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Jamie Foxx, pickleball, and the strange magic of Wednesday nights
Before my second visit to Jamie Foxx's house, I did a little homework. I watched interviews. A lot of interviews.
Jamie is a great storyteller. He has stories about music, comedy, acting, football, and recovering from a stroke. He can do impressions, play the piano, make you laugh, and then turn around and tell you something genuinely moving.
But I noticed something about the way he tells stories.
Almost every anecdote comes with a lesson. And more often than not, he names the person who taught it to him.
Someone gave him advice. Someone took a chance on him. Someone showed him how to do something better. He remembers who it was.
For a man with that much talent, and that many accomplishments, he spends a surprising amount of time talking about what he learned from other people.
I thought about that later, standing in his backyard at an hour when I would normally be asleep.
Every Wednesday, Jamie opens his home to around 100 people for pickleball.
His actual home.
There is food. There are drinks. There are people from the music business, the movie business, and people who have nothing to do with either. Jamie pays for it all.
It's quite a thing to invite a hundred people to your house every week. I sometimes hesitate before inviting eight people over for dinner because then I have to clean the house.
And these aren't dinner parties. These things can go until 4 a.m.
Four. In the morning.
I have Gen Z kids. I'm familiar with the concept of staying up late. I just thought I'd aged out of participating.
Then I was playing King of the Court on the middle court with a member of the Wayans family. There seem to be an almost unlimited number of Wayans, and apparently quite a few of them play pickleball.
I glanced at my watch.
1:15 a.m.
I'd been playing for hours. I was sweaty, laughing, talking trash with people I'd never met, and had absolutely no intention of going home.
This was a personal development I had not anticipated.
The atmosphere is hard to describe because it wasn't what you might imagine.
Tell someone you've been invited to Jamie Foxx's house for a party that goes until dawn and they're going to picture a certain kind of Hollywood scene.
This wasn't that.
There was some evidence of shenanigans, sure. But security was discreet and impressively attentive. Nothing seemed to get very far.
The courts were busy. People were eating, watching matches, waiting to play, giving each other grief.
The amount of shit talking was considerable. So was the casual use of the N-word, which this 50-something white woman from Southern California was still processing somewhere between the kitchen line and the baseline.
But there was something else going on that I found much more interesting.
The manners.
I'm serious.
People made eye contact. They introduced themselves. They shook hands. They asked questions. They were welcoming in a way that felt almost old-fashioned.
And not just to the people who mattered.
I watched people interact without much regard for who had the bigger name, the better connections, or the more impressive career. Maybe everyone knows who everyone is. I certainly didn't.
It didn't appear to matter.
I don't know whether it's because guests are vetted or because Jamie has established an unspoken code of conduct. Probably both. But people seemed to understand that they were guests in someone's home and behaved accordingly.
Even while talking an extraordinary amount of shit.
Jamie moves through the evening as both host and participant. At times he's holding court, joking with friends or playing chess with his inner circle. At other times, he comes down to the courts and plays.
He's clearly having fun.
And I kept thinking about those interviews.
The stories about people who helped him. The lessons he remembered. The credit he gave away so easily.
I wouldn't pretend to know someone from two evenings at their home and a collection of YouTube interviews. But I did notice a consistency.
He seems genuinely interested in people.
Which brings me to music.
Jamie has spent his life moving between different worlds. Music, comedy, film, sports. He's collaborated with people whose backgrounds and experiences couldn't be more different.
Music is particularly good at bringing those worlds together. People who might never have a conversation can find themselves singing the same song. Age, income, politics, background. For a few minutes, none of it matters very much.
Pickleball does something similar.
It's one of the few places where people who have almost nothing in common can spend two hours together and leave feeling like friends.
You don't need to know what someone does for a living to appreciate a good third-shot drop. Or forgive a terrible one.
You need four people, a net, a ball, and a willingness to look a little ridiculous.
Fame doesn't help much when somebody hits a ball directly at your feet.
And what Jamie has created on Wednesday nights seems to understand that.
He's taken something he's very good at, bringing people together, and given it a new setting.
There are no velvet ropes around the pickleball courts. No VIP section where the important people get to avoid playing with the rest of us. At least none that I saw.
There are just games to be played.
Of course, the setting is extraordinary. Most of us don't have the property, the staff, or the resources to host a hundred people every Wednesday.
But the feeling wasn't particularly extravagant.
It reminded me more of the best kind of neighborhood gathering, where somebody's house becomes the house everyone gravitates toward. The door is open, there's always something to eat, and nobody is keeping track of who owes whom.
Except in this case the host is Jamie Foxx and you might find yourself playing pickleball with a Wayans at one in the morning.
I finally left around 1:30 a.m.
I heard afterward that Jamie was on the courts from 2 until 4. I can't verify that. But I no longer have any trouble believing it.
I've been lucky enough to go twice now.
And what stays with me isn't the celebrity of it all. It's how remarkably normal the human part felt.
People looking each other in the eye. Learning names. Laughing at themselves. Competing hard and shaking hands afterward.
I went back to those interviews in my mind. Jamie remembering the people who had taught him something along the way.
Maybe that's part of what makes him such a good host. He appears to understand that interesting things happen when you make room for other people.
And maybe that's why pickleball fits him so well.
At 1:15 a.m., on the middle court, I wasn't thinking about where I was or whose house it was.
I was thinking about winning the next point.
And hoping I wouldn't have to go home anytime soon.
