ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: May 08/08

When Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg rallied from 1-2, 8-11 to overtake Matt Jenson and Clive Leach this past Sunday afternoon in the final round of the early-May Sea Island Open, the 15th and final sanctioned tournament on the ISDA 2007-08 schedule, they thereby captured their tour-leading eighth title of the season ---including five in a row during the first three months of calendar 2008 --- each of which (namely Wilmington, Boston, Greenwich, Cleveland, Brooklyn, Denver, the mid-town Manhattan Kellner Cup and Sea Island) had occurred during the 10 post-Thanksgiving events, in all 10 of which the first-year Mudge/Berg pairing had attained at least the final round.

The comeback victory required them to win a best-of-nine fourth-set tiebreaker session preceding an anticlimactic 15-8 fifth game by which time Jenson had become immobilized with the quadriceps cramps in both legs that had begun late in the fourth. It marked the fifth time (four of them in finals) in which the eventual champion was able to surmount substantial late-game deficits in what would have been the close-out game of the match --- Leach and his regular season-long partner Chris Walker trailed Paul Price and Ben Gould 2-1, 14-9 in a season-opening St. Louis semi and a week later were again behind 2-1, 11-8 in the Baltimore final; Price/Gould ran off the last six points from 9-11 against Mudge/Berg in the early-November Big Apple Open final, then led Mudge/Berg 2-1, 12-9 in the late-April Kellner Cup final a week prior to Sea Island before letting two championship-points get away in that fourth-set tiebreaker and dropping a fifth-set tiebreaker as well.

That Kellner Cup final, given the magnitude of this biennial event on every front --- the $70,000 purse was the season’s biggest by far, and its late-April placement on the schedule effectively constituted a postseason-playoff counterpart to football’s Super Bowl or baseball’s World Series, plus this year the No. 1 season-end team ranking hinged on the outcome as well --- represented the most important match of the season, and perhaps of the last SEVERAL seasons, and the above-noted number of finals that came down to just a few points either way compellingly confirms how little separates the few teams that occupy the top tier of the ISDA circuit.

Price and Gould swept through four of the five November/December tourneys (in New York, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver, with the lone loss a fifth-set tiebreaker Wilmington semi at the hands of Preston Quick and John Russell), and also reached the finals in the Maryland Club Open, the North American Open, the Johnson (in Brooklyn) and the Kellner Cup, while evenly dividing their six head-to-head match-ups against Mudge/Berg. In so doing, Price and Gould, the No. 1 ranked team in their first season together in 2006-07, clearly established themselves as this season’s second-best team, ahead of Walker/Leach (whose October pair of titles in St. Louis and Baltimore were augmented by runner-up finishes in Chicago, Toronto and Boston) and of Quick and Russell, who were finalists in Wilmington and at the Denver Athletic Club, where Quick learned squash as a youngster.

This fearsome foursome comprised a true aristocracy throughout the ISDA campaign, going a virtually upset-proof 60-1 against the rest of the field and discompassionately rendering the quarterfinal rounds for the most part the round most devoid of excitement or suspense as to the matches’ outcomes. The lone loss sustained by any of the top four teams occurred in a Big Apple Open quarter, when Russell and Quick were upended by Willie Hosey (a St. Louis finalist with Mudge while Berg was recovering from a late-September hamstring pull that lingered through most of the autumn) and Scott Butcher, for whom this performance represented the swan song of his praiseworthy seven-year ISDA career, coming as it did just weeks before he and his wife permanently returned to their native Australia to await the imminent birth of the couple’s first child.

Of the remaining leading players outside of this octet of week-in, week-out semifinalists, Jenson, who prior to this past season had reached only one career ISDA semi (Denver ’07, when he and Jeff Mulligan were leading Price/Gould two games to one before Price retired with a back injury in the fourth game), attained two ranking-tournament finals, doing so with Quick in Cleveland while Russell was visiting his native England for his father’s 60th birthday, and, as mentioned, with Leach in Sea Island while Walker was fulfilling a USA men’s team head coaching commitment. Joe Pentland partnered Price’s brother Mark to the Vancouver semis (the first time that either of them had reached an ISDA semi) as the two formed perhaps the most consistent quarterfinal team and the one that got the closest (especially when they led Russell/Quick 2-1, 14-10 in Boston) to upsetting a top-four team. Pentland also got to the semis with Gould in Cleveland while pinch-hitting for an injured Paul Price).

Mark Chaloner and Michael Pirnak got to, but never through, every quarterfinal until they decided in the early spring to go their separate ways. And James Hewitt, in addition to fulfilling his administrative duties as the executive director of the ISDA tour, combined with a half-dozen different partners to attain the quarterfinal stages of tournaments. So did Hosey, 46, who along with his Big Apple Open performance with Butcher, continued throughout the season to display his amazing longevity and adaptability: in the12-month period from early February ’07 to late January ’08, the record 10-time Irish national singles champion played, and won main-draw matches, with no fewer than ELEVEN different partners in his last 12 events!

The first of those partners, Jamie Bentley, had planned to be Hosey’s regular teammate all this season, but recurrent arm and knee injuries forced this long-time pro-doubles right-wall warrior permanently to the sidelines, where he joined other recent retirees (all of them early-2000’s ISDA standouts) Blair Horler, Todd Binns, David Kay, Josh McDonald, Gary Waite, Anders Wahlstedt and Butcher. Two of the current top-four teams, namely Price/Gould and Russell/Quick, completed only their second season together just now, and the other two, Walker/Leach and Mudge/Berg, joined up just this past summer.

It seems reasonable to conclude that with Waite’s retirement in the spring of ’07 and the consequent ending of his record-shattering (76 ISDA tournament titles; no other team has even reached double-figures) eight-year run with Mudge, the staying power of the top-echelon pairings has taken on a decidedly more transient quality. A major reshuffling of the deck COULD therefore occur as soon as by the time the tour gears up again in October, as what beckons as quite possibly the most lucrative and event-filled ISDA campaign in the now nearly decade-long history of the Association comes into focus during the next few months.