How tennis great Steffi Graf got bitten by pickleball’s ‘fun factor’

Nerves were rarely an issue for Steffi Graf during 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.

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.

“For me, it was really a lot of unlearning and actually it was one of the things that I really enjoyed because it really challenged me,” she says.

“I like to hit the ball in tennis, but no, not in this game. It’s much more about the feel, choosing to reset and taking speed off than driving the ball. So patience is not my strength. I’m enjoying that it really is taking me out of my comfort zone a lot of times.

Graf readily admits that Agassi, who has played in all three of the pickleball slams, is the better player between the two of them.

“He’s so good,” she adds. “And he’s played a little more, he’s physically so much stronger and quicker. His sense for this game, how quickly he picked it up, was absolutely phenomenal to watch.

“Not that I didn’t see it in the other sports that he’s so good at, but he picked it up and he loved the analysis of it, from the beginning on watching videos and other clips. When he goes out and plays with some of the professionals, he will have very specific questions that he needs answered to get better.”

Agassi, an eight-time grand slam singles champion on the tennis court, has become a vocal advocate of pickleball. Promoting the sport in India recently, he defended tennis as “the most difficult racket sport in the world” but lauded pickleball as a more accessible alternative.

“It’s going to grow like you can’t even imagine,” Agassi said, adding that he could “absolutely” see pickleball at the Olympics.

Debate is ongoing about whether tennis is under threat by the growth of games like pickleball and padel, which is especially popular in Europe. They are, undeniably, some of the easiest racket sports to play, but tennis as a spectacle carries more historical significance and its top players are some of the most compelling, skillful and physically impressive athletes in the world.

Graf’s view is that tennis and pickleball complement each other, the growth of the latter only creating “more options” for recreational players of racket sports. And nearly three decades after her retirement from tennis, she leans on events like the pickleball slams to feed her competitive instinct.

“You can’t take the competitive out of us,” Graf says about playing with and against former tennis stars. “It just tends to get that way.”

And with that in mind, there will doubtless be plenty of nerves once more when she steps onto the court in Las Vegas on Sunday.