Andre Agassi Invades Vietnam, Wants Pickleball Stakeholders Working Together to Take Sport to the World
Andre Agassi headlined the JOOLA 2025 Pickleball Legends in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam on 26 March 2025 along with his wife, Steffi Graff, and pickleball stars Ben Johns, Collin Johns, and many others.
The sports’ headline names played exhibition matches, conducted coaching clinics, and did product demos for JOOLA’s pickleball line. The Ho Chi Minh leg was the first stop of the JOOLA 2025 Pickleball Legends tour, which will see Agassi and his crew visiting Hanoi today, 27 March 2025 and Shanghai in China on 28–29 March 2025.
While at Ho Chi Minh, Agassi also got to speak pickleball with The Straits Times’ fantastic sports journalist, Kimberley Kwek. According to her, Agassi considers pickleball to be “at its infancy” with “about 30 million people in America playing.”
“I think that’s gonna double, triple, in not too long at all… globally. I think it’s gonna be probably the fastest-growing sport we’ve ever seen,” Agassi told The Straits Times.
But Agassi emphasised that pickleball is only going to reach the level of other spectator sports—tennis, for one—if its stakeholders actually work together to uplift the sport.
“I believe that if we all worked together, we could raise the water level and all the boats would rise…,” Agassi told Kwek. “I would like to see the sport as a whole work together, to take the entire sport collectively to the world and not be so fragmented.”
Agassi was referring to the sport’s lack of unified governing body even after the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) Tour and Major League Pickleball (MLP) merged in 2024 under the United Pickleball Association (UPA). As things stand now, the UPA operates independently from the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP), and neither is universally recognised as pickleball’s main organisation.
The tennis legend makes a valid point. Tennis has the Association of Tennis Professionals for male players and the Women’s Tennis Association for female players. Basketball has the Fédération Internationale de Basketball. Badminton has the Badminton World Federation.
Pickleball has… what again? Is it the UPA or the APP? Or is the World Pickleball Federation?
Having a world governing body is the logical next step for pickleball. It’s time to work towards that goal.
