Padel Players “Not Angry, Just Disappointed” Over “Accidental” Cameo in The Hollywood Dink Movie
Pickleball players across America have been settling in to watch The Dink, Apple’s comedy about their beloved sport, and emerging with a unanimous verdict. The first eight minutes and fifty-five seconds are flawless.
“I was blown away,” said Gary Pemberton, 61, a 3.5-level player from Scottsdale. “The country club politics, the tennis snobbery, the way Ed Harris looks when he’s talking about pickleball. I’ve met that man. I’ve been yelled at by that man. Every second of it rang true.”
Then minute eight arrived, and the director, the editor, and apparently everyone who watched the final cut let it slip through. Or did they?
Intentional, Ot A Mistake?
Harris plays Chuck, the owner of a suburban country club waging a personal vendetta against the new craze taking over his courts. In the opening stretch, Chuck delivers an impassioned speech about the plague sweeping through tennis, the sport that must be stopped, the barbarians at his gates.
And as he says it, the camera cuts to a picture of people playing padel. Enclosed glass walls. Walls that are part of the game. Players holding padel “paddles.”
A production reportedly involving Ben Stiller, two former world number one tennis players, and the full resources of a three trillion dollar technology company could not locate a pickleball court for the scene about pickleball.
Was it a genuine mix-up, or a sly dig at tennis dads who can’t tell the two sports apart? Apple isn’t saying, and we’re honestly split on it ourselves.
“That’s exactly what tennis people think we play,” said Denise Okafor, 54, of Naples, Florida. “They have no idea what our sport looks like. Apple accidentally made a documentary.”
Padel Players Weigh In, Reluctantly
Padel players, who had their sport hijacked at the 8:55 mark of a major motion picture, say they’re taking the whole thing in stride.
“We’re not angry, just disappointed,” said Marco Alessi, 47, a padel player from Miami who was tagged in the footage by at least a dozen friends. “We have glass walls. We have a completely different court size. At this point, we don’t know what more we can do to distinguish ourselves. Nobody asked us if we wanted to be in this movie. We got zero lines, zero credit, and one cutaway shot playing a sport we don’t even play.”
Meanwhile, the pickleball community, famous for correcting kitchen violations from three courts away, wasted no time weighing in.
“That’s the tennis establishment in one shot. Confidently wrong, and yelling,” said Ron Delgado, 58, who has personally explained the two-bounce rule to eleven strangers and counting.
A support group has reportedly formed for viewers who noticed the padel footage and had nobody to tell. Membership currently stands at every pickleball player in North America.
Apple has not responded to requests for comment, largely because nobody seems to have reported this. You read it here first, which is a sentence we don’t get to write often about a company that fact-checks its emoji.
Okay, But Is The Movie Any Good?
Setting the satire down for a moment, here’s the honest read. The Dink stars Jake Johnson as Dusty Boyd, a washed-up former tennis prodigy reduced to coaching unruly children at his father Chuck’s suburban country club. When an old injury takes away his ability to play tennis, he resorts to the unthinkable in the name of rehab. He picks up a paddle. Mary Steenburgen plays Candace, who helps him discover that he actually enjoys the game, and Andy Roddick appears as a fictionalized version of himself, playing Dusty’s childhood nemesis. John McEnroe and Ben Stiller round out a cast that suggests someone at Apple said yes to everything.
The San Francisco Chronicle placed it in the lineage of Dodgeball, Talladega Nights, and Caddyshack. The Hollywood Reporter called it watchable but entirely vanilla, best as background noise while making dinner. Pro player Zane Navratil disliked it, while the person watching alongside him fell asleep.
We tend to agree. We’re undecided on whether the Lifetime “A Pickleball Christmas” on Amazon is better. As for the gear product placement, it’s so obvious it’s funny.
What This Means For Pickleball
Padel-gate aside, a mainstream studio comedy about pickleball with this cast is a milestone. Ten years ago the sport couldn’t get a mention on a regional news broadcast without a chuckling anchor calling it “wiffle tennis.” Now it has a Ben Stiller production with two tennis Hall of Famers playing along.
The movie gets the culture right where it counts, the tennis resentment, the evangelizing converts, the strange gravitational pull the game exerts on anyone who tries it once. Watch it yourself and see which side of the padel debate you land on. Just don’t be surprised if you catch yourself muttering “that’s padel” under your breath.