Gold in Kuala Lumpur, Finals in San Clemente

Noé Khlif is having the kind of year players dream about. A few weeks ago, the Frenchman lifted the Major League Pickleball championship with the New Jersey 5s in New York. This week he flew halfway around the world to Kuala Lumpur and came home with two more medals: gold in men’s doubles, silver in men’s singles, at the PPA Tour Asia 1000 Leapmotor Kuala Lumpur Cup.

The doubles gold was the one he had been chasing for two years on the PPA Tour. He finally found it in Malaysia, alongside Gabriel Tardio.

The funny part is that Khlif wasn’t even supposed to be there. His calendar was already full. Another tournament meant another very long flight, and — more importantly — another week away from his wife Jen and their children. Then Tardio asked him to make the trip. Khlif said yes. After the tournament, he thanked Tardio publicly for talking him into it.

There is something fitting about winning it with Tardio. At the end of August, the two stood on opposite sides of the net in New York: Khlif playing for the 5s, Tardio trying to stop them from winning the MLP title. A few weeks later they walked into Kuala Lumpur as the top seeds in men’s doubles — on the same side of the court.

The road nearly ended early. Against Pengsu Yong and Syed Uzair Sufi, Khlif and Tardio fell behind 10–0 in the opening game. One point away from being pickled. They avoided that particular humiliation but dropped the game 11–3. Then the match flipped completely: 11–5, 11–1. The scare passed. The tournament didn’t.

For French pickleball, this matters. Khlif’s season — an MLP title in New York, now PPA gold in Asia — is the loudest statement yet that France belongs in the professional game, not just in the village gymnasium.

Meanwhile, back in America, the season’s last big act is underway. The CIBC PPA Tour Finals, presented by ROAR Organic, opened Wednesday at Life Time Rancho San Clemente in Southern California.

The format is pool play. In each of the five events — men’s and women’s singles, men’s and women’s doubles, mixed doubles — the players are split into two pools, the ATP Pool and the Erne Pool. Two players or teams from each pool advance to the semifinals. By Friday, every match is win-or-go-home arithmetic.

In women’s doubles, the top seeds had to survive a scare of their own. Anna Leigh Waters and Catherine Parenteau lost Thursday to Jorja Johnson and Lacy Schneemann — an upset that blew the ATP Pool wide open. On Friday they answered: 11–1, 7–11, 11–5 over Tina Pisnik and Parris Todd.

That left three teams at 2–1 with only two semifinal spots. The tiebreaker was total point differential. Waters and Parenteau took the pool at plus-24. Johnson and Schneemann finished second at plus-11. Pisnik and Todd, at plus-5, were eliminated — along with Mary Brascia and Meghan Dizon.

In men’s doubles, Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin booked their semifinal spot with an 11–4, 11–6 win over Dylan Frazier and Pablo Tellez. Both teams came in at 1–1. The winner advanced. The loser went home.

The win was also a bounce-back. A day earlier, Staksrud and Patriquin had suffered their first defeat in twelve matches as a partnership: 6–11, 11–4, 11–6 to Tyson McGuffin and Andrei Daescu, who moved to 2–0 in the Erne Pool and reached the semifinals regardless of Friday’s result.

New partnerships are the week’s subplot. Dekel Bar and Christian Alshon, playing their first tournament together, opened with an 11–1, 11–7 win over JW Johnson and Gabe Tardio. Alshon suggested the unfamiliarity might even be an advantage. Frazier and Tellez, also new, earned their first win as a pair — 11–8, 12–10 over Matt Wright and James Ignatowich — with Frazier playing the left side, a look rarely seen in his two years beside Johnson.

In the women’s doubles Erne Pool, Mari Humberg and Jessie Irvine opened with a 7–11, 11–6, 11–3 comeback over Tyra Black and Allyce Jones, finding their third-shot drives after dropping the first game. Anna Bright and Rachel Rohrabacher needed only six minutes to pickle Callie Smith and Lucy Kovalova 11–0 in game one, then climbed out of a 1–5 hole in game two to close it 11–8.

All of this follows the PPA’s last regular-season stop, the Veolia Sacramento Open, which belonged — as so many do — to Anna Leigh Waters. Triple crown: gold in singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles.

The numbers were absurd. In singles, Waters didn’t lose a game across five matches — and conceded 22 points in total. That is an average scoreline of 11–2.2. In women’s doubles with Parenteau, again no games lost: 29 points conceded in five matches, an average of 11–2.6.

Mixed doubles, with Ben Johns, was the closest thing to a contest. Still no games lost in five matches — but in half the games played, the opponents reached eight points or more. Dominance, but not excessive.

What the Finals will decide is the shape of the offseason conversation. Pool play sorts the contenders; the semifinals and finals this weekend write the season’s last lines. The broadcast is on Pickleballtv and YouTube.

And the French thread runs through all of it. Khlif’s Kuala Lumpur double arrives in the same season that France’s tennis federation took charge of the sport at home and village clubs started converting courts by the dozen. The pipeline from the salle polyvalente to the PPA podium is getting shorter.

Two weeks, two continents, one Frenchman with three new medals, and a tour heading into its winter rest. Pickleball’s center of gravity keeps moving. This week it sat — briefly — in Kuala Lumpur and San Clemente at the same time.