Dimes Square or Dink Square
What happens when reactionary pickleball ideology lays siege to a neighborhood in Downtown Manhattan?
In a corner of Chinatown, just a service toss’s throw from the much mythologized “Dimes Square'', a heavily stylized movie about the 1981 French Open titled The French is currently playing at the Metrograph, a similarly heavily stylized theater that has become a sceney spot in the neighborhood since its opening in 2016. As a tennis player, you might assume from the flashy footage of tennis legends such as John McEnroe, Björn Borg, and Chris Evert that in choosing to run the film, which is being presented by Wes Anderson, the theater and the cultural milieu to which it belongs is signaling an allegiance to the sport, but unfortunately, this is not the case. By resurrecting this forgotten film in our current moment, Metrograph portrays tennis as a curiosity of the past, stripped of its radical potential, sanitized and reintegrated into capitalism and sold back to the public in the form of $17 movie tickets and $16 house cocktails. As any tennis player who has spent time in the buzzy social scene that has set up shop in Downtown Manhattan will know, the reactionary spirit that this represents isn’t limited to film – there’s a greater ideological perversion at work.
While the area around the corner of Canal and Division Street is commonly referred to as “Dimes Square”, it might be more accurately described as “Dink Square”, referring to the pickleball maneuver and the controversial online rag, The Dink Pickleball, named after it. On a Friday night, it isn’t an uncommon sight to see socialites walking out of Clandestino with pickleball rackets poking out of their Telfar bags or editors at upstart literary magazines sitting at Dimes scrolling through articles on The Dink as they toss back espresso martinis. In fact, while it may not take up more space than a handful of tennis courts, this micro-neighborhood has become the cultural center of anti-tennis sentiment in New York City.
Last November, as the backhoes were trucked into Seward Park to lay waste to the last three courts east of the Bowery, the mood was dour over the remnants of a once vibrant tennis community on the Lower East Side. Comrades of the leftist tennis movement huddled in a dark corner of KGB Bar, processing the news in silence. Just a few weeks ago the courts of the Brian Watkins Tennis Center were closed for the construction of so-called flood protections in East River Park, which meant that with this most recent act of political violence, there was now an entire quadrant of Manhattan without any facilities to play matches, practice groundstrokes, or even casually hit with a friend. Eventually, a weathered older player with a wooden racket laying across his lap spoke up, expressing his dismay at the potential of being displaced to Brooklyn, the only borough of the city where ‘tennis’ was a word you could still say out loud.
Beyond physical acts of political violence, this ideological war has been waged on the terrain of culture, often expressed by the sartorial choices of the downtown set. Dasha Nekrasova, one of the hosts of the podcast Red Scare, which is commonly referred to as the pirate radio of pickleball, even posted a selfie in tennis attire while mockingly claiming to “steal tennis valor”. Moreover, iconic tennis brands you may see worn on Ludlow Street like Fila, which once outfitted legends like Björn Borg, now has a line of pickleball gear. Like a Che Guevara t-shirt, the irony is palpable. The truth is that any reference at all you might see to tennis in this part of Manhattan is merely flashiness without substance. But as real players know, the idiosyncratic style of tennis arose from the beautiful praxis of playing the game and studying the theory of point construction, not parading around in fancy clothes.
With this in the background, the question arises: where did this reactionary ideology come from?
What is clear is that this is not an authentic grassroots movement. During the peak of the pandemic in NYC, some observant downtown residents started noticing pickleball courts pop up on the newly deserted streets. A few days later, what appeared to be a group of models, seemingly marched out of an early 2010s Urban Outfitters advertisement, were down there slapping a wiffle ball back and forth with some paddles. The next day, they were gone, but in their place were legions of desperate aspiring members of the literati, eager to be a part of anything they sensed as cool.
While there’s little concrete evidence to prove that the models were planted to astroturf support for this juvenile activity, it wouldn’t be unheard of given the amount of Peter Thiel’s money that has been floating around the neighborhood. In addition to funding players, it’s now documented that the right wing billionaire has been financially supporting anything that could potentially smear tennis as obnoxiously “woke” or too earnestly political. Take one peak at the propaganda being shared by post left irony podcasts and contrarian twitter tastemakers on Thiel’s payroll and there’s no doubt that this movement isn’t organic.
There’s a huge amount of resources and effort being used to prop up Big Pickleball in an attempt to promote a culture of self-defeating nihilism. Pickleball valorizes the indifferent, the casual players, and the bitter recluses. It demands that you don’t ever hope for anything better politically, like more tennis courts in your city, or an improvement to your ranking in a local ladder tournament. Pickleball trains us to be content with our deskilling, and how to use ironic detachment to protect ourselves from criticism of our form. But once you remove the sincerity and pride that a working class tennis player feels when he steps up to the service line to begin a match, all that’s left is a deep hostility to any politics of solidarity or community.
While passing the time in Manhattan before a recent evening court reservation at Fort Greene Park, one of our comrades accidentally stumbled into a showing for the play ‘Dimes Square’ and was horrified at what they saw. After 30 minutes of incoherent dialogue about art openings and vague interpersonal conflict, star actor Christian Lorentzen broke character, set up a net across the stage, and said that if anyone could beat him in a game of pickleball, he would review their book in the Drift magazine. Immediately the whole audience, save our compatriot, jumped to their feet screaming and howling for a chance to get a quick dink in, evoking memories of crowds at a Trump rally.
To counter this revisionism, it’s clear that leftists in Brooklyn need to build and strengthen our own cultural institutions. We leave you with a call to arms: who is going to write the leftist tennis play to be staged at Kings Theater?