Why Calabasas Is
the Cathedral of TYPTI

Dear Friend,

I’ve played racket sports my entire life. I started out playing racquetball and handball and by about age 8 my Dad had me playing tennis at Belle Meade Apartments in Indianapolis, IN. Soon after I graduated to the Indianapolis Racquet Club and did their junior program in the winter and North Central High School in the summer. I played 8 hours a day, every day. In high school I became addicted to ping pong, and shortly after Badminton. I started training for the Olympic Badminton team, but it didn’t become an Olympic sport for a few more cycles. I played little in college and then immediately moved to California where I taught tennis to the top juniors in the world. I started acquiring tennis clubs and while doing that I invented LiveBall and Shotgun 21. I also got introduced to a sport at Venice Beach called Paddle Tennis, which was sort of like mini tennis meets a zoo, as there were so many characters.

While seeing how rewarding tennis was to kids and how little tennis was on television, I came up with an idea for a television network devoted to all racket sports, but carrying the name of the flagship racket sport…Tennis. Thinking it would be a long time before I’d actually get live tennis on The Tennis Channel, I started researching other racket sports… platform tennis, court tennis, jai alai, real tennis, and an obscure sport in the upper Northwest with what I thought was the dumbest name of all time… It seemed like the least sophisticated of them all by a long shot. So, I took what little money I had, bought a plane ticket to Seattle and hopped a ferry to Bainbridge Island to meet the founders of a game called pickleball. It was raining that day, so we went to an indoor basketball gym with some blended lines. It was me, a Grandma and Grandpa aged couple and their dog aptly named Mr. Pickles. We played pickleball and they gloated about how tennis professional Jan Michael Gambill played pickleball. They had very unsophisticated paddles and a whiffle ball with long holes.

Candidly, the game didn’t feel very sophisticated, but I had a one-page television rights agreement for the US Open of Pickleball that I wanted them to sign. They said “There is no US Open of Pickleball” to which I responded, “then you’ve got nothing to lose signing the rights away” which they did! So, I had my first rights for The Tennis Channel. A sport that shares the name of a hamburger accoutrement that no one knew about for a tournament that didn’t exist. I was in business! Next, I got the rights to The Clydesdale Open in Cincinnati, OH where doubles teams had to weigh at least 425LBs. My 3rd pitch was for a Nudist Colony tournament, but unfortunately I couldn’t get them to sign.

Anywho in the early years of The Tennis Channel, I was still teaching tennis at my clubs as I wasn’t making any real salary, and I was getting bombarded with teaching pro’s looking for courts. There was no shortage of lesson takers, but courts were like an ice cube in hot water. The stories were all the same, a tennis pro would have 40 hours of lessons at a club in the valley or somewhere in LA, and that club was more valuable to the community as a shopping mall or an apartment complex. In 30 days, it was going to be demolished. My intentions for The Tennis Channel were entirely noble. I wanted to promote tennis. I didn’t build a business as much as a cause. But now there was sand in the gears because at 7200 sq ft 22 degrees North, the real estate was simply too valuable in large population centers to sustain courts.

So, I started working on new games on a smaller court. I built a new sport (late 1990’s) and a presentation. Then at ITF, USTA, TIA, ATP and WTA meetings, I pitched either shrinking the tennis court or building this new companion short court sport. To say I was laughed out of every meeting is a comical understatement. I basically pitched to the tennis industry elite that if we didn’t address the harsh reality of how large our playing field was, there would be a day of reckoning in 20 years or so that would be brutal. And my last slide said, “Don’t Make Me Say I Told You So!”

After a long stint in the movie business, the anticipation of the likely devastating impact of AI, a few other environmental movie business issues at the same time as the insane crescendo of pickleball, I started reworking that sport I’d created, but this time sitting on top of a pickleball court with no adulterations. I tried every racket and ball combination I could. I spent a bazillion dollars on rackets from eBay and started customizing like crazy.

And then I found Calabasas.

Tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains, guarded and gated, with the California sun pouring across its courts like honey, the Calabasas Pickleball Club became the laboratory where TYPTI came to life. Not a sterile lab—a living, breathing community of players who showed up every morning ready to hit. It was here, on these courts, with this community, that I found the perfect marriage of racket and ball that allowed the player to load, explode, and rip. It’s the itch that we loved in tennis but wasn’t getting scratched appropriately in pickleball. (PS. I love pickleball.)

There is a reason I call the Calabasas Pickleball Club the best in the United States, and it goes far beyond the 16 courts, the five acres of rolling Calabasas hillside, or the 500-plus members who call it home. It’s the spirit of the place. This is a community that invested in courts when others were tearing them down. A community that chose racket sports over strip malls. Brad Gold, Brian Lando, and the entire CPC family didn’t just build a pickleball club—they built a gathering place for people who love to play. And that’s exactly the kind of soil where a new sport can take root.

Calabasas is where we stress-tested every new racket prototype, every ball variation, every scoring innovation. It’s where we hosted the first unofficial TYPTI tournament—a raucous Calcutta that had players talking for weeks. It’s where Kaanu Patel, “The Michael Jordan of TYPTI,” first showed the world what this sport could look like at its highest level. The overwhelming amount of TYPTI’s infancy happened right here, on these courts, under these lights, with this community cheering it on.

That is why Calabasas is officially the Cathedral of TYPTI. And that is why the Calabasas Typti Club is the first accredited TYPTI facility in the world.

Every great sport has its cathedral. Tennis has Wimbledon’s All-England Club. The French Open has Roland Garros. The Italian Open has the Foro Italico. When we set out to build TYPTI’s first major professional event, there was only one place it could live: Calabasas. Our vision is to establish a global presence and awareness for this facility the way Roland Garros defined clay-court tennis—a place so tied to the soul of the sport that you cannot tell the story of one without the other. TYPTI may one day outgrow its birthplace and play on stages around the world, but Calabasas will always be where it started. This is our Forest Hills. This is our spiritual home.

And the science of what happens on these courts speaks for itself. After watching a bazillion junior tennis matches and tons of professional pickleball matches, I wanted to overhaul the game and scoring. So, I devised ‘The Stakes’ method which creates a completely different risk and reward scenario than contemplated in traditional racket sports scoring. Tie them all together and TYPTI is really something special.

The points are long, exciting and fun. Players load, explode and rip. They stay at the baseline longer. They turn points around more often. The saves are incredible, and every point is like a highlight reel shot. Much like in Badminton, you can hit a missile with the flick of the wrist. And the channeled foam ball bounces high. Back of the envelope, a pickleball comes in at 25 degrees and leaves the ground at 13 degrees. A tennis ball comes in at 25 degrees and leaves at 25 degrees. A TYPTI ball comes in at 25 degrees and leaves at 43 degrees. That is over a 300% difference of ascent. Every ball strike feels like you’re on Roland Garros right after they threw down four bags of fresh. Pickleball has made dinking a fine wine or an art form. TYPTI goes the other way. You don’t just crash the net, you strategically set up or wait for the perfect opportunity and then you attack. Because players can so control depth and trajectory of the ball through spin, passing shots are much easier to hit than in tennis and pickleball.

To that and in my opinion, tennis is the best professionally played sport there is. Badminton is the best racket sport. And pickleball is the greatest social phenomenon in the history of sport. TYPTI is sort of the baby of Tennis and Badminton on what was a badminton court, but has now become a pickleball court.

Most importantly and without a doubt as vetted by many, many players… TYPTI is the most fun racket sport. It is a blast and you can do so much with the ball and with your game. When you start getting in the groove, every point is like a masterpiece that hangs at a museum. It allows players to push the boundaries of their potential in ways I’ve never seen before. Also, when people who play tennis and pickleball… play TYPTI, they always say that their tennis or pickleball is much better.

The quality of the rackets are like precision swords. The ball strike, the contact—it’s absolutely breathtaking. You can do things with the ball you can’t do on a tennis court. If you have racket sport expertise, then you’ll be amazing at the first ball strike. If you’ve never played a racket sport, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can get up to speed as the ball bounces high and moves through the air slowly.

So I present to you the Calabasas Typti Club—the Cathedral of TYPTI, the gold standard for programming, the first accredited facility in the world, and the spiritual home of a sport that is going to change everything. This extraordinary community in the Santa Monica Mountains didn’t just welcome a new sport. They helped build it. Every prototype was tested here. Every rule was refined here. Every moment of magic that convinced me this sport was real happened right here, with this community, on these courts.

Calabasas is not just where TYPTI was born. It’s where TYPTI grew up. And as this sport reaches every corner of the globe, the story will always begin with these five acres in Calabasas, California.

Try it out and you will be hooked.

PLAY BALL!!!