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America is flush with racket and paddle sports, including tennis, squash, racquetball, pickleball, platform tennis, and padel—is there room for one more?
An 80-person-investor group led by Tennis Channel founder Steve Bellamy, and including Drew Brees, Nick Kyrgios, Tony Robbins, Chris Pine, JJ Abrams, Tiffany Haddish, and Bert Kreischer think so. On Monday, they’re unveiling typti, a new sport that is a cross between pickleball and tennis. Bellamy will serve as CEO of Typti Inc., the company overseeing the sport’s rollout.
Played on a pickleball court, typti uses a foam ball and small tennis-like rackets that are currently being manufactured for sale. It’s closer to mini tennis than to pickleball. (You can see a video of typti here).
The investment thesis behind the venture is that an estimated 130 pickleball venues are opening a month, and typti is played on the same courts; thus it has a chance to piggyback on pickleball’s surge. A series of professional typti tournaments is in the works.
Tennis purists have long turned up their noses at pickleball, considering it an inelegant bastardization of tennis. By Bellamy’s estimate, there are 25 million former tennis players who won’t play pickleball but he believes would play typti, which allows players to utilize their tennis skills far more than pickleball affords.
“I am targeting those people to try to get them back on the court,” Bellamy says. “And I just don’t care whether it’s a tennis court or a small court.”
“I plan to roll it out at every facility I’m involved with,” Brees, who is an investor in pickleball clubs in locations like New Orleans and also part owner of the LA franchise in Major League Pickleball, told Front Office Sports. “This opens up a realm of opportunity for pickleball facilities. Now you can play this other sport that is really, really fun. Has different rules, has a different racket, different ball.”
Brees is more than an investor, he’s also one of a handful of people who has played typti and helped develop the rules with Bellamy. Brees played tennis as a young junior (12 and under) and says he beat Andy Roddick three times (to be fair, Roddick was two years younger and won their final match). Bellamy says Brees is informally one of the top 10 typti players nationwide. Bellamy and Brees have been playing the game with about 30 former college tennis players, who will form the nucleus of the nascent pro typti circuit.
The duo met at a pickleball conference on Necker Island two years ago and soon after began developing typti, a game Bellamy says he had brainstormed even before he launched The Tennis Channel in 2003.
“Steve and I for the last two years have gotten together multiple times to actually play the sport, and it was really just like a test, like a trial,” Brees said. “It was, ‘Hey, let’s just see how it feels. Let’s play around with different rules. Let’s play on a padel court, let’s play on a pickleball court.’”
The game has some unique features. Players must win three points to win a game, but if at two points the player in front loses game point, the right to game point transfers to the opposition even if they had no points. Players need five games to win a set. And in an element that is sure to raise eyebrows, players can play the ball off the net and on the bounce use anything but the racket strings to get a second chance to hit it over: racket handle, feet, and hands are the most likely. The ball is heavier than the wiffle ball used in pickleball but lighter than a tennis ball, so it bounces high enough that if a player hits into the net, they have time to try to save the point with the wacky second method.
Jeff Clarke, the former Kodak CEO who was the first to write a check for the typti venture and hired Bellamy in 2014 at Kodak, said the emerging sports company has grand plans.
“The business model not only includes creating a game, selling design and selling patented rackets and balls, but it involves the entire media presence of tournaments, obviously on television or YouTube,” Clarke said. “Bringing that together, not only the creative new game, the merits of the new game, but also the whole media side of it, is a proactive part of the business model.”
You might wonder where typti got its name. Bellamy learned at Kodak that its founder believed brand names should consume exactly five letters and essentially be meaningless (Kodak, Crest, Prell and Evian were examples he cited). The word starts with a “t” as a homage to tennis, but the rest of it Bellamy cooked up in his marketing brew.
The Racquet Sports Professional Association has agreed to add typti as a sixth racket sport its pros teach. And Bellamy recently closed a deal with the Intercollegiate Tennis Association to offer a collegiate championship with prize money.
Monday’s press conference at California Smash, a pickleball club in L.A. co-owned by Marcellus Wiley, will enumerate the sport’s celebrity investors and tournament plans.
“We’ll be announcing that there’ll be at least $500,000 worth of prize money tournaments that are going to happen in the near future,” Bellamy said. “And then we’re in discussions on a million dollar prize money tournament. I’m trying to basically grow the Wimbledon of typti.”
