LA QUINTA, Calif. — At 17 years old, Blades Brown will embark on his professional golf career this week by playing on a sponsor’s exemption in The American Express Championship. He’ll face some of the fiercest competitors in the game. And, still, he’s not going to contend with the steely looks he gets from his mom on a regular basis when they play pickleball.
MORE: American Express DFS picks
In a family that includes a mom, Rhonda Blades Brown, who played in the WNBA, a sister, Millie, who competes in Division II hoops, and a teenager readying to compete this year against the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, the Browns are hyper competitive. It’s made them who they are, of course, and that doesn’t switch off when the move away from their respective sports.
Pickleball has become a favored pastime for the clan at home in Nashville, Tenn.—evident by Blades Brown’s reaction to flying over the Coachella Valley this week and noting the inordinate number of golf courses and pickleball courts.
“As soon as we hit the ground, I turned off my airplane mode on my phone, and I texted my mom, ‘Mom, bring my pickleball stuff, we’re playing this week.’ I’m really excited to get after it,” Blades said in a press conference on Tuesday ahead of his pro debut on Thursday at La Quinta Country Club in the event’s three-course rotation.
Never mind the golf, how cut-throat does it get on the court?
“So, my mom … she’s already a competitor,” Blades said. “My dad [Parke] is too, but my mom, she and I, we go at it hard in pickleball.
“The quickness that I have is a little bit faster than hers, but she’s intimidating sometimes, I got to admit. Like, if I go up three or four points, all of a sudden she gets that look on her face and you’re, like, ‘Uh oh, do I want to be sacrificing my relationship with my mom right now, or what are we doing here?’ But no, it’s a lot of fun to go at it with her.”
Do things ever get so heated that they walk off the court not speaking?
“That happens more with my sister, believe it or not,” Blades said with a smile. “It either ends up we get in a shouting match—and this is in basketball too—but we hug it out and do all that stuff after, but it’s a lot of fun being able to compete with my family.”
Blades, who announced in Decembe that he was forgoing college to turn pro, and sister were both standout youth basketball players, but it was Millie who has gone on to play in college as a junior starting guard at Alabama-Huntsville. Of course she always had her little brother buzzing around trying to show his stuff.
“So she thought that since I was this 4-9 midget that she could just bulldoze me in every sport ever,” Blades said. “Then once I started to get a little height and get taller, she had a humbling moment, I’ll leave it at that.”
Did he dunk on her?
Nope. “I’m not able to dunk yet,” Blades said. “My trainer, Winston Gordon, I’ve been telling him, ‘Hey man, by the end of the year I got to be able to bunk a basketball.’ That’s one of my goals for the year.”
It’s an admirable to-do list: Defeat Mom, pull off dunk, and make a big splash on the PGA Tour.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
