Swearing on the PB Court - By Twila Slesnick

Do you know that if you swear on a pickleball court during a tournament, you could receive a technical foul, which would cost you a point? Tournament players get around this by swearing quietly at their paddles.

​If you swear on a pickleball court in rec play, you won't be docked a point, but you might offend some people...and make new friends.

​Either way, court etiquette suggests we should practice verbal restraint when frustrated or annoyed.

​This is a big problem for me, because I swear. It's ingrained.  That's not to say I object to sportsmanship rules, or to generally accepted courteous behavior.  It's just that after all these years, those bad words have become part of my lexicon. It's like trying to exercise a verbal tic.

​My journey to this point was strange. I grew up in a household where curse words simply were not used. It wasn't that we weren't allowed to use them, we just didn't know they existed. My parents didn't swear (although my father had been a Marine in the war), and apparently the kids we hung out with in high school didn't either.

​The result of this deprivation was that I seemed to feel the need to make up for lost time when I went to college. I picked up every swear word I heard and attempted to incorporate it into my vocabulary, sometimes to hilarious effect because I usually didn't know what the words meant.

​But I learned. And I have never looked back.

​So...fast forward to the pickleball court.  When I started playing, I didn't hold back on cursing when the need arose.  Then one day, I was playing with a buddy and enjoying myself immensely, when I missed an easy shot. Naturally, I tossed out an "Oh s___, sorry partner," whereupon he lifted his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. 

​I was surprised and, of course, worried that I had offended him. I said, "But Sebastian <not his real name>, "s___" isn't a swear word, "f___" is a swear word."  He rolled his eyes and put his finger back to his lips, as if to say he remained unpersuaded.

​Indeed, by now, those words do not seem like swear words to me. My ears are much more likely to twitch at the word "crap," which was my mother's favorite expression of extreme frustration. But I'm definitely trying to be a better citizen. It's good for my aging brain to be aware of my surroundings and the behavior that is appropriate for those surroundings. Focus focus focus.

​Nonetheless, it's a giant relief to me to occasionally invite some like-minded pickleball friends to enjoy a game with me on a court that's off the grid, and where the words can fly freely from all of our mouths.