Ouch!

Well, I never dreamed it would come to this, but here we are. In Florida (where else?) some people got into a tussle following a sporting event at a country club, and it wound up with one player slugging his opponent's face and beating him right down to the ground.

The sport in question here is the deadly game of pickleball.

The guy, the slugger, is a 63-year-old, and he stands charged with with two counts of felony battery on a person 65 or older (hey cool! It's a whole separate crime to beat on a senior!) His 51-year-old wife also joined the fight in Port Orange, and she has one single count of felony battery on a person 65 or older hanging over her head, which is not as gray as nature intended, I assume.

Here's where the fracas began: they were taking on another married couple but they began arguing about shots being made in what pickleballers call the kitchen (a marked-off zone on either side of the net.) The rule was you can only hit the ball there once it has landed; otherwise they must avoid it like I avoid pickleball entirely.

Well, you know how these things go. The players started insulting each other, and then the slugger insulted the other player's wife, and then words led to fisticuffs.

And then! At least twenty oldtimers  members of the club got into it. It must have been as glorious as when Morty Seinfeld clobbered Jack Klompus over that astronaut pen on "Seinfeld."

I'm printing this out and carrying it around in case anyone is crazy enough to try to get me to join a country club, or a game of pickleball.