On the 2 November episode of The World Pickleball Podcast, Gordon Watson brought me the news that JW Johnson had gone to No. 1 on DUPR. I allowed that it was “interesting stuff”. Then I said what I always say about ratings: “it all comes back down to, for me,” what you have actually won. Any tennis player, I argued, “would quite happily trade as many weeks of their number one status in the world” for a major. And then the line I have had to live with since Sunday: “what’s he winning consistently week in, week out?”
Six days later he won the biggest title on the PPA calendar. Two games down, alongside a 15-year-old, against the pair who had just knocked out Ben Johns and Gabriel Tardio. So I owe him a column. Not an apology, exactly. A column.
The question was fair when I asked it
Let me defend the pundit before I eat his words.
DUPR rewards winning games and matches against strong opposition. It does not hand out trophies. When the rating put Johnson top, The Kitchen Pickleball and Dink Authority both described him as slightly ahead of Johns. The trophy cabinet told a different story.
His last PPA Tour title before Worlds came at the Daytona Beach Open on 21 December 2025, where he won men’s doubles with Augustus Ge and mixed with his sister Jorja. Then 2026 happened. On the PPA Tour’s own tournament record, he reached five finals before Dallas and lost all five. Men’s doubles with CJ Klinger at Cape Coral in February and Sacramento in April. Mixed with Jorja at Sacramento, at Nationals in Cary in September and at the Chicago Cup in October. Add third places at the Masters and Greater Zion and you have a season of nearly.
The year before was no kinder on the biggest stage. At Worlds 2025 he lost both finals: men’s doubles with Klinger to Hayden Patriquin and Federico Staksrud, and mixed with Jorja to Johns and Anna Leigh Waters 11-7, 11-4, 11-7.
That was the gap I meant. A rating that says you are the best player in the world, sitting beside ten and a half months without a PPA title. Gordon put the opportunity more generously than I put the problem. Worlds, he said, “would be a great opportunity for him to translate that number one DUPR ranking into a world title.”
Sunday answered it
He did exactly that, and in about the most awkward way possible for me.
I won’t replay the final; our Championship Sunday report has it game by game. The scoreline is the whole argument. Johnson and Tama Shimabukuro, the No. 4 seeds, lost the first two games 5-11, 5-11 to Andrei Daescu and Christian Alshon, then won the next three 11-4, 11-8, 11-4. Daescu and Alshon had beaten Johns and Tardio the day before. There was no easy road and they did not take one.
It was their first title together, in what The Kitchen Pickleball counts as their fifth tournament as a pair. Three weeks earlier they had lost the Brisbane final to Tardio and Patriquin 3-11, 11-6, 11-7, which we wrote up at the time as part of the sport’s partner-swapping chaos. By Dallas, the partnership was the story.
The contrast with a year ago is the part I keep coming back to. At Worlds 2025 he left with two silvers. At Worlds 2026 he left with a silver and a gold. One medal’s difference, and all the difference in how the week will be remembered.
Johnson’s own account was unglamorous, which suits him. “Every single tournament we just get more and more comfortable with each other and used to each other’s games,” he told The Kitchen Pickleball. “That’s really helped us the past couple events and this week especially.”
Fifteen, and a co-champion
It would be easy, and lazy, to write this as Johnson’s title with a teenager attached. It wasn’t. Shimabukuro is 15. A year ago, according to The Kitchen Pickleball, he was at Worlds on the Major League Pickleball Junior All-Star team. This year he won it, against two of the best men’s doubles players on the tour, from 0-2.
His version of the comeback was a lot more fun than his partner’s. “JW went crazy at the end of that match, and I think I lost my voice hyping him up.”
Dink Authority described Johnson as a serious, focused player who rarely gives an emotion away, and reported that after the last point he could not stop smiling. One of them shouts, one of them finally smiles. That sounds like a partnership that knows what each half is for. If you want the case for Shimabukuro as a singles player in his own right, we made it in Hunter Johnson v Tama Shimabukuro is the rivalry men’s singles needs. This one belongs to both of them.
What changed
The honest answer is that nobody outside the camp can prove it. But the people inside it have a theory.
Julie Johnson, his mother and coach, pointed at the Major League Pickleball season. “The Dallas Flash have been great to him and have created a network of people around him who he really trusts and enjoys being around, and he loves the new partnership with Tama,” she told The Kitchen Pickleball.
The Flash numbers at least don’t argue with her. Johnson and Ge were 8-6 as the Dallas men’s pair before the roster moves that turned the Flash season, and 9-2 after them. Results alone cannot prove why a partnership improves. They can tell you that it did.
And there were signs on the PPA side too, if you looked past the final scores. At Nationals in September he and Jorja beat Waters and Johns 4-11, 11-9, 11-6 in the semi-final, the second year running the siblings had beaten them in Cary. They lost the final. That was rather the pattern.
The case against him has not gone away
Now the counter-case, which I’d rather make myself than have made for me.
Earlier the same day, Johnson and Jorja lost the mixed final to Johns and Waters 9-11, 11-6, 11-9, 3-11, 11-4. They led 7-1 in the third game and lost it. Put that beside the men’s doubles and his 2026 PPA record reads seven finals, one title. Four of the six defeats came in mixed. Four of the six, too, were against a team with Ben Johns in it, including the Chicago Cup final a month earlier, which Johns and Waters won 11-4, 11-4. Sunday’s mixed final was far closer than that. Closer is still second.
That is the uncomfortable thread through his year. He keeps getting to the last match. The last match keeps having Johns in it.
Then there is the table the PPA actually uses. The World Pickleball Rankings are a points list built on 52 weeks of results, not a rating, and on them Johnson was sixth going into Worlds. Worlds was worth up to 3,000 points. On the PPA’s current list he is fifth, on 11,294.4 points. Johns leads on 18,210. Worlds moved Johnson up one place. It did not move him into the same postcode.
So he is No. 1 on DUPR and fifth on the PPA table. Both are true. They measure different things, and anyone telling you either one settles the “best player in the world” argument is selling a rating or a ranking.
Daytona is the real test
My question was not “can he win a big one?” It was “week in, week out”. One Sunday, however good, is one week.
The next one comes quickly. The Proton Daytona Beach Open runs from 16 to 22 November at Holly Hill, Florida, where last December he won both men’s doubles and mixed. Defending a title is a different job from ending a drought. The pressure moves from “can he?” to “can he again?”, and that is the question that separates a great week from a great player.
If he wins there, or deep into the start of 2027, I’ll happily stop asking. If Worlds turns out to be the outlier in a year of silver, the rating will start to look like a very accurate measure of a man who keeps reaching finals and losing them.
The verdict
He answered the question I asked. Partly.
He won the biggest title on the PPA calendar, from two games down, with a 15-year-old partner who played like a co-champion because he was one. That is not a rating doing the talking. That is a trophy. Fair play to him.
But I asked what he was winning week in, week out, and the honest scoreboard says one title from seven finals this year. Daytona starts next week. I’ll be watching the week in. Then the week out.
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine, published by World Pickleball Media Ltd. He follows the global game closely, reporting on news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball…
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