Steve Bellamy, the former president of Motion Picture and Entertainment at Kodak who previously founded several sports-themed cable networks, has launched a new sports league and inked a deal with Tennis Channel to air the inaugural championships.
TYPTI is described as a racquet sport, played on a standard pickleball court with a 22-inch strung racquet, a 3.5-inch channeled foam ball and “a new scoring method that uniquely marries risk and reward.” Unlike pickleball, it’s nearly noiseless and said to be easy on the body, with high shockless ball strikes and no overhead serve. It has its own governing body with amateur and professional tours.
This weekend, the inaugural U.S. Open TYPTI Championships will take place Saturday and Sunday at the Calabasas Pickleball Club in Los Angeles featuring $100,000 in total prize money. All five of the championships on Sunday will be broadcast on Tennis Channel 2 starting at 11 a.m. PT; Saturday’s matches will be streamed on the Tennis Channel app and YouTube.
“Tennis Channel has curated such an incredible national racquet sport audience,” says Bellamy, CEO and chairman of TYPTI. “They will love TYPTI because it’s so perfect for television. The points are long, the rallies are dramatic, the action is constant, there is a refined bedlam, and the strategy reads so beautifully on camera. It’s the perfect marriage of competition, audience and distribution platform.”
Bellamy is well known in the sports world. Prior to his role at Kodak, he founded the Tennis Channel, the Ski Channel, the Surf Channel and the Skate Channel; he also invented the sport of LiveBall. Bellamy started working on TYPTI more than 30 years ago.
From left: Lincoln Bellamy, NFL veterans Jarvis Landry and Terrell Owens, Steve Bellamy and Kaanu Patel at the Racquet X trade show.
Courtesy photo
“It started as an accident and soon I realized that the points were like nothing I’d seen in racquet sports,” he said. “The points are bedlam. They’re like a Tarantino movie meets a Spielberg movie.
“Then when I was running Kodak and looking at what AI could do to the movie business, I dusted off TYPTI and started prototyping racquets and balls,” he added. “The game was already formatted to sit on a pickleball court, and now there were nearly $100 billion worth of brand-new ones in the U.S.”
Bellamy and NFL veteran Drew Brees worked out the rules while playing during a trip to Necker Island, a private island owned by Richard Branson that’s located in the British Virgin Island. (Brees is now an investor.)
“A lot of the rules got written, or at least galvanized, on Necker Island with Drew Brees,” said Bellamy. “He and I were playing TYPTI, pickleball and padel everyday (he’s an amazing racquet sport savant) and separately I was playing tennis in the mornings with Richard. Going back and forth between all the sports gave a perspective that bred a lot of the innovation.”
As for the name of the sport, Bellamy cited some words of wisdom from George Eastman, found of the Eastman Kodak Company, who in 1887 “came up with the premise that the best brand names were five-letter meaningless words.” For example, Eastman named his own company Kodak. For his part, Bellamy said he went “back and forth [on the name] in the beginning. Now I hear it a thousand times a day, and the ecosystem is completely created around it.”
Drew Brees playing TYPTI.
Courtesy photo
The sport officially launched four months ago. At first, TYPTI caught on at the Palisades Tennis Center, where “thousands of kids” were picking it up and playing it, Bellamy said. Now, he says, there are tens of thousands of people playing the sport, with hundreds of clubs programming it. He added that there’s a professional TYPTI tour.
“We outsold our initial racquet forecast by 1,400 percent,” he adds. “Half of Hollywood is calling me asking to get involved. It’s been great.”
The father-son duo of Vince and Duke Van Patten will provide color commentary for the championships broadcast on Tennis Channel. Duke was one of the first players to play TYPTI, while Vince is a racquet sport veteran, reaching No. 24 in the world in professional tennis and No. 1 in the world in paddle tennis.
“TYPTI is genius,” Vince said. “The points are dynamic and artistic, and the matches are bedlam. Calling these first matches at this inaugural U.S. Open will be akin to 1877 at All England Club.”
Players will include faces that are familiar in the world of racquet sports: Ashley Harkleroad, Clay Thompson, Vicky Duval, Kimi Hance, Jack Jaede, Brian Wan, Federico Brown, Jacob Brum, Megan Govi, Kenadi Hance and more from around the country will be taking part.
TYPTI is financed by a slew of well-known strategic investors, including Tony Robbins, Drew Brees, Chris Pine, JJ Abrams, Bert Kreischer, Tiffany Haddish, Heather Mills, Kyle MacLachlan, Melissa Rivers, Giovanni Ribisi, Kenny Moore, Jen Prince, Nick Kyrgios, Milos Raonic, Prakash Amritraj, JT Mollner, Gil Henry, Desiree Gruber, Andrew Segal, David Flarety, Barry Allen, Carl Chang, Gordon Uehling, Tony Pritzker and others.
Terrell Owens playing TYPTI.
Courtesy photo
Calabasas Pickleball Club owner Brad Gold said the sport has been growing at his facility.
“We have so many people from Hollywood playing at CPC,” Gold said. “We’ve been watching TYPTI grow with that same Hollywood crowd like crazy for the last year and in the last couple of months, it’s like it’s become the new golf. … We’re looking at our club being the All-England Club in 1877. We are now the official birthplace of the U.S. Open TYPTI Championships!”
Organizers note that because they are played on the same size courts, anyone who has a pickleball court now has a TYPTI court.
“TYPTI reminds me of snowboarding in 1986,” investor Robbins said. “Snowboarding exploded profits at ski resorts by adding a second use case to the mountain. That’s what TYPTI will do for pickleball clubs and tennis clubs with pickleball. And the accessibility is unparalleled. While it’s mind-blowing what the top players are doing with the ball, beginners can have great rallies in minutes. That’s not typical for racket sports, where the barriers of entry prevent the majority from using them as a tool for physical fitness. TYPTI blows the doors off those barriers and will be an unparalleled tool for physical fitness and mental health.”
McLaren of Westlake Village, TYPTI Warehouse, Good Idea and Uomo Sport have joined as official automobile, official retailer, official beverage and official clothier of the U.S. Open TYPTI Championships, respectively.
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