Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: December 17/08
As they did a year ago in their ultimately successful run to the No. 1 end-of-season ranking in their debut campaign as partners, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, after taking a few early-season events to find their footing, have closed the fall portion of the 2008-08 tour with a strong late-autumn burst that has brought them back into contention when the tour resumes after a month-long holiday break with the crucial winter stretch of the season. Semifinal losers in the season-opening tournament in Baltimore (as also happened the prior year) and frustrated finalists in the next two tour stops in New York and Toronto (where Paul Price and Ben Gould prevailed 3-0 in both cases), Mudge and Berg motored back into the winner’s circle in both St. Louis, where they got on the scoreboard against Price/Gould in the finals, and Wilmington, where they repeated their ’07 final-round win over Preston Quick and John Russell (who had out-played them in the top-half Baltimore semi). The Mudge/Berg resurgence was just a bit too little and too late to prevent Price and Gould from displacing them as No. 1 in the recently-released rankings, but the two teams are now close enough in the points tally to create a situation in which whichever team out-plays the other in the important Boston/Greenwich parlay that lies directly ahead will occupy the No. 1 position at the end of January.
Those similarities with last season aside, this has been a very different and more competitive tour at several levels from 2007-08, when the top-four teams (Mudge/Berg, Price/Gould, Chris Walker/Clive Leach and Russell/Quick) went a combined 60-1 against the rest of the field in ISDA sanctioned tournament play, a phenomenon that gave a very pre-ordained feel to the quarterfinals. This season, by contrast, has already seen the Nos. 3 and 4 teams (Russell/Quick and Leach/Matt Jenson) suffer a combined four defeats to teams ranked below them, as well as the ascent of two new partnerships to the semis, namely James Hewitt/Steve Scharff, who accomplished this feat in their first foray together in Wilmington, and Willie Hosey/Mark Chaloner. The latter pairing defeated both Russell/Quick in the round-robin part of the Cambridge Club and Jenson/Leach in the third-place playoff, then repeated that win over Jenson/Leach just a few days later in the quarters in St. Louis, a result that both ushered Chaloner into his first-ever ISDA ranking-tournament semi and marked the first time Leach had been stopped SHORT of an ISDA semi since he and Scott Butcher fell to Russell and Quick in Baltimore ’06 25 months earlier. A second such fate would befall Leach barely a week after Thanksgiving when he and Jenson, whose only collaboration prior to the outset of this season was their final-round advance in Sea Island last May, were again ousted in the quarters, this time in Wilmington, by Hewitt and Scharff, who were so pleased by this debut performance as partners that they plan to play together in the North American Open next month.
There have been numerous other examples as well already at this early juncture of how close some of the matches have been, and how deep the tour has become --- Whitten Morris had a double-match-ball fourth-game opportunity with Michael Ferreira in Baltimore against eventual winners Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan (who themselves stood at 2-0, 13-all vs. Hosey/Chaloner in New York before being swept in that best-of-nine tiebreaker and losing the next two single-figure games), then had an 11-7 fifth-game lead with Addison West in New York two weeks get away against Joe Pentland and Mark Price, with all three of those aforementioned matches coming in the round of 16; Morris and West had only gotten to that stage in New York by overcoming deficits of 2-1 against Yasser Kamel and Eric Christiansen (who would later fail to convert multiple third-game match-points in a five-game Wilmington qualifying loss to Tom Harrity and Shane Coleman) and 2-love against Bradley Ball and Raj Nanda in the Big Apple Open qualifying. And all three pre-final main-draw rounds at the Maryland Club Open had fully half of their matches go the five-game maximum, a telling symbol of how even the on-court action has been throughout the fall.
One other highlight of these past few early-season months was the success of the early-October tour stop in Pittsburgh, which hadn’t hosted a major event since the ’94 U. S. National Doubles, and which held the first “Challenger” tournament, a new concept on the ISDA tour, which entails purses below the $20,000 current full-ranking minimum and which is only open to players ranked out of the top 10. Several more such events are planned during the upcoming few months (the next one will be at the Cynwyd Club in Philadelphia in mid-January between the Boston and Greenwich tourneys), and the Pittsburgh debut did allow some new teams to advance into the late rounds and hence some different heroes to emerge from under the shadow of the top tier, which, as noted, had been so dominant throughout the 2007-08 tour year. Vlcek and Badan wound up winning the tournament, defeating sequentially Coleman and his Cynwyd Club colleague Gavin Jones, Canadians Michael Pirnak and Chris Deratnay and top seeds Hewitt and Chaloner, and the momentum that the Vlcek/Badan duo acquired in taking this trio of straight-set though overtime-filled matches may have played a role in the match-ball-against-saving exploits they generated a few weeks later, as noted, in surviving their opening-round main-draw match with Morris and Ferreira.