ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Bentley Cup: Price And Gould Make It Three In A Row by Rob Dinerman

Buoyed by their title-taking exploits in both New York and Chicago earlier this month, and possibly angered by the new ISDA rankings released just last week signifying their displacement from the top team ISDA ranking by Chris Walker and Clive Leach, Ben Gould and Paul Price overpowered Walker and Leach in three emphatic and single-figure (15-6, 9 and 6) games in the final round of the Bentley Cup, hosted as always at the Cambridge Club in downtown Toronto. Price and Gould, who lost to Walker and Leach in both St. Louis and Baltimore to start the season, have now not only won the past three tournaments but defeated Walker and Leach in each of those events as well. As a result of its non-ranking status (due to its round-robin format comprised of three teams in each of two pools prior to the final, as opposed to being run as a straight-draw), the Bentley Cup’s outcome will not dislodge the Walker/Leach tandem from their newly-acquired standing. But popular regard as the No. 1 team is often as much a matter of public perception as it is one of statistical data, and there is no question that Price and Gould --- who failed to convert safe-appearing leads against Walker/Leach in both their St. Louis semi (2-0, 14-9!) and Baltimore final (2-1, 11-8), and who nearly lost the Big Apple Open final to Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg after two fourth-game match-balls got away and they fell behind 11-9 in the fifth before winning 15-11 --- have now re-established themselves as the top team, or at least as the “team to beat” coming into the remaining tour stops in Wilmington and Vancouver prior to the Christmas/New Year’s holiday break. Walker and Leach defeated both the Willie Hosey/Josh McDonald and the Mudge/Berg pairings en route to winning their pool, while Price and Gould did the same in theirs to Gary Waite/Preston Quick and ’02 Bentley Cup finalists Michael Pirnak/Mark Chaloner, who led Waite/Quick two games to love before losing the third game in a best-of-nine tiebreaker and getting a bad break late in the fifth when at 12-13 Pirnak hit what appeared to be a winner, only to have a lunging Quick get just enough of his racquet on the ball to have it trickle just above the tin to make the score 14-12 instead of 13-all, preceding a Pirnak tin early in the next point that ended the match. Waite and Quick would then have faced Mudge and Berg in the third-place playoff, but the latter reinjured the right hamstring muscle that has plagued his throughout the fall during the four-game loss to Walker/Leach and was consequently forced to default the match for third place. Jamie Bentley, head pro at the host club, defending champion after partnering Price to last year’s title from 1-2, 9-12 against Leach and Scott Butcher, and son of the man after whom the tournament is named, had planned on making this Bentley Cup his pro-tour swan song after more than two decades of high-level accomplishment in doubles squash. However, a recurrence of the knee injury that has sidelined him for most of calendar 2007 forced him to withdraw --- yet another instance of how rarely top-level athletes in almost any sport get to go out completely on their terms --- though this downbeat conclusion to a stellar career does not detract from his many accomplishments (the 13 different partners with whom Bentley has won pro doubles tournaments over the years is a record by a wide margin) and did not prevent all of the finalists from paying deserved tribute to him as the main recurring theme of the post-match trophy presentation ceremony.

Draw