Pickle Ball Falls

I wish I had discovered pickle ball sooner. A legend in our community started talking with me about pickle ball several years ago. Finally, I started playing pickle ball this past spring with my 90-year-old coach and some other friends from church.

All of us who regularly play in our church gym are over 70 except Mark Hambert, who is a 60-year-old retired major in the Georgia highway patrol. He is built like a tank and as quick as a flash.

We try to play on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and one day after everyone else had gone home, Mark and I were playing singles. My friend Alton is my old college buddy who lives in South Carolina and also plays pickle ball. He had already told me I am too old to play singles—especially with a 60-year-old flash. Disregarding the strong opinion of my dear friend, I managed to keep up with Mark that particular day.

After I served from the left court, I started to rush the net just like Coach Bill had taught me. Mark returned my serve deep into the right corner. I turned quickly to my right and chased the ball, and with my back to the net, I scooped up the ball with an underhand shot. As I was making this shot, my feet became tangled, and I crashed at full speed into the wood paneled wall of the church gym.

I was sprawled on the floor holding my shoulder when Mark approached me. He asked me if I was OK and said it was probably just a stinger. I replied to him that it felt worse than a stinger. I guess he did not know what to say, so he said, “If it makes you feel any better, you got the point!” At the time it did not matter, but looking back on the experience it made me feel good. However, over the past 6 months of pain that won’t go away and having to learn to play pickle ball left-handed, I cannot believe that I wiped out on the wall of the gym just for one point!

My orthopedist gave me a cortisone injection in my shoulder, and I hoped that would do the trick. But no. It did not faze the aching shoulder. So, I continued playing pickle ball with my left hand and four months later, I am still not using that right hand.

Two months after running into the wall, Coach Bill was my partner, and we were playing again at the church gym. Blanchard, one of our opponents, who has the wingspan of an airplane, dinked the ball from one side of the court to the other just over the net, and I lunged for it. Once again, I found myself sprawled out on the gym floor. This time it was my hip that took the blow of the fall.

As I was collecting myself on the floor and standing up, my 90-year-old partner said to me, “Larry, I have a couple words that I want to give you.” He said it very slowly, and as he was saying that I was thinking, OK, so he’s going to say something like act your age, Larry. To preface those two words, he said, “when you see a shot like that, you stay where you are, and you only need to remember two words:  good shot!”

There was a lot of wisdom in those two words, and I have put them into practice since those two falls left me injured. And I haven’t fallen again since receiving that wisdom.

Sometimes we don’t listen to simple words that people say to us. It’s those quiet words of wisdom that we do not hear because we are thinking that we already know what they are going to say. Basically, we are proud people.

“But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” James 4:6 (ESV)

P.S. I am writing this on the evening of December 15, 2023, and today I had an arthrogram and an MRI on my shoulder because in six months the shoulder has not healed. Wonder what the follow up visit with the orthopedist will reveal?!