ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Capture Vancouver Open By Rob Dinerman

     April 22 --- With the snow-covered North Shore Mountains surrounding Vancouver (whose buses, street signs and billboards exhorted the hometown NHL Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs and trumpeted the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, which Vancouver will be hosting, everywhere one looked) as a spectacular backdrop, the two best teams on the ISDA tour staged a gold-medal confrontation of their own this past weekend with both the GreenWing EnergyVancouver Open trophy and the season-end No. 1 team ranking riding on the outcome. Between them, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg and their foremost rivals Paul Price and Ben Gould had won every sanctioned ranking tournament of the entire 2008-09 schedule while exchanging places throughout the winter and early spring as each took temporary turns at No. 1.

  After losing the Players Championship final two weeks ago in New York to Price and Gould, Berg (a Vancouver native and current resident who had never been able to win his hometown’s ISDA tour stop) and Mudge entered this season-ending tourney knowing that they would have to win the event to wind up at No. 1, just as was the case last season coming into the late-April Kellner Cup --- and that was exactly what happened, for the second year in a row. Last year, Mudge and Berg had to fend off two match-balls against them in the 16-15 fourth game and to win the last four points (from 12-13) of the 16-13 fifth; this time, the key tiebreaker moment occurred in the second game of their 15-7 16-14 15-7 triumph, in which they raced out of the gate, then persevered through another 12-13 deficit in a terrifically played, fiercely competed and wonderfully entertaining second game whose carryover effect (at least as much in terms of the negative momentum it had for Price/Gould as the uplifting impact on Mudge/Berg) had a massive influence on the never-in-doubt third, which was characterized by an 8-3 game-opening spurt, a rash of tins from an increasingly irritated-looking Price’s racquet and an exhilarating Mudge/Berg sprint to 13-5 and, shortly thereafter, across the finish line.

   Neither of these top-tier pairings had any difficulty in advancing to their virtually preordained Sunday summit: indeed, all seven matches throughout the tournament were won by the higher-seeded team in straight sets. Matt Jenson and Preston Quick, who teamed up when their regular partners, Clive Leach and John Russell respectively, declined to make the long journey from their bases on the east coast, were expected to be ready to seriously contest their semifinal match-up with Mudge and Berg, especially after Jenson and Quick had attained the Cleveland final last season in their only prior collaborative attempt. But Mudge set the stage literally on his first swing of the match, a perfectly-angled backhand reverse-corner winner on the opening serve, and he proceeded to dominate his left-wall battle against Jenson with his aggressive volleying and physical presence. Berg was fully on his shot-making game as well, and they rode strings of winners and a host of Jenson errors through a pair of single-figure games and to 14-9 in the third.

   There they temporarily foundered, partly due to a few Berg tins resulting from his visible wish to end the match with an eye-catching calling-card flourish, and when Jenson buried a cross-court drop winner the score had tightened to 13-14. But the ensuing cross-court exchange between Berg and Jenson ended on a semi-forced tin off the latter’s bat, and Mudge and Berg were through to the final, joining (for the seventh time in the 11 ISDA sanctioned/ranking events this season) Price and Gould, who had already displayed their full and vaunted firepower in defeating Ben Howell and Yvain Badan 15-13 (on an unreachable Gould overhead reverse-corner on the game’s final point) 15-6 15-11. Both Howell and Badan (quarterfinal winners over Rob Dinerman and ’09 Canadian National Doubles finalist Michael Leckie and hence ISDA semifinalists for the first time in either’s ISDA career) played well under the unrelenting Price/Gould pressure, which however proved too much both at the end of the close first game and in a 7-0 run from 7-9 to 14-9 that effectively sealed the close-out third.

  Never in the history of the ISDA has possession of the No. 1 team ranking changed hands anywhere near as often as was the case this 2008-09 season --- six times in all counting the Vancouver outcome, including after each of the last three ISDA events. Price and Gould went 4-3 in their rivalry this tour with Mudge and Berg, who, however, wound up with a counterbalancing 6-5 edge in the 11 sanctioned tour events that comprised the current campaign. The very narrow margin by which Mudge and Berg emerged triumphant in the battle for No. 1 can be traced not only to this past weekend in Vancouver, but also to what happened in Brooklyn two months ago, which Price sat out with an injury and where Gould (with substitute partner Michael Pirnak) lost in their first match (against Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey) and Mudge and Berg, trailing Quick/Russell 2-1, 13-12, rallied to take that game 15-13 and the 15-10 fifth as well. Mudge (who also teamed with Dan Allard to earn the pro-am final over Jerry Peters and ISDA veteran Ayman Karim right before the pro final), amazingly, has now won the final ranking tournament in all 10 years of the ISDA’s existence (the first eight with Gary Waite and the last two with Berg) since that organization’s founding in the winter of 2000.

  Price and his Australian compatriot Gould will be entering the non-ranking Worlds competition, which will be held next month in San Francisco and which requires that both players on a given team be from the same country, therefore preventing Berg and the Australian-born Mudge from partnering up. A total of 16 teams chosen by the SRAs of perhaps a half-dozen different countries will be participating, and there will be an eight-team women’s event that season-ending weekend as well. That event will be hard-pressed to match the impressive performance put on this past weekend both by the two powerhouse finalists and by Tournament Chairman Marvin Mizinski and his dedicated Committee in ensuring that this event (which had Vendtek Systems as a presenting sponsor), which was not listed on the original tour schedule, became a significant part of the 2008-09 ISDA season.