ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Berg Rally To Briggs Cup Victory By Rob Dinerman

October 20th --- Trailing 1-0, 6-2 against an aroused and powerful opponent that seemed well on its way to what would have been a second decisive upset win in as many days, top seeds Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg courageously rallied to a 10-15 15-12 15-9 15-11 victory over Matt Jenson and Clive Leach in the final round of the spectacularly season-opening $100,000 Briggs Cup, hosted by the magnificently renovated Apawamis Club in Rye, NY. After conjuring up their successful second-game rally to even the issue at a game apiece, Mudge and Berg were able to press that advantage just enough in the final two games to make it to the winner’s circle of this prestigious biennial championship.

   Leach and Jenson had only defeated second seeds and defending champs Paul Price and Ben Gould once last season, and by only a single point at that, i.e. 16-15 in the fifth in Boston in January; this time they won the first game of their semi by only a single point, 18-17 on an audacious Leach drop shot from deep in the court at 17-all, then ran roughshod over their vaunted but increasingly ineffectual foes in a pair of 15-7 close-out games. The four semifinalists --- namely the Mudge/Berg, Jenson/Leach and Price/Gould tandems, as well as John Russell and Preston Quick --- had between them dropped only one game prior to the semis, when the qualifying team of ’03 Briggs Cup winner (with Mudge as his partner) Michael Pirnak and former PSA No. 4 Martin Heath, semifinalists in San Francisco a few years ago, took a game from Mudge and Berg in the round of 16. Raj Nanda and Mark Price had looked so good in their first-round 3-0 win over Eric Vlcek and Yvain Badan that it had been thought that they might pose a threat to Russell and Quick, who, however, asserted themselves early on and never relinquished their advantage.

  The remaining quarterfinals (in addition to the Russell/Quick triumph and the Berg/Mudge vs James Hewitt/Steve Scharff outcome) featured a seeded team against an opponent that had already exceeded expectations with an unforeseen round-of-16 win: Price and Gould out-played qualifiers Tim Porter and Greg Park, who had upset Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey on Park’s sharp-shooting late in the fifth game, and Jenson and Leach won in three (with a 16-15 second game) over first-time partners Whitten Morris and Joe Pentland, who had taken three airtight games over Chris Walker and Jonny Smith. It is worth noting as well that Porter and Park had been pushed to five games in the last round of the qualifying by Yasser Kamel and world racquets champion James Stout before beating two-time (in St. Louis and Brooklyn) 2008-09 semifinalists Hosey and Chaloner, an early sign of how deep the tour is shaping up to be this season, and how tightly matched many of the teams are, going all the way back to the preliminary-rounds portion of the draw.

   This was pointed up as well by how competitive the three Briggs Cup $15,000 pro-am events (all of which were named in honor of longtime Apawamis denizens) were, with Nanda and former WPSA top-20 Mark Barber winning the Kane Cup, Walker and Rob Dinerman taking the Jennings Cup and Carl Baglio and Michael Walsh coming away with the Karlen Cup. Leach and Mudge both played strenuous pro-am finals before then locking horns in the Pro final, a tribute to the professionalism and durability of these two extraordinary protagonists.