Nerves were rarely an issue for Steffi Grafduring her decorated tennis career, even though she found herself playing on the sport’s biggest stages time and again.
I did something that I was so comfortable with, that I’ve done all my life,” Graf, who won 22 grand slam singles titles and spent a women’s record 377 weeks as the world No. 1, tells CNN Sport. “I knew all the ins and outs.”
So it was perhaps a surprise, 25 years after retiring from tennis, that Graf found herself suddenly gripped by nerves while playing in front of a big crowd. This time, the circumstances were different to what she had experienced during her professional career: the court was smaller, the racket lighter, and the game was happening at lightning pace.
This wasn’t tennis but pickleball, a game with which Graf had only been familiar for a few years. To give of sense of the sport’s burgeoning popularity, a peak ESPN audience of close to one million watched on as she and husband Andre Agassi defeated John McEnroe and Maria Sharapova in Hollywood, Florida, last year.
It’s such a fast game, things can happen so quick you don’t have the time to kind of ease into a match,” Graf says about playing in the 2024 Pickleball Slam 2 event. “You don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents and it was just so much unknown.”
Not entirely perturbed by the experience, the 55-year-old Graf will feature in a sequel competition, Pickleball Slam 3, in Las Vegas on Sunday, playing alongside Agassi and against fellow former tennis stars Andy Roddick and Eugenie Bouchard. A prize purse of $1 million is on the line and the action will also be televised live on ESPN.
Many Americans would never have heard of pickleball prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but now, for the fourth consecutive year, it claims to be the country’s fastest-growing sport. An estimated 48.3 million adults played it at least once between 2022 and 2023, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP), which is nearly 19% of the total US population.
It’s increasingly common to see megastars like Graf and Agassi become involved in pickleball. Beyond tennis, Tom Brady and LeBron James have invested in professional teams, while Hollywood actors Catherine O’Hara and Willem Defoe were filmed whacking shots on a court in a recent Super Bowl commercial.
Much of this popularity, Graf thinks, rests with pickleball being so accessible.
“You can see progress so much quicker than in tennis,” she says. “The fun factor just is immediately there, and the game equalizes each other out a little more, playing more doubles and mixed … you feel like everybody you know just can jump in.”
Graf and Agassi aim to play once or twice a week, perhaps more in the build-up to an event like the Pickleball Slam 3. Years of experience in professional tennis, of course, goes a long way to excelling in the sport, but perhaps not as far as you think.
The small, 20-foot by 44-foot court means that pickleball is played with a greater sense of urgency than tennis, lending itself to those who rely on quick reactions and soft hands in other racket sports. In other words, not Graf.
