Vietnam’s Biggest Name Brought Collin Johns. Its Best Partnership Beat Them

The most famous partnership at the MB Ho Chi Minh City Open had been assembled for the occasion. The partnership that beat it had been built across a season.

Ly Hoang Nam and Collin Johns brought together two very different forms of authority. Ly is one of Vietnam’s most recognisable racket-sport athletes, a former national tennis No. 1 who reached the world’s top 250 before moving into pickleball. Johns arrived with a career spent at the highest level of American professional doubles, where his patience, court positioning and understanding of the right side helped form one of the most accomplished partnerships in the sport.

Their first tournament together gave PPA Tour Asia precisely the sort of story it should want. A major American player had not simply entered an Asian event and selected another familiar visitor. He had partnered the most prominent Vietnamese athlete in the field.

By Sunday, the experiment had carried them into the men’s doubles final.

They took the opening game 13–11 against Hien Truong and Quan Do. The score suggested that a new partnership, however recently arranged, might possess enough individual quality to overcome the understanding developed by a regular pair.

Over the next two games, that difference in understanding became harder to ignore.

Truong and Do won 11–6, 11–4. The match lasted almost 90 minutes, but its direction had shifted decisively. The longer it continued, the more the established Vietnamese pair appeared to know where the other would be, which balls belonged to whom and how to keep Johns and Ly from imposing the patterns that had taken them through the draw.

It was their third PPA Tour Asia title together, following victories in Hangzhou and Beijing. Truong also maintained his perfect record in men’s doubles finals.

That history changed the meaning of the result. This was not a home upset produced by a favourable afternoon or an unfamiliar opponent. Truong and Do entered the match with more shared success on this tour than the partnership facing them. Their nationality made the victory important to the home event. Their record made it credible before the first ball was struck.

Ly and Johns supplied the attraction. Truong and Do supplied the better team.

For Vietnamese pickleball, the distinction matters.

The Partnership Everybody Wanted to See

Johns and Ly had done enough before the final to prevent their partnership from being dismissed as a promotional arrangement.

Seeded fourth, they reached the last four against Eunggwon Kim and Hong Kit Wong. The top seeds had not yet won a title together, but both were established near the front of the Asian game. Wong had been one of the defining players of the PPA Tour Asia season, particularly in singles, while Kim had become a regular presence in the later rounds.

Ly and Johns beat them 11–5, 13–15, 11–7.

The match asked more of the new pairing than celebrity and reputation. They had to work through three games, absorb the loss of a tight second and find a way to recover in the decider. Reaching the final gave Johns his first genuine measure of how his methods would transfer alongside a partner formed outside the established American professional system. It gave Ly the chance to test his developing pickleball game beside one of the sport’s most exacting doubles specialists.

The appeal was obvious, although it would have been easy to read too much into it. Pickleball’s expansion has produced plenty of occasions when the arrival of a prominent American has been treated as evidence that a national scene has suddenly become serious. The visitor brings recognition, the local player receives reflected status and the tournament is presented as having joined the professional world.

Ho Chi Minh City resisted that tidy conclusion because the final refused to cooperate.

Truong and Do did not need Johns to demonstrate that a high-level men’s doubles game could be produced in Vietnam. They had already won on the tour. When presented with its most celebrated international partnership, they lost the first game, adjusted and beat it.

Their route to the final had also required a comeback. Robert Stirling and Kenta Miyoshi took the opening game of their semi-final before Truong and Do recovered to win. The same sequence followed in the championship match, against better-known opponents and with more attached to the result.

That capacity to change a match was one of the clearest signs of their maturity as a pair. Partnerships built for a single tournament can succeed through talent, especially when one player has Johns’s experience. Established teams possess something harder to improvise. They have seen each other struggle before. They know which patterns remain dependable when the original plan stops working.

By the deciding game, Truong and Do looked like the pair with those answers.

Luc Pham Changed the Men’s Singles Order

The doubles final carried the tournament’s most complete argument about Vietnamese progress, but it was supported elsewhere in the draw.

Hong Kit Wong arrived in Ho Chi Minh City seeking a fourth consecutive PPA Tour Asia men’s singles title. He had won in Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore, giving a young tour something it had not possessed in its opening weeks: an identifiable standard that everyone else had to reach.

Luc Pham removed him in the semi-finals.

Wong won the first game 11–5. Pham responded 11–7, 11–9, surviving the pressure of a close decider to end the tour’s most imposing active sequence.

The result deserves to stand independently of what happened the following day. Adam Harvey beat Pham 11–4, 11–4 in the final, and the score left little doubt about who played the better championship match. Harvey had lost to Wong in the Singapore final two weeks earlier. In his second PPA Tour Asia appearance, he converted another opportunity and established himself immediately as a significant presence on the circuit.

Pham’s defeat did not return his week to the level of a routine silver medal. He had changed the tournament by beating its form player.

Harvey had done something similar on the other side of the draw. In Singapore, Hien Truong led him 9–1 in the deciding game of their semi-final before Harvey recovered to win 11–9. Their rematch in Ho Chi Minh City was much shorter. Harvey won 11–4, 11–5.

Within two weeks, the men’s singles field had shifted. Wong, winner of the previous three events, did not reach the final. Truong, who had come within two points of beating Harvey in Singapore, was handled decisively. Pham advanced further than both, then discovered how abruptly Harvey could close the distance between a competitive run and a title.

This instability has become one of PPA Tour Asia’s more interesting qualities. Its leading order exists, but it has not hardened. Players arrive from different racket-sport backgrounds and enter a competition still young enough for rapid improvement to carry immediate consequences.

Pham did not win in Ho Chi Minh City. He did force the tour to reconsider who could.

Trang Huynh Found a Week Her Record Had Not Predicted

Vietnam’s presence was not confined to a handful of established male names.

Before Ho Chi Minh City, Trang Huynh had never advanced beyond the round of 16 at a PPA Tour Asia women’s singles event. She seemed likely to leave at that stage again when second seed Albie Huang took the first game of their opening match 12–10.

Huynh conceded one point across the next two.

She won 11–0, 11–1, a remarkable reversal against one of the leading players in the draw. It was not the last recovery she needed.

Ho Tam won the opening game of their quarter-final before Huynh responded 11–4, 11–8. Mihae Kwon then extended her through another three-game match in the semi-final. By the time Huynh reached Championship Sunday, her progress could no longer be explained by one dramatic result. She had repeatedly allowed a match to move against her without surrendering the larger contest.

Andie Dikosavljevic eventually stopped her. The Australian took the opening game of the final 11–2, but Huynh answered 11–9 and moved within one game of completing a home singles breakthrough that her previous tour record had given little reason to expect.

Dikosavljevic won the decider 11–7.

It was the first of her two titles that day. Alongside Yufei Long, she completed the women’s doubles tournament without losing a game. They beat Huang and Yu-chieh Hsieh 11–3, 11–5 in the semi-finals, then defeated Xiao Yi Wang-Beckvall and Nok Yiu Tang 12–10, 11–5 for the title.

Dikosavljevic had arrived after winning a triple crown at the PPA 250 Melbourne event. Her success in Vietnam offered its own evidence of how the wider PPA structure is beginning to work. A player can build competitive momentum in Australia, take it into the Asian tour and immediately face opponents emerging from several different national systems.

She was the most successful player of the weekend. Huynh’s silver may have told PPA Tour Asia something it did not already know.

Vietnamese depth could no longer be located entirely around Ly, Truong and the country’s most visible male converts. Huynh entered without a record that announced her as a probable finalist. Five matches later, she had made the strongest women’s singles run of her career and forced the eventual champion into a deciding game.

The Visitors Still Took Most of the Gold

The temptation after a tournament like this is to use every strong local result as evidence of a power shift. The medal table does not support it.

Players from outside Vietnam won four of the five titles. Harvey took men’s singles. Dikosavljevic won women’s singles and shared the women’s doubles title with Long. Wong recovered from his singles defeat and the end of his men’s doubles campaign to win mixed doubles with Lingwei Kong.

Wong and Kong had to earn it. Top seeds Nok Yiu Tang and Kim won the opening game of the final 11–4. Wong and Kong responded 11–8, 11–9, allowing Wong to leave Ho Chi Minh City with another title after the two events most closely associated with his rise had ended in defeat.

The champions came from the United States, Australia, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam. Some partnerships followed national lines and others crossed them. That mixture is no longer unusual enough to provide the article by itself. Several flags in a draw may show geographic reach. They tell us less about the quality of the competition those players create together.

Ho Chi Minh City provided a better test.

Could a player arriving from Australia carry domestic form successfully into Asia? Dikosavljevic did.

Could Harvey respond to losing the Singapore final by beating two Vietnamese opponents and winning his next event? He did.

Could Wong find another route to a title after his singles sequence ended? He did.

Could Vietnamese players affect the latter stages rather than decorate them? They did that repeatedly.

Pham removed the winner of the previous three men’s singles tournaments. Huynh reached her first women’s singles final and took the champion to three games. Ly reached the men’s doubles final alongside one of the most accomplished players in the sport. Truong and Do then beat them.

That last result gave the week its centre. The other performances prevented it from being mistaken for an isolated success.

Vietnam Supplied More Than the Audience

Vietnam has already become one of pickleball’s most energetic markets. Large participation figures, busy venues and intense interest can create the impression of a national scene moving quickly, but they do not guarantee competitive depth. A country can fill courts long before it produces players capable of controlling the final rounds of an international tournament.

The MB Ho Chi Minh City Open offered firmer evidence.

It did not show that Vietnam had overtaken the established professional game. Four titles were won by visiting players, and Harvey and Dikosavljevic were decisive champions. Johns remains important enough for his choice of partner to alter the profile of an event. Those facts should not be softened to make the local story sound larger.

Vietnam’s achievement was more convincing without the exaggeration.

Its players influenced who reached the finals, which leading names were removed and how the tournament’s main story concluded. They appeared on both sides of the net in the men’s doubles final. One partnership carried the novelty of a major cross-continental collaboration. The other brought the habits acquired through winning together.

That is a meaningful stage in the development of a national game. Attention still matters. Famous visitors can attract audiences, raise standards and give local players access to knowledge that would otherwise take longer to acquire. None of that requires the host country to remain a supporting character.

Johns gave Ly a fascinating examination of how far his doubles game has moved. Ly gave Johns an entry into the most closely watched partnership of the tournament. Their run justified the attention and may prove more useful than a title won against a weaker field.

The final belonged to two players who already understood how to win together.

Ly and Johns had the celebrated experiment. Truong and Do had the better partnership.

After almost 90 minutes, that was still what counted.

Further Reading

• Kuala Lumpur Open Signals PPA Asia’s New Reality
• Rika Fujiwara’s Pickleball Reinvention After Tennis Success
• Phuc Huynh Wins Historic All-Asian Final at APP Kuala Lumpur

Chris Beaumont

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…

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