of the greatest people that I've ever met.
Him being out at the tournaments and or at the physical education shows, anyone who meets him, he will tell you the story of how Pickleball came to be. which people love to hear. He's just real.
I could, I never saw the big picture until I went two years ago to the national tournament in Phoenix. People asked him when I autographed, I was almost embarrassed about that. As an envelope salesman, you want my autograph? But I've got sense enough to realize that there were 650 people there on their own dime. It was working.
Well, the game that started out as just a fun thing for families over on Bainbridge is continuing. It's continued to grow and it's just turned into a well-rounded activity that a lot of people are enjoying now. Without Barney, there would be pickleball because he's the one that took it from just a family game nationwide. And I'm waiting to see what's next from Barney.
Barney is one of a kind. I'm glad that those young guys were so entrepreneurial and stuck with it. Joe, my dad, Bill Bell. I wish Bill and Joe could see what this thing has turned into.
The reward for my dad is not the business side of this. The reward for my dad is that people are playing this, having fun. There's no turning back for me. I love the game.
And so I'm in it forever. No matter where you are, Pickleball can bring us together to celebrate community, learn new things, and have fun. If you know someone we should feature on a future episode, we would love to hear from you.
All you have to do is send us an email and tell us your idea. This episode of I Heart Pickleball has been brought to you by Highlands Leg Cramps, America's number one over-the-counter leg cramp medicine. For more information, go to highlands.com.