Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: February 25/09
As also happened last season, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg are conjuring up a mid-winter explosion that is rocketing them back to No. 1. In 2007-08, they reached all 10 ISDA finals from Thanksgiving onwards, winning eight of them, including five in a row in January/February: with their sweep of this year’s pair of February events --- by default in their Cleveland final against Ben Gould and Paul Price when the latter withdrew due to a back injury with Mudge/Berg leading 2-0, 7-2, and in hair-raising fashion this past weekend in Brooklyn, rallying from 1-2, 12-13 against John Russell and Preston Quick by running off the last three points of the fourth game and taking the 15-11 fifth --- they are well along in equaling that level of prolonged success.
The Brooklyn comeback gave Mudge and Berg the 13th ISDA title in their season and a half as partners, and it represented the third time in the past 11 events (previously vs. Price/Gould in the late-April Kellner Cup and vs. Matt Jenson/Clive Leach a few days later in Sea Island) dating back to last spring that this pair after trailing two games to one has rallied from behind to force a fourth-set overtime, won that overtime and gone on to capture the fifth game as well. It also extended Mudge’s personal Heights Casino tournament-winning streak to eight straight, 2002-07 with Gary Waite and now each of the last two editions with Berg, an unprecedented skein in the 61-year history of the most venerable event on the ISDA calendar.
Mudge and Berg have now won five of the last six ISDA full-ranking tourneys, namely St. Louis, Wilmington, Boston, Cleveland and Brooklyn, their sole stumble having come in the finals of the North American Open at the hands of Price and Gould. The Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould tandems have between them won the last 23 ISDA tournaments dating back 16 months to October ’07, and have met head-to-head in 11 of those finals, a possibility that was obviated in Brooklyn when Gould played with Michael Pirnak (pinch-hitting for a still-injured Price) and lost in five, after leading two games to love, to Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey, who thereby duplicated their advance to the Wilmington semis and hence consolidated their status (along with the Big Two and the Baltimore/Brooklyn finalists Russell/Quick and Boston finalists Jenson/Leach pairings) as a top-five ISDA team.
In fact, there have been a number of “firsts” and personal breakthroughs so far this season, which has witnessed more upsets (as well as many more NEAR-upsets) than have occurred in prior campaigns. Jonny Smith (partnering James Hewitt in Cleveland) and Chaloner, as noted, both attained their first-ever ISDA career semifinals, while Shane Coleman teamed up with Whitten Morris to reach his first (and Morris’s second) ISDA quarterfinal when they won six straight points from 11-14 against Andrew Merrill and Hamed Anvari in a Brooklyn last-round qualifier and then nosed out Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan, 15-13 in the fourth.
Coleman entered that event with heightened confidence due to his and partner Gavin Jones’s advance to the final round of the Philadelphia Racquet Club Challenger event (for players ranked out of the top eight) one week earlier, where Merrill/Anvari also dropped a fifth-set tiebreaker (to Rob Whitehouse and Greg Park, who then lost to Coleman and Jones), and where eventual champs Hosey and Hewitt had to face multiple game-balls-against predicaments in no fewer than SIX (two in each of their three matches) of the 11 games they played that weekend. The first two matches in the Brooklyn qualifying rounds last Thursday night were both decided by three-point fifth-game margins, all clear examples of how deep and competitive the tour has become, and how quickly even first-time partners (Coleman/Morris in Brooklyn, Smith/Hewitt in Cleveland, Hosey/Hewitt in Philadelphia and Hosey/Chaloner entering this season all fall into this category, as did Hewitt and Steve Scharff when they shocked Jenson and Leach in a Wilmington quarterfinal in early December) can catch fire and heavily impact an ISDA draw. The days when the four top-ranked teams can go a combined 60-1 against the rest of the field (as was the case in 2007-08) appear to be long gone, which clearly is a healthy sign in terms of the competitive balance of the ISDA tour.
The third and final Challenger tournament, at the Germantown Club on the outskirts of Philadelphia, is scheduled for mid-March, and it will be interesting to see both if its successful forebears in Pittsburgh in October and a few weeks ago at Philly Racquet are replicated (there are more entries in this upcoming event than there had been in the prior two, a sign of how quickly the concept has caught on) and if these $10,000 events “grow,” as hoped, into the $20,000 purses next season that would qualify them as full-ranking tour stops. There are also ranking events set for Long Island (the eighth edition of the highly popular Creek Challenge Cup) and Vancouver, where Berg is currently based, in April.