DALLAS — All eyes of the pickleball world are on North Texas this week, shining an uncomfortable spotlight on the man responsible for bringing the growing sport’s national championship to town.
Tom Dundon, the Dallas billionaire known more for his purchase of the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes, also owns the Professional Pickleball Association. That’s why Brookhaven Country Club’s entryway has been turned into Pickleball Boulevard through Sunday, serving as the gateway for the biggest collection of amateur and pro players from around the nation.
More than 3,500 players are competing in the Pickleball National Championships — an event expected to generate $10 million for Farmers Branch and the surrounding economy. As many as 25,000 fans will watch matches including the game’s best players as well as Dallas sports celebrities like Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Romo and Jason Kidd.
It’s a chance for Dundon and his PPA tour to impress a national audience. The final day of the event will be aired on ESPN.
While Dundon tries to deflect attention from himself, the 52-year-old investor in businesses like Top Golf and a growing collection of downtown Dallas towers is a competitor at heart. Pickleball gives him a chance to win with a sport that’s now one of his personal passions. He even built his own pickleball court at his Dallas home to hone his skills.
“Exercise, at least for me, was boring. I would always rather want to play something,” said Dundon, who got rich when his subprime auto loan company, Santander Consumer USA, went public in 2014. “I was just in a position where I could get involved on the business side for fun because it was something I was interested in.”
Pickleball is a quirky combination of tennis, pingpong and badminton and generally has a more gentle learning curve than other sports with its small court size and slower gameplay.
It’s also the fastest-growing sport in the United States.
There are over 36 million pickleball players in the U.S. and participation in the sport has grown almost 160% during the last three years, according to Pickleheads.com, a website to find pickleball courts, stats and lessons. Investors are so bullish on pickleball that Plano and Keller are each set to get a 40,000-square-foot high-end Pickleball Kingdom next year.
Even in his wildest dreams, Dundon couldn’t have seen in early 2022 that the sport would reach the level of popularity it’s at now. The old heads who stuck around are one of the biggest reasons why he’s so confident about the state of the sport, he said.
“I would never have predicted it getting this big this fast,” Dundon said. “There’s this older, wealthier demographic that knows about it, has the free time to play it and has the ability to go do it. It started with our older demographic. Clearly, that’s what happened.”
But like Formula One and other hot sports, its future is being secured in real time by its youthful talent like No.1-ranked women’s pro Anna Leigh Waters, Dundon said.
“The younger demographic is where all the growth is coming from. We’re just lucky that the best players when I got involved were about 21 years old,” he said. “They’re at a level that is hard to sustain. But when your best players are also young, charismatic, and then able to stay on top, that’s easy to build around.”
Pickleball has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 1965 when three vacationers on Bainbridge Island, Wash., had to use pingpong paddles because they couldn’t find badminton rackets.
Nowadays, large brands such as Carvana, Coca-Cola, Tesla, TravisMathew and Molson Coors are jumping at the opportunity to ride the pickleball hype train. Dundon said that means he has to be more careful in assessing partners.
“You have media companies and big corporate sponsors all sort of pushing and making it [the tour] work pretty well,” he said. “Our challenge now is that we don’t want too many [sponsors]. We need meaningful partnerships that create value for both sides, and we need people that will be proud of participating with this sport.”
The sport has never been more visible as it now has deals with marquee platforms like Amazon Prime Video, CBS, ABC, Fox, ESPN, FanDuel, YouTube and the Tennis Channel.
In preparation for the event, Brookhaven Country Club underwent a $5.3 million renovation to turn it into a state-of-the-art centerpiece of the pickleball world. The upgrades include 28 permanent outdoor pickleball courts, new pickleball net systems and much more. However, the event requires 80 pickleball courts, meaning some of Brookhaven’s tennis courts will temporarily become pickleball courts.
Brookhaven’s owner, Invited, is one of the event’s sponsors. Dallas-based Invited, formerly known as ClubCorp, is one of the nation’s biggest golf course owners and operators. It’s been experimenting with pickleball at some of its clubs.
Players are participating from 49 of the nation’s 50 states. That made the Dallas area, with its unrivaled air travel connections, the logical host city, PPA spokesperson Jeff Watson said.
“It’s a central location, and it’s a great connector to DFW Airport. We had good partners before, but being in Dallas lets more people participate,” Watson said. “It’s a lot harder to get everyone to go to a city like New York. This really gives us more accessibility to a wide range of people.”
Still, Dundon said he’s tempering his expectations of how far the sport can grow.
“I don’t think our aspirations are the global reach of soccer or even the reach of the NFL,” Dundon said. “But I think there’s a tier below where pickleball may end up at the top by next year.”
Beyond that, he doesn’t pretend to have a crystal ball about pickleball’s long-term popularity.
“I don’t know where anything will be in the future, including myself,” he said. “But I think over the next few years, it’ll probably end up being one of the most influential sports.”
