Niupipo Pickleball Paddle | $61 | Amazon | Clip Coupon
Hey you, listen, I want you to sit down right here while I tell you about this mid-weight professional-grade Niupipo Pickleball Paddle, approved for USA Pickleball play, and on sale right now for $19 off when you clip the coupon on the page. This paddle has a fiberglass/graphite face and a polypropylene honeycomb core, and its perforate grip is cushioned for your Pickleball pleasure. What’s that? You’ve never heard of Pickleball? The devil you say! Very good, let’s switch gears and talk about the rules of Pickleball, as I understand them.
Pickleball, as you might guess, is a game played exclusively on one leg. 5 players engage in a Pickleball pillywilly at a time—a pillywilly is the Pickleball name for a bout—and the game is played exclusively on the broken, unkempt parking lot behind in direct sunlight behind an abandoned PC repair shop in Blue Springs, MO. The rules are simple: each player is given a approximately seven gherkins that are apparently rolled up and lacquered together to roughly create a ball-shape. The goal of the game is for each of the four outer players—called Wildcats for obvious reasons—to bounce this lacquered gherkin ball repeatedly with your paddle, keeping it aloft while you also bounce on one foot toward the center of the parking lot, which is the storm drain, where the fifth player, or the Zappa, awaits. The Zappa may only play with their feet, which are never allowed to leave the ground.
The Zappa’s goal is to sweep the Wildcats’ one foot from beneath them as they hop around, which removes them from play. The Zappa may not kick, flick, shoulder, or push, except in the situation where a Wildcat has accidentally placed a second foot on the ground, in which case they may only approach the storm drain when The Zappa is not looking, and must otherwise remain still. This is called two-shoeing, and when a player is two-shoeing, The Zappa may employ any means to fell them, so long as they make skin-to-skin contact, which can be difficult during Winter play. Each round ends when either a Wildcat places a foot in the storm drain area, or when all Wildcats have been swept to the ground. Players are disqualified if their Pickleball hits the ground.
All matches are played for cigarettes, as was tradition when the first Pickleball players began the game while on a prison work crew, cleaning the field behind Phil’s Automotive Emporium, which was still operational in 1974 when the game first started. This was where the first Pickleball was found, and the crew boss had taken a break to flirt with the young woman in the auto store. No one knows quite where Pickleballs themselves come from, and attempts have been made to reverse engineer them—though they appear to be made from simple lacquer and approximately seven gherkins, there seems to be an otherworldly component that gives them both heft and bounce, which scientists have been unable to identify. They simply show up in the field behind Phil’s, and when they’re removed from that area, they lose cohesion and the gherkins fall apart.