Jake Johnson: ‘The Dink’ Is the Caddyshack’ of Pickleball

Jake Johnson has a comparison for "The Dink" that he admits he keeps botching. He says yacht rock, and people hear something dismissive.

What he means is warmth.

"We wanted to feel like you're hanging out with old friends," Johnson said on the show, after Rich described the movie as feeling like visiting an old friend. "You're laughing. It's light. It's just a movie. It's 90 minutes. There's no big messages. We're not teaching you anything."

The film premieres globally Friday, July 24th on Apple TV, and the cast reads like a fever dream. Ben Stiller. Ed Harris. Mary Steenburgen. Andy Roddick. John McEnroe. Aaron Chen, who Johnson thinks is going to be the breakout.

Johnson plays a former tennis prodigy who gets hurt, turns pro, and gets hurt again. The scene people will talk about is where Stiller walks him through it, and Johnson could not hold it together.

"Not a joke. I've now been doing this for 20 years. I view myself as a professional who doesn't break a lot," Johnson said. "We were cross-covering it, which means there was a camera on me and a camera on him, and he started improvising. It was so funny that I didn't care that I was ruining takes."

"It's unprofessional, but I've been a fan of this man since The Ben Stiller Show when I was a kid," Johnson said. "Watching him riff, I was like, yeah, he's one of one, man."

The Caddyshack comparison came up because the movie is set at a club, and Johnson leaned in hard. He recently sat down with Eli Manning for Manning's movie show and picked Caddyshack, waving off the producers' pitch of Rookie of the Year despite being a die hard Cubs fan.

"I don't care about Rookie of the Year. It's a good movie when I was a kid," he said. "But if we've got to talk movies and a sports one, nothing touches Caddyshack. Caddyshack is the greatest movie to this day."

His specific obsession is Rodney Dangerfield, who Johnson calls tonally insane, and the moment Dangerfield stands up and does a thing with his legs no director would ask for.

"That's not how human men stand, brother," Johnson said, imagining himself trying to give the note.

He also argued that Ted Knight, not Dangerfield, is the king of that film, which is the tell for how Ed Harris functions in this one. Harris runs tennis at the club and plays Johnson's father, strict, exacting, certain there is a way things are done. The line Rich flagged, and that Liz liked enough to write down, is Harris's character calling pickleball "the coronavirus of sports."

Harris intimidated him. Johnson called his headspace on set sweaty 12-year-old boy vibes.

His favorite Harris reference point is not an obvious one, either. He compared the film's opening monologue to Glengarry Glen Ross. "Everything about this is significant besides the subject matter," Johnson said.

As for the sport, Johnson took tennis lessons with Brad Gilbert, then played pickleball with pros. Rich, an unapologetic doubter who thinks the game is for people of a certain age, got a partial endorsement.

"This idea that it's so easy anyone can do it, that is true. But it's not easy to get great at it," Johnson said. An 80-year-old can play an 8-year-old on day one, which he found shocking. Then he got to the net against top players.

"At first I'm like, I'm so good at this game, it's crazy," he said. Then Chen's character delivers a line about murdering these old people, and the illusion dies.