What Ben Johns and the Eye-Gate Debacle Tells Us About the UPA’s Investment in MLP

Drama is good for the sport of the pickleball. Storylines that go beyond the on-court action is what keeps a sport as a topic of conversation. There is a line to all of this. All publicity is good publicity, until it is not. 

The Ben Johns saga from the weekend, Eye-Gate or Lighting-Gate if you want to label it, exemplifies a conversation that is not good for the sport of pickleball. While we can often overstate how much any single issue will negatively impact the long-term appeal of a sport, that shouldn’t diminish an issue being a very bad look in the moment. 

For those of you who may have missed it, Ben Johns and Collin Johns withdrew from the remainder of the MLP Columbus event after a deflating loss in their first match to the Atlanta Bouncers. Despite the women of the Carolina Hogs winning their game, Ben Johns looked mopey and miserable as he zombie walked his way to losses in men’s and mixed. This was followed up by a gloomy Collin Johns loss in mixed. 

Shortly after the loss, news came out that the Johns brothers were out for the rest of the event, citing an eye issue related to lighting, which was being treated as an injury situation. Martin Emmrich and, brand new UPA signed player, Ross Whitaker, were tabbed to fill in for the Johns brothers. 

The reaction to the withdrawal was met with near universal displeasure form the pickleball community. Zane Navratil was the most outspoken pro player on the issue, which initiated a flurry of posts from Mr. Ben Johns on X defending his actions. In short, Ben cited safety due to insufficient lighting in the venue.

In our view (and most others share this sentiment), there’s really no defence to the decision of the Johns brothers. Although Ben has long been known to have an issue at indoor venues due to lighting, pulling out because of a safety/lighting issue after giving minimal effort does not compute, in our eyes. With brother Collin out there using eyewear, it is an easy solution to deal with the safety aspect, even if Ben illogically asserts it as a band-aid fix to the broader lighting issue.  

Neither of them addressed in their Instagram story statements how Collin gets to claim a safety issue when he has never had an issue with vision indoors and has been wearing glasses for months at this point.

It is very telling that their close friend and business partner, Dekel Bar, is the only pro player we have seen publicly support the stance the Johns brothers have taken.

There were tanking concerns (i.e. not giving any effort) with Ben at MLP brought up last year following the Utah event that took place indoors, but it is a whole other beast to simply choose not to compete. 

As Zane pointed out to Ben on X, the more pressing concern with this whole withdrawal situation is the tanking aspect of things. Ben stopped responding on X when Zane brought the conversation back to the tanking issue.

None of their logic makes good sense if you take 2 minutes to analyze it because it isn’t really a lighting or a safety issue. Sure, the lighting might make it harder for Ben to play, but that should not stop the brothers from giving a full effort on the court. If safety were an issue, Ben wouldn’t be lazily standing at the kitchen while an overhead is being hit right at him.

Not surprisingly, their statements do not present any self-reflection or insight on the ongoing effort/tanking problem.

It goes without saying that he should try harder when he being paid very handsomely to take the court. Of course, it is up to Ben to to handle his brand however he wants on court as the public shaming of all his moping clearly has not stopped him from doing it. He knows what his contract allows for and what he can get away with from his sponsors – we would be curious how JOOLA feels about this latest saga. 

For us, the broader concern is that the Johns brothers felt comfortable enough to withdraw using such absurd reasoning.

When we refer to Ben’s comfortability, we are mainly referencing his standing in pro pickleball and the team he is playing for. The Carolina Hogs are owned by former PPA majority owner and current UPA board member, Tom Dundon. As a primary investor in the merged UPA entity, logic would dictate that Dundon would have an issue with one of its marquee players not only tanking, but puling out on his team for an issue that would make pickleball a laughing stock if any mainstream outlet were to pick up this story. 

In theory, Dundon should not stand for this. It’s bad for the Carolina Hogs. It is bad for MLP. It is bad for the business pro pickleball. 

And yet, here we are. 

We know that Tom Dundon and Ben Johns are very close. This is not a secret. Ben has been Dundon’s guy and Ben has remained loyal to him since Dundon has entered the pro pickleball landscape. 

Prior to the 2024 MLP draft, it was common knowledge that Tom Dundon was going to spend whatever it took to get Ben Johns. It’s probably the reason why he was able to get him for less than the maximum $1 million auction price, which frighteningly left the Hogs with room to spend a little more money to put a good team around Ben. Instead, Dundon opted to spend next to nothing and put together a sorry excuse for a team around Ben for MLP in 2024. 

In 2025, the Hogs spent big money, most of it on Ben, to keep their 3 incumbent players – Ben, Collin and Kaitlyn Christian – and then chose to spent the absolute bare minimum on rounding out their roster. 

You could chalk it up the decisions by Dundon to poor roster construction, as is the case with a number of MLP teams. However, the evidence would suggest that Dundon’s franchise is not simply suffering from the symptom of poor roster construction.

By all accounts, all the right things have been said post-merger from the PPA side about everyone at the UPA being on one team and wanting the best for both the MLP and PPA aspects of the business. On its face, we would expect everyone to want both parts of the business to succeed when the merger meant that the parties have a financial stake in all of it.

The thing is, the actions haven’t matched the words. 

Dundon’s handling of his franchise is a prime example of an original PPA investor being far less invested in the MLP side of the merged business. Except for Ben Johns, Dundon spends next to nothing on the team and has shown next to zero interest in making it successful. Their coach and GM in 2023 and 2024 was Dave Fleming, who was already employed by the PPA/UPA in a broadcasting capacity. Our understanding is that Dundon does not cover any of the travel or accommodations for the players of his team either. 

If Dundon truly wanted MLP to succeed, he would not be handling the Hogs in the way that he has. The two-fold move of maintaining control of Ben in MLP but keeping him in purgatory by surrounding him with a sub-par roster is undoubtedly bad business for MLP. Door Dash cannot be happy right now that they are the presenting sponsor of a league where the #1 player in the world tanks matches and then withdraws from the rest of the event due to a lighting issue. You would think that would concern one of the primary investors of the league. But it doesn’t appear to concern Dundon at all. 

You could chalk it up to simply being frugal as Dundon was voted as the worst owner in the NHL in an agents survey conducted by the Athletic earlier this year. However, Dundon is a guy who should have as much incentive as anyone to help the league succeed yet the investment in his team is the least of any franchise in MLP.

In a world filled with full-baked, half baked and barely baked conspiracy theories, we don’t throw around thoughts like this haphazardly. It’s also not something that we want to be true. But we can only avoid talking about this for so long and this Eye-Gate debacle is the straw breaking our backs. 

There are other factors that could lead someone to the conclusion that the UPA is not committed to MLP. The man who Dundon purchased his majority interest in the PPA from and current UPA CEO, Connor Pardoe, has had questionable at best investment in MLP post-merger as well. He spent $0 of real money on the 2024 draft and somewhat lucked his way into a frisky, fun team that distracted from a tank job of his own for the 2024 draft. The NY Hustlers, owned primarily by UPA board member, Jason Stein, sold the farm to recoup cash prior to the 2025 draft. 

These are not the actions of key UPA personnel who believe in and want the MLP product to succeed.

The problem for the UPA group is that they can’t really throw in the towel on MLP. There are too many big hitting business people and celebrities as part of these ownership groups that have invested a lot of real money in this league. 

Interestingly, Brooklyn Pickleball Team owner and UPA board member, Al Tylis, has been as invested in MLP as anyone out there. He wants to win at all costs and continues to invest in the league as much as any other franchise owner.

So, even though it is understandable that any individual team owner would not want to burn large sums of money in the short-term, it is less understandable to knowingly put a poor product on the court when a small baseline level of additional investment could ensure basic competency. This is well within the control of each franchise owner and it is troubling that certain teams with deep pockets are choosing not to do so. 

It’s particularly evident with Dundon’s Hogs where he only needed to spend a little bit extra in 2024 or 2025 to put a capable team around Ben. Instead, he has basically paid money to ensure his prized toy remains under his control while also ensuring that Ben has about the worst MLP experience he possibly could have.

If Tom Dundon cared at all about MLP, wouldn’t he have called Ben and told him that he better get on the court and play hard regardless of the lighting issue? Ben would not bite the hand that has fed him for the past 3 plus years but, obviously, Dundon did not do anything about Ben’s withdrawal from Columbus.

We don’t want to be out here criticizing the league and how it is being run. Similar to what Zane Navratil expressed, we love MLP and want it to succeed, but we hate to see the direction things are trending. 

The action or inaction that UPA takes against Ben and Carolina could be very telling when it comes to their investment in MLP. It’s a huge conflict of interest for the league to have to assess penalties against UPA board member owned teams (technically, Matt Turney from Dundon Capital Partners is the UPA board rep) and/or a key stakeholder’s most prized player possession (i.e. Ben Johns). 

The official statement from MLP’s X account followed by Connor Pardoe’s response attempting to temporarily deflect from the elephant in the room gives us little confidence that they are treating this as a serious issue, particularly when Pardoe is out here liking the Instagram post from Pickleball.com about the Johns withdrawal.

We’ll have to expect that some kind of penalty will be assessed to Ben. It will be needed, at a minimum, to placate an entire group of owners that will almost certainly be up in arms if something is not done. California Black Bears owner and OG MLP investor, Ritchie Tuazon, likely represents the sentiment of most other team owners.

As much as Eye-Gate or Lighting-Gate is a terrible reflection on Ben Johns as one of the main faces for a burgeoning sport that is far bigger than one individual and his brother, it may be more concerning for the outlook of MLP that Ben Johns has been enabled to the point where he feels safe enough to take such drastic action at an MLP event.

We guess we’ll wait to see what is done about this situation by the UPA brass but, as you can already tell, we don’t have much reason to trust that the action taken by the UPA will change our current opinion about the UPA’s investment in MLP as a long-term product, or lack thereof.

As much as we hope that is not the case, our optimism wanes with each passing day. 

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