ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Retain U. S. Pro Title By Rob Dinerman

     Making a triumphant return to the site of their breakthrough moment a year ago, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg successfully defended the first-ever tournament title of their partnership when they swept to victory this past weekend in the 15^th annual U. S. Pro Championship, hosted as always by the Wilmington Country Club and expertly directed by the club’s long-time head pro Ed Chilton. Their win a year ago, over the same final-round opponents, namely John Russell and Preston Quick, who faced them this time at that stage as well, kick-started a season-ending run during which Mudge and Berg reached all 10 ISDA finals, winning eight of them and thereby earning the No. 1 2007-08 end-of-season team ranking. When the new rankings are released later this week, Mudge and Berg will be placed behind Paul Price and Ben Gould, who won the three season-opening events in Baltimore, New York and Toronto before dropping a St. Louis final to Mudge and Berg and (for the second straight year) their Wilmington semi to Russell/Quick. But by closing out the autumn portion of the current tour with their consecutive conquests in Missouri and now Delaware, Mudge and Berg, who also took a while last year to hit their stride, have given compelling notice of how tough they will be to beat when the season picks up in earnest early next month.

   Though it is big news any time that Price and Gould are stopped before the final (as happened for the third straight Wilmington edition, the last two times at the hands of Russell/Quick, in a fifth-set tiebreaker in ’07 and in more routine fashion this time around, courtesy Quick’s error-free effort and Russell’s exceptional shot-making), the weekend’s most noteworthy achievement was generated by the first-time-ever pairing of Steve Scharff and James Hewitt, who after defeating Dave Rosen and Andrew Cordova in the round of 16, pulled off a major upset when they out-played third-seeded Matt Jenson and Clive Leach by a count of 15-17 15-9 15-14 15-10. Winning that one-point third game, which they did when at 14-all Jenson hit a ball right back at himself for a stroke-call against him, was clearly an important element of the unexpected outcome, but a few mid-fourth-game Jenson tins, the diminishing of Leach’s influence as that final frame unfolded and most surprisingly, the match-long ability of both Scharff and Hewitt to for the most part contain the dangerous Leach by lobbing him deep into the back-court, all combined to make the fourth game much more convincing than anyone had anticipated. It marked the first trip to the semis in several years for either Hewitt (who in one of his career-best performances solidly out-dueled Jenson on the left wall) or Scharff, and it sent Leach (who prior to his and Jenson’s similarly first-round loss to Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey in St. Louis two weeks ago had not been stopped short of the semis since October ’06) and Jenson to the sidelines in the quarterfinal round for the second event in a row.

   In the aftermath of their Friday-evening win, Scharff and Hewitt managed to force the second game of their semi against Mudge and Berg (who had previously defeated Chris Walker and Jonny Smith) to a tiebreaker before falling in three games. Meanwhile, in the bottom-half, Price/Gould rose superior to Mark Price and Joe Pentland in one quarterfinal, while Russell and Quick avenged their Toronto third-place playoff loss to Chaloner and Hosey in the other, with Russell’s sharpshooting accounting for many of his team’s points in both that match and the subsequent four-game semifinal Saturday morning over Price and Gould. The final was played Saturday evening, and the difference in the tenor of the respective semis just hours earlier, in which Russell and Quick were extended markedly more than Mudge and Berg had been, may have played a role in the four-game final. Certainly Russell looked a bit fatigued at times, especially during the downhill 15-9, 15-10 second half of the match after the teams had split the opening pair of 15-12 games. Once Mudge and Berg were safely in the saddle by mid-third, they were not about to be stopped, as they rolled inexorably to the 10^th title of their partnership. It was the seventh career Wilmington crown for Mudge, winner of this event with Gary Waite in 2000 and from 2002-2005, and it gave him and his teammate positive momentum going into the month-long holiday break that is now beginning.