Inside professional pickleball’s

civil war: ‘All hell has broken

loose’
A spending war between billionaires battling for control of
professional pickleball has thrown the sport's future into chaos.
Jeff Eisenberg
Senior writer
Fri, Sep 1, 2023, 5:06 AM GMT+8·10 min read
471
Tyson McGuffin hits a backhand volley shot against Connor Garnett during the PPA event in June.
McGuffin is one of the players targeted by MLP. (Bruce Yeung/Getty Images)

Connor Pardoe remembers when he became concerned that the uneasy

partnership between professional pickleball’s two biggest entities might not
last.
The founder of the Professional Pickleball Association says he sensed
something was wrong a couple weeks ago when Major League Pickleball
executives suddenly stopped returning his calls and texts.

“I’m not saying this to be conceited, but usually when I call someone in
pickleball they call me back,” Pardoe told Yahoo Sports. “When they went
radio silent for four days, I thought, ‘Oh no, what’s going on here?’ ”

What came next was an ambush worthy of Greek mythology or a

Hollywood blockbuster. The two competing organizations had been
operating under an agreement where players could compete in both
leagues. Out of nowhere, Major League Pickleball owner Steve Kuhn
blindsided the PPA by offering dozens of the sport’s top players multi-year
exclusivity contracts that guaranteed extra money and perks in exchange
for them playing nothing but MLP events.

Pardoe discovered the plot only eight days ago on the eve of a PPA
tournament in Kansas City. Multiple players told him that the money MLP
had offered was life changing and that they had only a day to decide
whether to accept.

“Until then, I wasn’t planning on going to Kansas City,” Pardoe said. “I ran
straight to the airport, no bag, no cell phone charger, no toothbrush, no
clothes. I flew to Kansas City and I tried to save my business.”

Players who were in Kansas City last Thursday and Friday describe a
surreal scene in the player’s lounge. The sport’s biggest stars spent their
downtime between matches confiding with their agents in a quiet corner of
the room, their phones pressed to their ears and their voices hushed.

Pardoe spoke to as many elite players as he could on his way to Kansas

City. Then he and his executives redoubled their efforts once he got there.
They pleaded with players not to sign with MLP without giving the PPA the
chance to match or surpass the contract offers.

“I had one of the PPA guys come up to me five times saying, ‘Hey let’s get
a deal done, let’s get a deal done,’ ” veteran pickleball pro Kyle Yates told
Yahoo Sports. “I’m like, hold on! I need something in writing. I need to send
it to my agent. I need to make some calls. It was like we were almost
getting bullied into it.”
The result of the bidding war is newfound financial security for players who
previously worked second jobs or taught at camps and clinics to support
themselves. Industry sources say that a select few elite players signed
deals worth as much as $1 million per year and even those ranked outside
the top 20 received six-figure contracts. The proposed deals also
guaranteed a defined offseason and stipends for medical insurance and
travel expenses.

And yet it's fair to wonder if the gains made by the players are worth the
chaos and upheaval in the sport.

As veteran player Tyler Loong put it, "All hell has broken loose."

Calling a ceasefire
Less than a decade ago, pickleball was known as the last athletic refuge for
graying retirees. Now the pingpong-tennis hybrid is America's fastest-
growing participation sport, with nearly nine million players across the U.S.
as of 2022.

As pickleball leaped out of obscurity and into the mainstream, there has
been a rush to profit off the sport’s surging popularity. Opportunistic
investors have poured money into professional pickleball, wagering that
they can turn America’s growing obsession with playing the sport into
enthusiasm for watching it.

Pardoe founded the PPA in late 2018 and quickly built it into the sport's
dominant tour by aggressively pursuing the brightest stars in the pickleball
galaxy. He signed world No. 1s Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters and
other elite players to contracts that paid extra money in return for not
playing events put on by rival tours.

“That was the most important thing we’ve ever done,” Pardoe told Yahoo
Sports in January. “TV partners, venues and sponsors wanted to know that
the best players were going to be at our events every week. Once we could
tell them, 'hey, we have 16 of the top 20 men under contract' or 'we have
16 out of the top 20 women under contract,' it became a lot easier to put
those deals together.”
At the same time that Pardoe was building the PPA in the image of
professional tennis tours, Kuhn sought to bring the fist-pumping, chest-
bumping camaraderie of team competition to pickleball. In 2021, the Texas
billionaire’s inaugural four-day MLP team event was an instant hit among
players and generated unprecedented mainstream media buzz.

The PPA's relationship with MLP remained cordial until Dallas

businessman Tom Dundon acquired a majority stake from the Pardoe
family. Under Dundon’s leadership, the PPA offered Johns, Leigh Waters
and other top pros contracts that not only prevented them from competing
in rival tours but MLP events as well.

Kuhn approached Dundon in hopes of negotiating a compromise, but the

two billionaires initially butted heads and failed to find common ground. As
Pardoe put it in January, “I tried to put both of them in a room. It just didn’t
really work out.”

While discussions regarding a potential partnership with the PPA continued

behind the scenes, MLP executives left that meeting knowing they would
need to compete to secure elite players. MLP increased its prize money to
$1 million across three 2022 events and began recruiting the likes of Drew
Brees, Tom Brady and LeBron James as celebrity team owners who could
help drive awareness of the league.

In response, Dundon landed a flurry of uppercuts of his own. In late

October, the PPA announced that it was forming the VIBE Pickleball
League, a direct competitor to MLP with a virtually identical team format.
Days later, two of MLP’s top players revealed they were defecting to VIBE.
Then VIBE confirmed that Mark Cuban, one of Dundon’s good friends, was
its first team owner.

It was full-blown war. Then, out of nowhere, both sides declared a

ceasefire.

Last November, Dundon and MLP board member Zubin Mehta held a
summit and hammered out the framework of a deal. The PPA and MLP
would work together to draft contracts, promote each other’s events and
snatch up all the top pros. Elite players would play singles and doubles on
the PPA tour. Those who won enough earned the chance to be drafted
onto an MLP team and to compete for extra prize money.
For a few short months, professional pickleball had a clear direction. And
then Kuhn made his move.

MLP founder Steve Kuhn has offered dozens of pickleball's top players multi-year exclusivity contracts.
(Bruce Yeung/Getty Images)

Making of a coup
The man who can best explain why the MLP ended the partnership with the
PPA without warning isn’t ready to provide those answers. Kuhn, through
an MLP spokesperson, declined comment to Yahoo Sports.

In its announcement that it had begun signing top players to guaranteed

contracts last Thursday, MLP made no mention of any past agreement with
the PPA. MLP painted its contract offers as a response to player feedback
“about what they need to earn a professional living and continue pushing
the sport forward.”

“The players spoke, and we listened,” the announcement said.

Player salary was an area of disagreement between MLP and PPA, Kuhn
said in his only public comments since the partnership disintegrated. He
told CNBC last Friday that MLP had previously “asked the PPA to join us in
paying players more and their reaction was that we pay the players too
much.”

Others across the industry wonder if MLP and PPA leaders also had
clashing visions for the future of professional pickleball. Kuhn favors rally
scoring and a team sport model in which players compete for a team
championship. Pardoe argues that pickleball as a team sport works only as
a complement to a strong tour model like golf and tennis have.

Whatever the explanation for MLP’s breakup with PPA, Pardoe suspects
the plan “had to be in the works for quite some time.” Without his
knowledge, MLP laid the groundwork for a coup that targeted some of the
sport’s top players.

The stable of players represented by sports agency Topnotch Management

was a logical place to start for MLP because that meant nabbing star Tyson
McGuffin and several other highly ranked talents. Those signings were the
first that MLP announced, suggesting that Topnotch might have received
the proposed offers ahead of time, shown them to their clients and sent
word to Kuhn that they would accept.

Among the other players who followed suit were some who previously felt
devalued by the PPA’s penchant for taking care of its top stars but
neglecting its middle tier. For example, Yates had to pay a $300
registration fee anytime he entered a PPA tournament this season. He said
that the PPA didn’t bother to return his calls when he sought a 2023
contract.

“So when they tried to negotiate with me in Kansas City, it was like, 'hold
up, now you want me?'” Yates said. “'I haven’t heard from you in a year and
a half.'

"I had a better relationship with Steve Kuhn and I trusted him more. That at
the end of the day was the final decision for me.”

It was the opposite for some of the players who were under contract with
the PPA this season. Ben and Collin Johns, Anna Leigh Waters and
Catherine Parenteau all chose the PPA over the MLP. So Loong, who said
his decision was pretty straightforward because of his loyalty to Pardoe and
his preference for the PPA tour’s format.

“If MLP offered me millions of dollars, it would have been hard to say no to
that,” Loong said, “but as long as they were similar, I wanted to stay with
the PPA. I’ve been with them for over three years. They’ve been really
good to me.”

In the end, it’s tough to declare a clear-cut winner in the latest pickleball
arms race. MLP caught the PPA flat-footed and pried away the likes of
McGuffin and Riley Newman, but it didn’t come close to delivering a
knockout blow. The PPA still has the two No. 1 players in the sport, some
other longtime PPA standouts and some newcomers from the tennis world
in Jack Sock, Sam Querrey and Donald Young.

Of course, for both leagues, self preservation came at a price. It’s unclear
how the MLP intends to pay for its flurry of new signings that’s now
exceeded 70 players. Pardoe said the PPA will cover its spending spree by
dipping into the revenue from some of the other pickleball-themed
companies that Dundon owns.

The lingering question in the wake of the bidding war is what professional
pickleball will look like when the dust settles. Will the PPA follow through on
its threat to relaunch the VIBE as a direct competitor to MLP? Does MLP
intend to organize some sort of traditional tour? Can either MLP or PPA
emerge as the sport’s lone dominant entity?
 Pardoe’s only prediction is that professional pickleball isn’t done growing.
Besides that, he doesn’t rule out anything — not even setting aside the raw
emotions of the past two weeks and revisiting another partnership with
MLP.

“I’d do the same deal we had again,” Pardoe said. “Tom and I both would.

“We gave clarity to TV networks. We gave clarity to sponsors. We were

able to put the Wild Wild West to bed. We had a tour where the best
players played. We had a league that had six events a year where teams
played and it was fun. If I could bring that back, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d
be more than willing to sit down and try to figure it out.”

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Matthew Stafford's wife, Kelly,

regrets putting 'foot in my
mouth' on QB struggling to
relate to Rams teammates
Callie Lawson-Freeman

Contributing writer

Fri, Sep 1, 2023, 8:14 AM GMT+8·3 min read

166
Matthew Stafford's wife Kelly (right) meant no harm with her comments about the Rams locker room last
week. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford was described as

struggling to connect with his teammates "because he's so old." Now, his
wife Kelly Stafford is walking those comments back.

"It's kind of crazy. So, Matthew's been in the league a long time. He's like,
'The difference in the locker room has changed so significantly.' They have
a lot of rookies on their team, they're very young. But he's like, 'I feel like I
can't connect,'" Kelly Stafford said on her podcast last Tuesday.

She went on to describe how the rookies are seemingly uninterested in

camaraderie and don't enjoy the same pastimes as her husband's former
teammates. She added that the generational divide led him to wonder
whether he should be "the dad" and confiscate their phones in the interest
of team chemistry.

On Thursday, she expressed regret about the episode in an interview

with Local 4's Christy McDonald, calling it "probably the worst thing I've
done when it comes to [Stafford]."

Putting the situation in perspective, she said the comments didn't have the
desired outcome.

"That was tough. I say all the time, probably not the best if your wife's name
is in the media, if it's talking about sports. I felt pretty bad last week. I put
my foot in my mouth pretty good last week."

Her goal was to shed light on a feeling that might be familiar to fans:

"I spoke on a topic that I think, it's relatable, to the fact that it's hard to
relate to someone who is 10 years younger than you. And I do think that's
entirely true. But I'm not in an NFL locker room, I'm not spending every day
with these teammates.

Stafford is 35 years old and entering his 15th NFL season. In his not-so-old
age, he is utilizing a literal "face book" as he attempts to learn the names of
his teammates who call him "sir" when he attempts to make conversation,
according to his wife.

For Rams head coach Sean McVay, the comments weren't a concern at all.
He saw the humor in them and ripped a joke of his own, while expertly
bringing the focus back to football.

"I think if you know Kelly, I took that as more of a joke at the old man,"
he told reporters on Tuesday. "And I'll be honest, there's a couple