It's a sunny, windy Sunday at the US Open pickleball championships in Naples. The atmosphere at the tournament is collegial— friends who’ve met through the sport greet one another boisterously.
Mark Palm is playing with his doubles partner — his 22-year-old son Drake. They are in the Split Pro category, meaning both are pickleball pros, but one is over 50 and one is under 50. Both men are fit, moving nimbly around the court, slamming or tapping the lightweight plastic ball over the net. They’re wearing the family uniform: black shorts and t-shirts.
Mark Palm, now 51, discovered pickleball in 2019. He was on the road, raising money for his nonprofit, when the people he was meeting with got him into their pickleball game. He loved it.
He kept after the game even when he was diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. Pickleball became a part of his recovery process, helping him through each of six rounds of chemotherapy.
“And then about day three, you slowly start getting your energy back. And so I would get up and I would get out to the park and I would just stumble around, but I would get one game in. It was just kind of this mental health boost for me. And then every day I would get a little stronger. And then the next day I could play three games. And then by the time I'd go back to chemo, another chemo round, I could play seven games,” said Palm.
Palm said that every time he got to go back to the court was a really big deal.
"And my doctor had said, look, live your life as much as you can. Because the mental side of recovering from cancer, dealing with the side effects of cancer and all the unknowns is such a big part of recovery. So pickleball for me became that,” Palm continued.
Seven years later, Palm is six years’ free of cancer, and competing as a pro.
When not on the pickleball court, Palm is running Samaritan Aviation, the nonprofit he and his wife Kirsten started in 2000. It provides emergency medical flights and medical care at no cost to the residents of Papua New Guinea, 80 percent of whom live in rural areas without access to health care or a hospital.
"Samaritan Aviation does seven-day-a-week response to medical evacuation flights. We drop medicine, supplies, and medical supplies into remote villages, take doctors into remote areas, and really just save lives of people who really have no hope if we're not there,” said Palm.
Naturally, in addition to emergency health care, the Palm family brought pickleball to Papua New Guinea.
“And so through our sponsors, people have donated paddles, and we've got nets and balls, and there's this one community that's 50 miles from the nearest road. It's a swamp out in the middle of nowhere. And there's a helicopter pad there. And so I'm like, we should bring pickleball. There's a school there. There's a boarding school for kids. And so we brought pickleball. We taught them how to play and brought the nets and the paddles. And it's been so fun just to see, you know, in a country that really women are kind of second-class citizens in a lot of ways, to see the girls playing with the guys and to see actually the girls beating the guys...,” Palm said.
The nonprofit has 30 staff and 3 planes operating on the island and the Palms spend part of every year there. Palm says the entire operation is funded 80 percent by donations and 20 percent by the Papua New Guinea government.
Palm and his son lost their pickleball match that Sunday in Naples. But he shrugged it off. There would be another match later in the week. And other important projects to get to.
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