ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Capture U. S. Pro Championship by Rob Dinerman

December 3 --- Trailing two games to one in the semifinals against their season-long tormentors Clive Leach and Chris Walker, who had won all three of their prior meetings this fall, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg rallied to take the fourth and fifth games 15-11, 15-13 (after leading 14-9), then made that comeback effort stick a few hours later by defeating John Russell and Preston Quick 17-14 15-10 15-7 in the final round of the $ 40,000 U. S. Pro Championships, hosted as always by the Wilmington Country Club. Russell and Quick had survived a harrowing semi of their own, seeing a two games to love lead vanish against Paul Price and Ben Gould and trailing late in the fifth before forcing a best-of-nine tiebreaker, which they proceeded to win 18-15. Both matches ended on daring reverse-corners from the left wall, the one that Walker tinned at 13-14 and the one that Russell nailed from near the back wall at 4-2, set-five that bounced twice before Price could react to it. The hectic Saturday action in Delaware capped off what was in a number of ways the most noteworthy and competitive of the six ISDA tourneys, five of them “ranking”, that have occurred so far this season, with one more event scheduled in Vancouver this coming weekend before the tour has a month-long break for the holidays. It was the first time this autumn that both semis have gone five games, and the first that as many as four main-draw matches required a fifth game – Russell/Quick were dead-even midway through the fifth game of their first-round match against qualifiers Michael Ferreira and Whitten Morris, while Walker and Leach also won their quarterfinal in five over Willie Hosey and Ayman Karim. This was also the first time this season that neither the Price/Gould nor Walker/Leach teams made it to the finals; indeed, neither team had lost to any team other than the other one before this weekend, when BOTH teams did so. Furthermore, Russell and Quick had never defeated Price/Gould prior to this weekend (though they sure came close in a Heights Casino semi last February before falling 15-13 in the fifth), during which Mudge (who won this U. S. Pro title four times in the early- and mid-2000’s while playing the right wall as Gary Waite’s partner, including last year) joined Quick as the only players in ISDA history to win ISDA ranking-tournaments on each wall. He and Berg (a U. S. Pro finalist with Hosey in ’02 and ’03 and with Walker in both January and December of ’06) had previously lost to Walker/Leach in the semis in both Baltimore and Chicago, as well as in a Cambridge Club round-robin Pool match, and Mudge had also fallen short against the two talented British stars in the season-opening tour stop in St. Louis, which he played with Hosey while Berg was sidelined with the hamstring injury that lingered throughout most of the past two months. But for this weekend, Berg seemed fully recovered, and the return of his trademark fleetness appeared to have a psychologically uplifting impact on both himself and his partner as well, one which enabled them first to surmount their 2-1 deficit in the semis and then to gradually pull away in the closing laps of the final as well. The Wilmington event has frequently been characterized by changes in the prevailing ISDA power structure, possibly abetted by the cooler and hence more shot-making-oriented court temperatures that exist there compared with most of the other ISDA arenas, and it will be interesting to see whether the aforementioned series of “firsts” prove to be one-shot-wonders or a harbinger of a more enduring realignment among the tour’s best teams as the battle for No. 1 moves into the winter months.

Draw