Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: May 24/09
May 24 --- In a back-and-forth season-long tug of war for the No. 1 ranking between the Paul Price/Ben Gould pair that held that distinction in 2006-07 and the Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg duo that displaced them in 2007-08, the lead changed hands a total of six times (including after each of the last three tournaments), double the number that any prior ISDA year has contained, in a rivalry that captivated and defined the 2008-09 tour and that came down to a late-April final-round clash in Vancouver, the final ranking event of the season. There, framed by the spectacular backdrop of the snow-covered North Shore Mountains that surround a town abuzz with excitement about the 2010 Winter Olympics that it will be hosting, Berg, a Vancouver native and current denizen, and Mudge decisively secured a 15-7 16-14 15-7 victory that ensured them the end-of-season No. 1 ranking. It marked the second consecutive year (preceded by a fifth-set tiebreaker conclusion to the ’08 Kellner Cup a year ago in New York) in which the No. 1 ISDA team ranking was not resolved until the last week in April.
The dominance that these two juggernauts have held over the last two ISDA tours has enabled one or the other to win the last 26 ISDA tournaments (not counting Challenger and invitational events) dating back to October ’07, when Clive Leach and Chris Walker defeated both of them in claiming that year’s Maryland Club Open title. This total includes the post-Vancouver season-ending early-May World Doubles event, which was sanctioned though non-ranking due to its requirement that all teams needed to be composed of players from the same country, a stipulation that allowed Australians Price and Gould (who wound up winning the tourney over British standouts Leach and John Russell in the final) to enter but prevented the Australian-born Mudge (who with Matt Jenson lost to Russell/Leach in the semis) and Berg (who with Canadian compatriot Gary Waite were jolted by Americans Preston Quick and Whitten Morris in the quarters) from doing so. Those 26 events have been evenly divided at 13 apiece between the Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould tandems, who have gone head to head in 13 of those finals, with Price and Gould holding a narrow 7-6 edge in that category.
Remarkably, given how tightly matched the achievements of these two teams were throughout this past season, how frequently their meetings in 2007-08 went not only to fifth games but to CLOSE fifth games --- in one of their two Manhattan finals last season Price/Gould ran off the last six points from 9-11 in the fifth, and in the other, Mudge/Berg saved double-match-point-against in the fourth before winning both that game and the fifth in tiebreakers --- and how evenly divided their seven final-round clashes were this past season (a 4-3 edge for Price and Gould), those seven 2008-09 head-to-heads necessitated only 22 games, really only 21 and a half in light of the course of the mid-February Cleveland final, wherein with Mudge and Berg ahead two games to love and 7-2 in the third, Price defaulted with muscle spasms in his back. The Price/Gould final-round wins over Mudge/Berg at the Big Apple Open, the Cambridge Club in Toronto, the North American Open in Greenwich and the Players Championships were all straight-setters, as was the match, as noted, in Vancouver, that landed in the Mudge/Berg column. The only match of the seven to go more than three games occurred in St. Louis, where the Price/Gould undefeated skein through the first three tournaments (Baltimore, New York, Toronto) of the season came to an end when Mudge and Berg, trailing 1-all, 9-14, salvaged that game 17-15 and erased a 6-2 deficit in the 15-10 close-out fourth that jump-started a three-tournament (St. Louis, Wilmington, Boston) winning streak of their own.
It is highly unusual, certainly unprecedented in the 10-season history of the ISDA, for two top-tier teams to have virtually a .500 record against each other involving that many matches, so many of which wound up with tallies of three games to love. In fairness, it should be noted that all seven of those matches contained at least one potentially crossroads tiebreaker game, save the Toronto final, the second game of which went to the eventual winners by a taut 15-13 margin.
Directly behind those top two teams were ’07 U. S. National Doubles champions Preston Quick and John Russell, three-time finalists (in Baltimore, Wilmington and Brooklyn) this past ISDA tour year, followed by Boston finalists (by virtue of their 16-15 fifth-game semifinal victory over Price and Gould on the former’s last-point tin) Matt Jenson and Leach. Quick and Russell, whose luckless fate it was to be in the same half as their nemeses Mudge and Berg (whom they WERE able to beat in the semis in Baltimore) no fewer than eight times in the 10 ranking events they entered this season, reached the final in each of the two exceptions, defeating Price and Gould (for the second straight year) in the semis in Wilmington and doing the same in Brooklyn to Willie Hosey and Mark Chaloner, who in the quarters had overtaken Michael Pirnak (subbing for an injured Price) and Gould after trailing two games to love. Russell and Quick then came agonizingly close to duplicating their season-opening breakthrough Baltimore win over Mudge and Berg (after going winless in nearly a half-dozen attempts against this pair the previous season) in the ensuing Heights Casino final, leading 2-1, 13-12, just two points away, before bowing to a determined three-point Mudge/Berg eleventh-hour run that gave them that 15-13 game and preceded a hard-fought but somewhat more routine 15-11 fifth.
For the second consecutive season, Russell and Quick were stopped short of the semis only once all year, when they were jolted in an opening-round quarterfinal by first-time partners Jonny Smith (who thereby reached his first career ISDA semi) and James Hewitt, the tour’s Executive Director, who had previously attained that stage when he and Steve Scharff handily conquered the heavily-favored Jenson/Leach duo in early December at Wilmington. The latter pairing, whose partnership produced a half-dozen advances to the semis (as well as that earlier-noted foray into the Boston final, where they pressed Mudge and Berg deep into the fifth game), suffered their only dry spell (three tournaments’ worth) right around Thanksgiving, during which they lost both in the third-place playoff in Toronto and, just four days later, in their opening round in St. Louis, both times to Chaloner (who thus reached his first career ISDA ranking-tournament semi, with, as mentioned, a similar advance awaiting him in Brooklyn) and Hosey prior to their setback at the hands of Hewitt and Scharff at the Wilmington Country Club.
But the month-long Christmas-holiday break gave Jenson and Leach the time they needed to regroup, leading to their season-highlight performance in Boston (the first event in calendar 2009) and an undefeated pre-semis record during the remainder of the season, which ended, somewhat ironically, with them opposing each other in San Francisco. By that time, Chaloner and Hosey, neither of whom competed in the Worlds, had established themselves as not only the No. 5 team but a WORTHY Number Five, one which had proven itself capable on a good day of knocking off the two teams directly ahead of them (as indeed they DID do in Toronto), which could also, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, be said of Hewitt (who with his Canadian compatriot Pirnak came within a fourth-set tiebreaker of forcing Price and Gould into a fifth game in a contentious San Francisco quarterfinal) and Scharff after their several solid results in addition to the Jenson/Leach win during the winter portion of the just-completed campaign.
Hewitt also teamed with his wife Stephanie (who partnered Jessica DiMauro to the women’s Worlds title over British opponents Suzie Pierrepont and Fiona Geaves in the final) to wrest the Canadian Mixed Doubles crown away from four-time defending champions DiMauro and Scott Dulmage. All told, in what was certainly his best season in several years, Hewitt complemented his semis advances in Wilmington with Scharff and in Cleveland with Smith with quarterfinal finishes with Jeff Mulligan in Baltimore and New York, with Scharff in Greenwich and Brooklyn and with Hamed Anvari in Boston. In addition, he reached two of the three Challenger-series finals, winning at the Philadelphia Racquet Club with Hosey and coming up short with Chaloner in Pittsburgh at the hands of Eric Vlcek (who also teamed with Morris to capture the Challenger event at Germantown) and Yvain Badan, the only ISDA top-12 under the age of 30 and a semifinalist in Vancouver while partnering Ben Howell, who had been a finalist with Mulligan at Germantown.