In the beginninging, er, beginning, the pickleball wannabe will end up playing pick-a-ball every time he misses the ball. Once he learns to love the game, he may morph into tickleball as he tries to tickle female players whose pickleball OOTD shows their kigol, thus lowering his game to kigolball.
Only the Bisaya can understand what a kigol is. So if you’re not Bisaya and your dialect’s term for kigol doesn’t rhyme with pickle, then there’s no chance for your pickleball game to morph into kigolball.
Tickleball can also mean tickling someone’s balls, that is, if you have the balls to do it.
Pickleball has become the Pinoy’s favorite sport. Has it replaced badminton and tennis? Surely Alex Eala’s reply to that is a big no. But there was a time when I played pelota in the late ‘70s, and before I could even learn how to grip the pelota racket—which looked like a short tennis racket—that sport went pfft and never managed to make a major comeback. Will pickleball suffer the same fate? Abangan.
Badminton and tennis are still around, obviously. I was in Grade 5 when I learned how to play badminton on our makeshift court in the driveway. It had a rough wall that always damaged our rackets.
As for pingpong, my cousins had a pingpong table, so I learned how to play there.
Pickleball is kind of the bigger version of pingpong—bigger paddle, bigger ball, and bigger court à la tennis and badminton.
But here’s the smaller part of pickleball—the skirt. The shorter, the better, for better kigol viewing. Oops.
Pickleball is good exercise for those who play it for health reasons. Otherwise, it’s merely for fun, to pass the time, and for social media content—and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. To each his own.
Even each gym rat has his own reason for working out. For me, it’s to control my blood pressure. For others, it could be their main stress reliever.
And for those who’d rather not exercise, it’s a free country. There is no law that says everyone should exercise.
But for now, pickleball is so in that even badminton courts are morphing into pickleball courts.
There was a time when “pickle” meant food. For pickleball to have “pickle” in it can hopefully serve as a reminder that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. No matter how many hours you invest at the gym or in running, jogging, walking, tennis, badminton, pickleball, etc., if your diet remains uncorrected, your body will still continue to have, hmm, issues.
So, focus first on a diet that you can sustain and maintain.
It took me two years after starting the low-carb diet to finally enroll in a gym and add exercise to my health journey. It has been four years and six months on low-carb and two years and six months of workouts. I started going to the gym on the second anniversary of my low-carb diet. It wasn’t intentional. I only noticed the date the morning after my first Zumba session at the gym. Coincidence pa more.
