Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: January 27/09
Victimized in Boston by a cruelly capricious turn of events that left them confronted head-on with the very real possibility of a repeat of last season’s midwinter slide out of the top slot at the hands of the same rampaging rival that had engineered their ouster a year ago, Paul Price and his Australian compatriot Ben Gould resolutely refused to waver in the face of this looming contingency and instead reasserted themselves by defeating defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg in straight sets at the Greenwich Field Club this past Sunday afternoon in the final round of the North American Open, which Price and Gould thereby captured for the second time in the past three years.
By so doing after first avenging in the semis the 16-15 fifth-game semifinal defeat they had sustained two weeks earlier in Boston (when Price cramped up just before hitting an open ball at simultaneous-match-point, resulting in a forward lurch and a whiffed stroking attempt) at the hands of Clive Leach and Matt Jenson, Price and Gould, winners of the 2008-09 tour’s first three tournaments (in Baltimore, New York and Toronto) before falling short in its next three stops (in St. Louis, Wilmington and, as noted, Boston), reversed their recent slide, halted Mudge and Berg’s three-tournaments’-worth of momentum and garnered the most coveted and venerable title on the schedule, while depriving Mudge (who was playing in his 10th consecutive North American Open final, eight of which have been victorious) and Berg, however narrowly (just a few points’ worth on the ranking computer) of their bid to unseat the pair of 32-year-old Aussies as the No. 1 team.
While the white-hot Price/Gould vs. Mudge/Berg rivalry has been playing itself out from one Sunday to the next ---- all 21 ISDA sanctioned tournaments over the past 15 months dating back to early-November ’07 have been won by one of these two teams, who had met head-to-head in no fewer than 10 of those finals --- there have been other competitive themes that have already emerged in calendar ’09 as well, perhaps most notably the resounding resurgence of first-year partners Leach and Jenson, who after starting the current campaign with three seeding-fulfilling semifinal advances had ended the fall portion with three consecutive losses, all to teams ranked out of the top four, namely to Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey in the Toronto third-place-playoff and five days later in a St. Louis quarterfinal, following which they fell in the Wilmington quarters as well, at the hands of first-time partners Steve Scharff and James Hewitt.
A continuation of this string of premature exits after the month-long Christmas-holiday break might have spelled disaster --- instead, Leach and Jenson emphatically responded when the tour resumed in Massachusetts, where, after first subduing the solid pairing of Joe Pentland and Raj Nanda, they pulled off their magnificent win over Price and Gould, rallying several times late in the fifth game (in which they trailed 13-12 in regulation and 2-1, set-3 in the ensuing best-of-five tiebreaker) and then giving Mudge and Berg all they could handle in the next-day final, in which Leach and Jenson stood at 1-all, 10-6, bowed to a 9-0 game-ending Mudge/Berg run but rebounded to win the fourth before falling barely short in the fifth game.
Each of those consecutive five-game Leach/Jenson matches were of such high quality that tournament promoter John Nimick, himself a top-tier WPSA doubles star who with partner Clive Caldwell won several major tourneys during the 1980’s, remarked on several occasions during the weekend on how elevated the level of play on the ISDA tour has become and (referring to the fact that five of the weekend’s 11 main-draw matches went to a fifth game, including three of the four round-of-16 tilts) how deep the talent pool runs. Proving that their Boston exploits were not a one-shot occurrence, Leach and Jenson then fully out-played Scharff and Hewitt in Greenwich in their return meeting post-Wilmington and fully tested the eventual champs Price and Gould in a well-played four-game semifinal that balanced a bottom-half semi in which Preston Quick and John Russell, finalists already this season in Baltimore and Wilmington who have not been stopped short of the semis in more than a year, bowed to Mudge and Berg, also in four.
The Greenwich quarterfinalists have all had their moments as well: Pentland has consistently reached this stage with a variety of partners (Mark Price in this case), as have Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan, champions in the Challenger event (for players ranked out of the top 10) in Pittsburgh in October, who for the second time defeated Silver Racquets winners Whitten Morris and Michael Ferreira. Scharff and Hewitt and Chaloner and Hosey, as already mentioned, have both attained the semifinal round of ISDA events in late autumn.
The tour itself has weathered the pronounced downturn in the North American economy remarkably well, all things considered, possibly a reflection of the new and elevated level of professionalism that has been making its presence felt throughout the past year, and definitely a reflection of the determination and commitment level displayed by the host sites and respective tournament committees. Several sites have been forced to reduce their prize money from the original level, and there was one cancellation of a small start-up Challenger event scheduled to take place in Philadelphia. But the remainder of the schedule has held strong and there are still a half-dozen or so events remaining on the 2008-09 tour these next few months. The tour will definitely survive even in this testing climate, and well may come out of it stronger than ever.