Photo Credit: Pickleball Connections FB
By Dr Rahim Said
My wife and I walk past Social Pickle Courts, hardly 500 meters from our condo in West KL, almost daily.
Sometimes we stop for a coconut at NOA — No One Alone — which is ironic, because few places better demonstrate how alone people can be, even when surrounded by others in coordinated athleisure.
We’ve played pickleball there before. We’ve played at courts in PJ too. For us, it’s exercise. Sweat, laughter, the occasional bad backhand, then home. Simple.
But lingering long enough, one notices that pickleball — like yoga, spin class, and certain artisanal cafés — attracts a secondary crowd. Not players, exactly. Observers. Hydration enthusiasts. Men who don’t seem to break a sweat but never miss a session.
They sit there, coconut in hand, eyes following the arc of the ball — or rather, the bodies chasing it. Tight Lulu Lemon. Sculpted Under Armour. Agile legs, toned arms, expensive sportswear doing what expensive sportswear is designed to do: enhance, compress, reveal. The game, in this sense, becomes theatre.
Which brings us to a wife’s confession making the rounds online — not really about pickleball, but about motives.
Her husband, she says, plays obsessively.
Not just at nearby courts, but strategically selected ones. He checks who’s attending. Scrolls through participant photos. Chooses locations not based on convenience, but on aesthetics. Exercise, apparently, requires good-looking women.
At home, he is distant. Critical. Suddenly, digestive issues appear at dinner, yet vanish when dining out. Physical affection is rationed, even framed as dangerous — she’s told not to touch him, in case he gets aroused.
A six-year-old child becomes a logistical excuse, not a shared responsibility. Freedom, in this household, seems to mean one person leaves, and the other stays behind to absorb the consequences.
Pickleball here isn’t the problem. It’s the alibi.
For some men, the sport isn’t about fitness or community. It’s about access. A socially acceptable space where flirting can be disguised as stretching, and lingering looks as “watching the game.”
A place where midlife insecurity can be temporarily soothed by proximity to youth, beauty, and attention — without the moral burden of calling it what it is.
At the court, these men are animated, talkative, and alive. At home, they are silent, scrolling, irritated. Their wives notice the contrast. Their children feel the tension. And when questioned, the defence is always the same: I just want freedom.
But freedom from what? From responsibility? From intimacy? From a mirror that reminds them they are ageing, dissatisfied, and unwilling to do the harder work of fixing a marriage rather than escaping it for two hours with a paddle?
The saddest part of the wife’s confession is not the suspicion of infidelity, but the quiet erosion of self-worth. She apologises to keep the peace. She doubts her body because he criticises it. She stays home because childcare is somehow her problem alone. Her child cries at night, absorbing emotions no six-year-old should have to interpret.
Pickleball, like golf once was, has become a socially sanctioned refuge for men who want to be elsewhere without saying so. It offers plausible deniability. “I’m exercising.” “I’m socialising.” “I’m being healthy.” All true — and yet, not the whole truth.
Some people go to the courts to play the game. Others go to be seen. And a few go because they no longer know how — or no longer wish — to be present at home.
The wife ends her confession asking whether her husband’s freedom is really about sport.
It rarely is. When a man needs to scan faces before choosing a court, when exercise depends on who’s watching, when silence replaces affection — the problem isn’t pickleball.
It’s that somewhere along the way, the marriage stopped being a partnership and became just another place he didn’t want to be.
That’s why I take my wife to tennis, paddle or pickleball. She knows I admire youth at play but I don’t choose the venue. She makes the booking. That’s what makes our marriage enduring and full of love unwavering.
The views expressed here are entirely those of the writer
WE