ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: April 04/07

The fairly reliable patterns that had emerged during the autumn and winter portions of what had become a somewhat predictable ISDA 2006-07 tour were tossed completely asunder in recent weeks in the wake of a series of physical maladies besetting top players and a host of completely unforeseen results among the top tier. As a result of the foregoing, it might well be the case that the competitive picture is more wide open entering April than it has been at any juncture in the history of the ISDA, now in the eighth year of its existence.

In past years, the late-April presence of the Kellner Cup, with its $70,000-80,000 purse and bright-lights-of-Manhattan location, has served almost as a postseason play-offs to culminate an ISDA campaign, a phenomenon that would have been especially alluring in light of what occurred on court late last month in Denver and Philadelphia, where a 10-day stretch saw each of the top two teams suffer their first opening-round defeats of the season, the reversal of recent trends in several well-established rivalries, no fewer than four teams attain previously unreached levels of an ISDA ranking-tournament draw and the presence of one player in the winner’s circle for the first time in his career.

At the Hashim Khan Invitational, Paul Price and Ben Gould, a tour-leading five-time champions (in Baltimore, New York, Greenwich, Boston and Rye) in this their first year as partners, fell for the first time in the opening round when Price suffered a back injury and had to default in mid-match against Matt Jensen and Jeff Mulligan, who thereby ascended to their first-ever semi, at which point they were eliminated by Preston Quick and John Russell. Down below, Chris Walker and Viktor Berg, who had been having a slightly disappointing second season as partners, finally played up to the formidable standard they had set last season with a comeback five-game semifinal win over Gary Waite and Damien Mudge (whose 15-4 collapse in the fifth game may have presaged the calamity that awaited them six days later), following which, and for the first time after three prior losses this season, they prevailed over Russell and Quick in a four-game final, Walker’s second final-round win over Quick that weekend, preceded as it was by his triumph a day earlier in the Mixed final over Quick and his younger sister Meredeth.
The ramifications of what occurred at the Denver Athletic Club were still being felt a week later at the U. S. National Doubles, held in one of squash’s true cathedrals, the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, the first time the members there had hosted a men’s professional squash tournament. They got an eyeful, too, partly abetted by the replacement of a still-sidelined Price by Willie Hosey (whose own regular partner, Jamie Bentley, has been plagued by an injured arm since February) as Gould’s partner and the worsening during the interceding week of the heavy head cold that had afflicted Waite throughout the weekend in Colorado.

That said, no one could have predicted the brutally curt 3-0 Friday-night ouster from the draw of defending champions Waite and Mudge (whose only previous first-round loss had come more than six years ago) at the hands of Michael Pirnak and Tyler Millard, who then stood at 1-1, 12-8 in their subsequent semi against Russell/Quick before the latter pairing salvaged that game in a tiebreaker and went on to take the fourth game. Nor could anyone have thought when Clive Leach and Scott Butcher (frequent semifinalists this season who had never progressed beyond that point in ranking-tournament play) forged their way to a 12-5 fifth-game semifinal advantage over Hosey and Gould, that a furious late rally would necessitate a best-of-nine tiebreaker to resolve the match. A trio of Hosey drop-shot winners enabled him and his first-time partner to advance to 4-2, set-5, triple-match-ball, only to be thwarted on, sequentially, an out-of-the-blue Leach overhead volley into the nick, a tin-defying Butcher reverse-corner winner and, at 17-all, a shallow Leach cross-court that stayed too low for Hosey to return.

Both final-round teams were in the first full season of their respective partnerships, and each was seeking its first ISDA tournament win; in fact, and for the first time in the decade of the 2000’s, none of the four Merion semifinalists had ever won an ISDA event as a unit. Leach has won ISDA events with Blair Horler in ’03 and with Hosey in ’04, and Quick combined with Gould to win three ISDA events last season, but neither Russell (0 for 4 in prior finals this season with Quick) nor Butcher (a runner-up in the ’05 Canadian Pro with Price and in the prestigious but non-ranking’06 Cambridge Club Doubles with Leach) had ever won an ISDA title before their April 1st Sunday summit.

But on Merion’s fabled exhibition gallery court, just as Russell and Quick had seen their three-match winning streak against Walker/Berg snapped in the Denver final seven days earlier, so Butcher and Leach, spent from their thrilling but enervating simultaneous-match-point win over Hosey/Gould, saw their two-match (in the Big Apple Open and Greenwich quarters) winning streak over Russell/Quick come to an end in a somewhat clear-cut three-game final that completed the Quick family sweep initiated by Meredeth just prior to the Men’s final when her double-boast winner at simultaneous match-point in the Women’s final brought her and Fiona Geaves a 17-16 fifth-game victory (from 11-14 and love-two, set-three, SIX match-points-against saved in all) over a dismayed Narelle Krizek and Steph Hewitt.

All of these unusual developments would ordinarily serve to perfectly set the stage for a climactic showdown at the Kellner Cup, with plenty of money and ranking points up for grabs. But the Kellner Cup, an annual event throughout the seven editions (from 2000 through 2006) of its lifespan, has decided to go to an every-other-year format, giving the current tour a decidedly mid-winter-loaded character (with the $ 40,000 mid-January North American Open and the $ 100,000 biennial Briggs Cup three weeks later offering by far the largest purses of the entire season), leaving the spring schedule somewhat barren, with only tour stops in Long Island and San Francisco left on the ledger, and depriving what clearly is a rapidly expanding band of doubles squash aficionados the chance to savor what would otherwise be shaping up as a captivating stretch run.