It’s a surprisingly silly name, for a sport that counts George Clooney, the Duchess of Edinburgh and Judy Murray among its nine million fans. But perhaps being silly is exactly what drew Clooney and his fellow A-listers to pickleball, the world’s fastest-growing sport and the reason I find myself volleying next to Tim Henman on a sunny September Saturday on an intimidatingly tennis-like court.
“Lovely dinks,” Thaddea Lock, a former tennis professional and now Britain’s number one pickleball player, tells me as Henman and I warm up on the shiny new blue courts at Beaverbrook, the first hotel in the country to offer the sport alongside tennis and padel tennis.
