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Notes -
A different kind of game but: I've written before about how there's a cycle of sports in America, where nice nebbish upper middle class white students develop a sport as recreational competition, it becomes professionalized and fills with different sorts of people with more natural athletic ability who pursue it more diligently than the original hobbyists for monetary opportunity, and the next generation of upper middle class white students develop a new sport as an outlet for their desire for masculine physical competition. Historically in the anglosphere this has hit boxing, all three varieties of football, basketball, marathon running. I've seen this cycle hit a bunch of hobby-sports I played around with just in my lifetime!
When I was a teen BJJ and Grappling were, to a certain extent, combat sports for those in the know. A lot of Joe Rogans base was built off the number of amazing people who hung out at Tenth Planet. And while they've held onto that hobbyist base, you see real dedicated athletes in MMA now in a way you generally didn't in 2004, and BJJ gyms in every small town strip center.
In college I took up CrossFit, it was kind of out of the mainstream and for dorks who got into sports late. Now every box I've dropped into is dominated by former college football players and wrestlers, I will never be at the top of the whiteboard for any workout if I joined. When I first tried CrossFit at 20 it was my first real exposure to weightlifting, I was one of the east coast's worst college rowers. Within a few months I could consistently compete for high spots on the WoD. Today I have vastly better lifts, but the competition has increased to the point where it doesn't even register, and because I don't specifically do CrossFit every day I don't have the specialized techniques mastered to even rx some competitive WoDs.
Rock climbing is somewhat resistant to professionalization in that sucking at rock climbing is still very fun, comparable to golf in that way. But as it's become more popular a similar process is ongoing. When I worked at a gym I was one of the better climbers, not great but there wasn't much I couldn't project in the gym even if I couldn't flash it. A kid joined who was dating a girl who'd been a member for a while, he'd been in the local MLS academy system but hadn't quite made it in professional soccer. He was better than me within six months of climbing for the very first time. With climbing hitting the Olympics, it won't be long until every gym is full of real athletes, and the days of the hippies and burnouts and goof around yuppies will be over.
Surely the current yuppie sport of choice is pickleball?
No, pickleball is for high school kids and senior citizens. It's a considerably less yuppie version of tennis, in that it's cheaper and involves less skill.
Tennis is like golf in that it tends middle class, primarily just because of the demographics of existing players and because almost everyone playing it got into it because of a parent.
Pickleball is definitely a yuppie sport, though, like it’s a banker meme, almost an in-joke.
Funny, in my area pickleball is largely a "tech-bro" meme. I didn't realize it had penetrated the finance scene as well.
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Pickleball is currently transitioning from the joke stage to the hobbyists taking it seriously stage. It's no longer entirely funny for your coworker to tell you they're going to a pickleball tournament, but it's not entirely serious either.
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