Origin Padel: History and Transition from Paddle

Let's take a small step back in time and discover theorigin padel, or the genesis of this sport that is gaining ground today.

More and more people are starting to get to know him, discovering the great fun he hides, but few actually know how he was born.

The truth is that this sport has a very recent past, with just a handful of active years compared to many others.

To shed some light on the subject, therefore, we will go to the discovery of all those details related to the birth of the padel.

Where was Padel born?

The padel was born in Mexico in 1969, from a character called Enrique Corcuera, who was looking to create a padel boss and, by pure chance, invented the padel.

But how? Therefore padel and paddles are not the same thing? Absolutely not, although some people believe and tell this story.

But, going back to padel, Enrique had a small garden bordered by some walls of the house, for this reason he could not create a tennis.

He therefore decided to throw himself on the paddle but, unlike the original sport, decided to introduce a small customized variant.

As we will see later, in the paddle there are back walls, but they cannot be used to bounce the ball and hit her as she comes back.

He decided to change the rules, including the rebound and giving birth to the sport we know and love today.

In short, a coincidence that has led to a new sporting reality, which has been much more successful than the original one.

If you want to know more about padel you can read our articles on how to play padel, the field size, or on classic questions of playing padel

When was Padel born?

But then, if this paddle isn't the same as the padel, where does it originate from and why isn't it as popular as its cousin?

The paddle was born at least 50 years earlier, perhaps even a few more, in a time window between the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Some say that English sailors invented the term (but not the game), which was then created in its final form by an American, Frank Beal.

His goal was to allow children to learn to play tennis on a court more appropriate to their size, so he reduced the size.

To this were added the walls to delimit the field (but considered as off-field) and, the rackets were simple wooden “padelle”.

In one way or another, this variation of tennis also found its place among adults, giving life to padel.

Over the years, the paddle has been further modified and today it looks much more like tennis, perhaps too much to be really popular.

Indeed, at the time of writing this article, padel does not have many areas of the world where it is played, certainly less than padel.

At this link, you will find the best padel rackets ever!

Why is it called Padel?

There would be a lot of debate on this and going to pull out the history archives, but we can still speculate about it.

There is no official version however, in all likelihood, it is due to Spanish corruption of the term paddle.

For a Spanish speaker, pronouncing the original form is quite difficult, as it makes very little sense in your language.

So most likely it was most directly and simply adapted for pronunciation, giving birth to padel.

In any case, as mentioned in the previous chapter, paddle is attributed to English sailors who (it is said) played on ships with a ball and oars.

True? False? Only historians can say this with absolute certainty and, on balance, they have better things to investigate.

We accept this theory at face value and always remind our readers that, whoever says that paddle and padel have the same origin (or are the same thing), are wrong.

If you are looking for your neighbor clothing from padel, take a look here!

Who brought Padel to Italy?

With little or no surprise, it was a South American (Argentinian to be more precise), which is fairly obvious.

This sport comes from the Latin areas of America, with particular diffusion in Argentina and Brazil.

From there it then passed to Spain (another logical consequence) to then arrive in Italy during the economic crisis in Argentina in the 90s.

It was Edoardo Caoduro and Martin Calvelo, who were fleeing their country's monetary disaster, to bring padel here.

Martin, a great tennis player and padel in his country, began to teach it in Italy, helped by Caduro as a promoter of the thing.

It took a short time for these two to make a fortune by introducing this new sport to our beautiful country.

Conclusions

Now you know everything there is to know about the origin of the padel, about the paddle and also how it arrived in Italy.

Tell your friends about the history of this beautiful and very interesting sport, they too will want to know more.

padel is experiencing a period of great expansion in our area and in the world, so we hope that it will soon reach an important level of diffusion.