AGING AND PICKLEBALL

 

When we started PAK almost four years ago, we adopted a motto that seemed to fit our love for pickleball.  “We don’t stop playing when we get old.  We get old when we stop playing.”  This cute saying has been credited to Herbert Spencer, George Bernard Shaw, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Sr., but there is no compelling supporting evidence for these attributions. I first saw it when it was part of the welcoming speech of a former Utah governor at the National Senior Games and appropriated it for PAK’s usage.  Nobody has sued us yet.  Our first t-shirts printed sported our logo and this motto.  It was a big seller and is now out of print and a classic.  I wouldn’t say it qualifies as a collectible, but if anybody out there wants to buy a white, blue or grey XL shirt used in countless pickleball battles over the years for a hundred dollars, just let me know.  Shipping included no returns.  I only met one person who didn’t like the shirt design and refused to buy it because she objected to the reference to age.  I wonder if time and age has changed her mind.

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One of my favorite reads is 808 Pickleball which comes out every Tuesday for free under the editorship of Jen Wilson.  How Jen can manage publishing such a quality weekly magazine devoted to pickleball in Hawaii is beyond me, as we struggle to do monthly updates to our website.  Here latest comments are about how pickleball, once regarded as “an old persons’ sport” has transformed as the sport continues to have phenomenal growth.  The average age in 2020 for a player was 41.  The last three years have seen a growth of 223% more players playing the game, and the average age now is 35.  I am kind of a statistics fan, so I figured it takes more than four 25-year-olds to bring my age 76 down to an average of age 35.  For us older players, “the kids” are now the rule, not the exception despite our best efforts at keeping the average age up by getting inexorably older.  Oh well, we’ll just dink and lob them to death and savor a win every now and then over the young’uns (or should I say young guns)? 

 

Two of my favorite picklers are a couple, aged 77 and 75. Recently, they told me a frightening story of a routine surgery that went awry.  A medical device used during surgery was removed improperly, and caused a cardiac condition that almost took the life of the healthy patient.  She was back playing pickleball in days laughingly saying how the incident would have caused her to miss her 75th birthday (and future pickleball games). 

 

We had visitors stay with us to attend the husband’s high school classmate’s memorial service.  They have maintained close contact for 58 years after graduation.  They just had an age 100 birthday for her mother, and our conversations revealed they are planning to reach at least age 100 themselves.  Since they are not picklers, I wonder how they will make it.   

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For the last several months, at the prodding of another friend in Honolulu, we have been visiting various elderly living facilities and gathering information for health care assistance as we get close to our life span and possibly a declining “health span”.  Our findings are sobering.  The best facility we found has a lifetime of care contract that states they will take care of you forever, no matter what your health.  You just must show financial ability to pay the enormous costs of care in the event you need assistance later in life and pay a non-refundable “entry fee” of $600,000, along with monthly charges of about $12,000 per month if you are healthy and capable of independent living.  The reality of dealing with the endless permutations of declining health conditions and durations is driving us crazy, just as we were feeling pretty good about how our retirement planning was working out.  I’ll tell you how it all comes out when we figure it out.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to do my squats and play pickleball and hope for the best.  Maybe I ought to raise the price of my vintage t-shirts!

 

Until next month,

Nolan