“Lunatic Country Music Person” Maren Morris is fully embracing her affinity for pickleball. The Grammy winner visited Jimmy Kimmel Live this week, the first time she’d been on the show since guest hosting it, and was introduced as the latest cover star of Pickleball Magazine.
“Vogue, eat your heart out,” Morris joked. “Pickleball is life.”
The country-pop hitmaker explained that she and her husband, Ryan Hurd, got into pickleball during her current North American headlining tour in support of Humble Quest, her third studio album from March.
“We would just set up courts outside the tour bus and play each other,” Morris told Kimmel. “It was kind of like a team-bonding thing, and then everyone got into it. And now, apparently, there’s a Pickleball Magazine. They’re all gonna be freaking out that we’re mentioning this on the show tonight. But yeah, I’m the cover girl.”
“We play doubles. We have scorecards,” she continued. “There’s a lot of trash-talking. We just do it before soundcheck and before shows. It was kind of a good way — we hadn’t toured in so many years, so there were a few new faces in the crew, and I felt like that first night we played after the show in the parking lot.”
“They say there’s no better way to get to know somebody than to play pickleball with them,” Kimmel interjected.
“That’s, I think, the Pickleball Magazine motto,” Morris quipped, noting that she would play pickleball before her Hollywood Bowl show in Los Angeles on Thursday night (October 13).
Morris didn’t leave Kimmel without performing a swoon-worthy rendition of “Good Friends” so check that out below.
