Pickleball's Congressional Birth
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Shaan tells the origin story of how pickleball was invented by a congressman in 1965.
"It was a congressman who created this in 1965 in the Pacific Northwest. Him and his buddy get back from some trip, they have nothing to do, they're at this house. The house has a badminton court and they're like 'great, let's go play some badminton.'
They go down there, there's no equipment for badminton. They're like 'oh fuck, what are we gonna do?' They had ping pong inside but wanted to be outside. So they take the ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball and they go to the badminton court and start inventing this game.
They called it pickleball because there's this phrase called 'pickleboat' which is like a hastily assembled crew for a boat. They're like 'ah it was a mash up of we just grabbed the paddles and played badminton and lowered the nets, this mash up thing - we'll call it pickleball.'"
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.