WHITEHALL — The White Lake area has a vibrant pickleball scene, a club membership of over 200 people, and a large group of players who fill the courts at the Nestrom Road park many summer mornings. It’s a group in mourning this month after the untimely and tragic death of the club’s treasurer, Ken Johnson, in a motorcycle crash Sunday, Aug. 4.
The club is planning a celebration of Ken’s life, to take place Saturday, Aug. 24. A club member, Keven Finnery, who outfitted his Montague home’s pole barn with a small indoor pickleball facility, will host the event.
Johnson, 75, who wife Mary said has been a motorcycle enthusiast since he was a teen, collided with a car while traveling to their North Muskegon home shortly after 5 p.m. Aug. 4 and passed away at the scene. The Muskegon County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene but has not released any official information about the crash.
Johnson’s involvement with the pickleball club dates to almost the very beginning, when longtime friend and neighbor Dave Kampfschulte introduced him and Mary to the game in 2014. Typical of Ken, once he became interested in the game and the efforts to provide a worthy pickleball facility to the area, he dove in headlong. The Whitehall Township courts are now an enviable facility well-known to local players, even listed on the official USA Pickleball app as a “Place2Play” - and Ken handled much of the maintenance of the courts and the area around them.
“Ken really took ownership of the courts,” Kampfschulte said. “It was a small group of people that started playing on the Fruitland Township courts (before Whitehall Township had them). We actually chalked them 10 years ago. Ken got enthused and took over.
“He took over responsibility for making sure this project got off the ground, and it did. Those courts are a real testament to his work.”
In the White Lake Pickleball Club’s infancy, Ken joined a small group of supporters in petitioning the Whitehall Township board for help. At first, the board permitted the group to fashion one pickleball court out of the run-down tennis court area next to the township hall that at the time was most often used by local kids for skateboarding. Once that court consistently filled up, the board permitted a second and third court. Eventually, the entire court was allowed to be used for pickleball, and Johnson, along with fellow summer resident Glenn William, helped spearhead the fundraising to spruce up those courts and also construct another set of courts, which has been done over the past year.
“(Glenn) called us, probably, every other week in Florida, just to get Ken’s input on this, that and the other thing,” Mary said of the process of getting the pickleball courts together.
The group still plans to eventually add a small gazebo in between the two courts to use for tournaments, though funds for that will likely take years to raise.
Johnson was a pickleball lover, but also a people person. He was competitive enough that he and his wife mutually decided it would be best if they did not play on the same team - he was known as a “poacher,” a player who goes for a ball they think they can get even if it is technically in a teammate’s zone - but friendly enough that he was happy to take the court with anyone who needed a partner. He was also well-known among the club for keeping score on his smart watch.
“There are some people in our group that are (picky about who they play with),” Mary said. “They don’t want to have less than the best game they can have. He loved to play hard and he would get in the boys’ games, but he would also play with everyone. That was the joyous thing about him. He’s a good man. He was good to people, and he didn’t have a bad bone in his body, really.”
He was also devoted enough to the game, and inventive enough, to jury-rig a squeegee together by using a 2x4 and a trashed hunk of carpeting, which he then used to clear the courts of water if it had just rained. That enabled play to begin sooner than it could have otherwise.
“He researched this on the Internet,” Mary said. “He put a rope on the end and he dragged it to get the water off the court, and it worked.”
Not just a pickleball player, Johnson worked in engineering at Amway before retiring, a job that took him all over the world on a variety of projects. He was well-read - though he joked to his wife that half of the information in my head “isn’t worth (anything)” - and loved to tell stories.
“Ken had multiple layers about him,” Shirley Swan, a friend and fellow member of the pickleball club, said. “He was a quiet guy but he talked a lot, if that makes any sense. He wasn’t all about himself...He was quiet, but he was very intelligent and he had a lot to say, and a lot of things to tell you about.”
He was also a guitar enthusiast and owned several of them. In a band as a teenager, Johnson returned to the pastime late in life and would play more days than not, studying music he enjoyed via YouTube and printing out chords to practice.
“He didn’t like me to come in the room and sing with him,” Mary said with mock frustration. “I can sing, not well, and he could sing, not well, but we didn’t sound good together.”
His love of motorcycles was clear. Johnson once won three Hare Scramble state motorcycle championship races in a row and owned several bikes; in fact, he was poised to go on a lengthy solo ride through Colorado later this year. Ken loved to backpack out west and to ski, which is actually how he met Mary, while cross-country skiing.
Mary said she’ll remember one thing above all about her husband.
“He was a wonderful man,” she said.
