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 signed a deal with Tennis Channel to broadcast the inaugural tournaments.
TYPTI is described as a racquet sport, played on a standard pickleball court using a 22-inch suspended racket, a 3.5-inch channeled foam ball, and “a new scoring method that uniquely combines risk and reward.” Unlike pickleball, it is almost noise-free and is said to be easy on the body, with high ball strikes without shock and no overhead serve. It has its own governing body with tours for amateurs and professionals.
This weekend, the inaugural US TYPTI Championship will be held on Saturday and Sunday at the Calabasas Pickleball Club in Los Angeles, with a total prize pool of $100,000. All five tournaments will be broadcast Sunday 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 nurtured an incredible national racquetball audience,” says Bellamy, CEO and Chairman of TYPTI. “They will love TYPTI because it is so perfect for television. The points are long, the rallies are dramatic, the action is constant, there is polished hoopla, 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 Kodak, he founded Tennis Channel, Skate Channel, Surf Channel, and Skate Channel; He also invented the sport of LiveBall. Bellamy began working on TYPTI more than 30 years ago.
“It started as an accident, and I quickly realized that the points were unlike anything I had seen in racket sports,” he said. “The score is pandemonium. It’s like a Tarantino movie meets a Spielberg movie.
“Then when I was running Kodak and looking at what AI could do in filmmaking, I dusted off TYPTI and started prototyping bats and balls,” he added. “The game was actually formatted to sit on the pickleball field, and now there are nearly $100 billion worth of brand new games in the U.S.”
Bellamy and NFL veteran Drew Brees laid out the rules in action during a trip to Necker Island, a private island owned by Richard Branson located in the British Virgin Islands. (Bryce is now an investor.)
“A lot of the rules were written, or at least motivated, on Necker Island with Drew Brees,” Bellamy said. “He and I played TYPTI, pickleball and padel every day (he’s a great racquetball expert) and I played tennis separately in the mornings with Richard. Going back and forth between all the sports gave him perspective and generated a lot of innovation.”
As for the name of the sport, Bellamy cited some wise words from George Eastman, who founded the Eastman Kodak Company, and who in 1887 came up with the hypothesis that the best brand names were meaningless five-letter 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 entire ecosystem is built around it.
The sport was officially launched four months ago. Initially, TYPTI caught on at the Palisades Tennis Center, where “thousands of kids” would pick it up and play, Bellamy said. He says there are now tens of thousands of people playing the sport, and hundreds of clubs program it. He added that there is a professional tour in TYPTI.
“We have exceeded our initial sales expectations for the bat by 1,400 percent,” he adds. “Half of Hollywood is calling me and asking me to participate. It’s been amazing.”
The father-son duo of Vince and Duke Van Patten will provide color commentary for the tournaments broadcast on Tennis Channel. Duke was one of the first players to play TYPTI, while Vince is a veteran racquetball player, reaching No. 24 in the world in professional tennis and No. 1 in the world in paddle tennis.
“TYPTI is genius,” Vince said. “The scores are dynamic and artistic, and the matches are full of pandemonium. Holding these first matches at the inaugural US Open will be similar to 1877 at the All England Club.”
Players will include familiar faces from the world of racquet sports: Ashley Harkleroad, Klay Thompson, Vicki Duvall, Kimmy Hance, Jack Jade, Brian Wan, Federico Brown, Jacob Brohm, Megan Joffe, Kenady Hance and more from across the country will be participating.
TYPTI is funded by a large number of well-known strategic investors, including Tony Robbins, Drew Brees, Chris Pine, JJ Abrams, Bert Krischer, Tiffany Haddish, Heather Mills, Kyle MacLachlan, Melissa Rivers, Giovanni Ribisi, Kenny Moore, Jane Prince, Nick Kyrgios, Milos Raonic, Prakash Amritraj, JT Molner, Jill Henry, Desiree. Gruber, Andrew Segal, David Flarety, Barry Allen, Carl Chang, Gordon Ohling, Tony Pritzker and others.
Brad Gould, owner of the Calabasas Pickleball Club, said the sport is growing at his facility.
“We have a lot of people from Hollywood who play at CPC,” Gould said. “We’ve watched TYPTI grow with the same Hollywood crowd like crazy over the past year, and in the last couple of months, it’s as if it has become the new golf game. … We’re looking forward to our club becoming the All England Club in 1877. We are now the birthplace of the TYPTI US Open!”
Organizers note that since it is played on courts of the same size, anyone with a pickleball court now has a TYPTI court.
“TYPTI reminds me of snowboarding in 1986,” said investor Tony Robbins. “Snowboarding has made huge 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. The accessibility is unparalleled. While it’s amazing what top players do with the ball, beginners can pull off great contests in minutes. This is not typical of racquet sports, where barriers to entry prevent the majority from using it as a fitness tool. TYPTI breaks down the doors on those barriers and will be an unparalleled tool for fitness and mental health.”
McLaren of Westlake Village, TYPTI Warehouse, Good Idea and Uomo Sport have joined as Official Cars, Official Retailer, Official Beverage and Official Apparel of the TYPTI US Open, respectively.
