Gary Vaynerchuk: 'People Dramatically Underestimate' Pickleball

The media guru and MLP team owner took to X to put some things into perspective: "Every sport that’s massive today was small and easy to dismiss at some point."

Professional pickleball is no stranger to celebrity endorsements.

Tom Brady, LeBron James, Eva Longoria, Drake, Michael B. Jordan, Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka... the list is long and illustrious and seemingly growing by the day. Pickleball is exploding, and that means there's money to be made for those bold enough (and with pockets deep enough) to invest early and hold on for the ride.

But that doesn't mean there aren't detractors. For every major step the professional level takes forward, there's always some vocal minority shouting from an X handle or a comment section somewhere about why it'll never be as big as other professional sports.

Well, media guru Gary Vaynerchuk has something to say about that.

He's on the ownership team of the 2026 Major League Pickleball Champs New Jersey 5s, but he's far from a figurehead: his media company is involved in repping the sport's brightest star, Anna Leigh Waters, and it's not uncommon to see him down at bench level for big matches, especially the MLP Finals in New York City.

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Recently, Gary Vee took to X to put pickleball's current growth phase into a bit of perspective. The dude's 50, as he points out, and has lived at the nexus of sports and media more than pretty much anyone else on earth.

I always say this to people when they ask me about pickleball: Super Bowl I did not sell out its stadium. The NBA Finals was so small in the beginning relative to what it has become, and at least once, CBS chose to air golf instead, so it put the NBA game on tape delay. UFC was banned in most states in this country within a lot of our lifetimes.

That’s the journey of things becoming popular. Every sport that’s massive today was small and easy to dismiss at some point.

I’m 50 years old. I’ve watched UFC go from a side circus to one of the most important sports in the world. In my lifetime, I watched basketball go from the third sport to potentially the first sport, or the second sport. I watched football pass baseball as most peoples’ favorite sport in the U.S. I saw Tiger Woods change the calculus on golf. I watched ESPN go from something very few people watched when I was a kid to a cultural phenomenon.

That history matters because I think people dramatically underestimate how much room there is for more sports, pickleball and wiffle ball included.

Image via Major League Pickleball.