Nostalgia can be a funny thing, with so many possible targets for fond remembrances. A scent, half-remembered from a childhood dream of summer. A snippet of a song, floating on the breeze. A time before you'd ever heard a human being described as "the Ryan Seacrest of pickleball." It's a magical thing.
This reflection brought to you by a new piece in The Hollywood Reporter this weekend, which you can tell all involved were assuming was going to be a slow news weekend, because it's about Jamie Foxx's private, wildcat pickleball parties. (You know what pickleball is, right? We're 40, and we've heard of it, so we assume we were the last to know.) Foxx is apparently just mad for the sport, having started selling his own line of very expensive paddles, built himself a three-court complex on his Los Angeles estate, and regularly hosted 400-person parties that feature, quote, "influencer-led cardio classes, swimming, a taco truck, a full bar, and a DJ." Prominently featured in the article is the aforementioned "Seacrest Of Pickleball," former college tennis player Matt Manasse, a man about whom we know only two things: He is the kind of person to unironically say "You never know when the Jamie Foxx pickleball party is gonna happen, but when you get the DM or texts, you know you’re in for a special treat," and he is the Ryan Seacrest of pickleball.
(If it sounds like we're completely fixated on that phrase, it's only because we are. What does it mean? Does he host pickleball competitions where rude British men critique your skills? Is he on the radio constantly, talking about pickleball? Does he aspire to someday be the Dick Clark of pickleball? We live in furious wonder at these fanciful imaginings.)
The THR piece wasn't able to quote any actually famous people (including Foxx), about the parties, but it does talk to a celebrity pickleball paddle vendor who wants everyone to know that pickleball is apparently the secret to good Hollywood marketing right now. "If you get good at pickleball, you never know who you might meet… Doors open up quickly on the pickleball courts." Chilling!
We cannot, in good conscience, recommend that you read the piece—it has driven us to madness, rendering us the Ryan Seacrest of scratching arcane, terrible secrets about the doors pickleball might open for us into the walls of our tiny cells—but if you do, please know that if you do, you will learn that Matthew McConaughey sells what he calls "the official tequila of pickleball." We don't know what to do with that information; we're vaguely glad Jamie Foxx is feeling better enough to get way too interested in any of this shit; we don't know what to do with any of this at all.
