Pickleball player Philip Black loses court appeal in bitter feud with Gold Coast club
A Gold Coast auctioneer faces potential bankruptcy as he considers taking his fight against a pickleball club all the way to the High Court.
A long-running pickleball feud has been whacked out of court by the state’s highest judicial authority.
But the pickleball protagonist who brought the case is vowing to play on in the battle with the boom sport’s officialdom, despite facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs and potential bankruptcy.
In a stoush that went from the playing courts to the Supreme Court, Gold Coast pickleball enthusiast Philip Black lobbed a lawsuit on officials in December 2023 after he was allegedly kicked out of his local club and banned from playing.
The 66-year-old auctioneer alleged he was “unconstitutionally stood down” from the Gold Coast Pickleball Association committee in 2021 after he refused requests to resign and was later threatened with expulsion from the game.
In court documents, Mr Black alleged a fellow committee member and wealthy businesswoman threatened to withdraw her funding for a new court complex unless he resigned “immediately”.
He alleged in the claim that he was the victim of “false witness, bullying, lying, extortion, harassment’ conflicts of interest (and) denial of natural justice and procedural fairness”.
Mr Black sought court declarations that his Gold Coast Pickleball Association membership was invalidly terminated and that its constitution was “null, void, invalid and ineffective”. He also wanted an inquiry into the adoption of the constitution.
Gold Coast Pickleball, as well as fellow defendants the Pickleball Association of Queensland and Pickleball Australia, vigorously defended the claim.
They lost patience after the self-represented Mr Black was allowed to file six different versions of his statement of claim in a bid to comply with court rules.
Earlier this year, lawyers for the defendants filed an application for a summary Judgment in their favour, a permanent stay on Mr Black’s claim and an order restraining him from any further Supreme Court action without judicial approval.
Justice Michael Copley granted the summary judgment but declined to make the restraining order, noting that Gold Coast Pickleball had admitted that Mr Black’s membership had been invalidly terminated.
Mr Black then filed an appeal against the summary judgment which was dismissed in the Court of Appeal this week.
In their decision, Court of Appeal judges Helen Bowskill, Thomas Bradley and James Henry said the Supreme Court could grant summary judgment where a party had no real prospect of succeeding and there was no need for a trial.
They found that Mr Black’s action was “a clear case of a claim with no prospect of succeeding” and he had “a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and role of the courts”.
Mr Black said he was now weighing up a High Court appeal, re-pleading his Supreme Court case or launching private prosecutions against pickleball officials he alleged had wronged him.
He said he had suffered “a travesty of justice” and potentially faced bankruptcy which could cost him his auctioneer’s licence.
Mr Black said the battle had cost him tens of thousands of dollars while pickleball associations had insurance funding, paid for by member premiums, to defend the case.
“I am the only one that knows the truth,” he said.
Originally published as Pickleball player Philip Black loses court appeal in bitter feud with Gold Coast club
