ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge and Berg Regain North American Open Doubles Crown By Rob Dinerman

Jan27 --- In a tournament that featured Phyrric victories, near- and actual defaults and dynamic five-game matches that animated every main-draw round, Viktor Berg and Damien Mudge reclaimed the North American Open title that they had won in ’08 before losing the ’09 final to Paul Price and Ben Gould by defeating John Russell and Preston Quick 15-10 17-15 12-15 13-15 15-8 in the final this past Sunday afternoon before a packed gallery at the Greenwich Country Club. It was the 10^th consecutive final-round appearance for Mudge, who won this event six straight early- and mid-2000’s years with Gary Waite before they surrendered it in a five-game final to Price and Gould in 2007, the last year of Waite’s career.

   Mudge’s tournament almost ended before it even began when his partner Berg missed his flight from Vancouver which had been scheduled to deliver him to Greenwich shortly before his round-of-16 match Thursday evening. Consideration was briefly given to defaulting the top seeds, who in the end were allowed to play that first-round match against Ben Howell and Tom Harrity on Friday morning. Mudge and Berg won both that match and their quarterfinal later in the day against James Hewitt and hometown favorite (and longtime head pro of the tri-host Round Hill Club) Steve Scharff in straight sets. They then received a semifinal walkover from Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, whose two-hour comeback five-game Friday-evening quarterfinal win (15-11 in the fifth from 11-all) over third seeds Clive Leach and Matt Jenson had exacted a severe price in the form of the late-match knee injury to Chaloner that swelled up overnight and left him in pain and unable to flex his leg when he awoke on Saturday morning.

  Meanwhile, the draw’s bottom half was devolving into what turned out to be an epic confrontation between the second-seeded Price/Gould juggernaut (whose quarterfinal opponents, Willie Hosey and Hamed Anvari, had switched walls after dropping their first two games against Briggs Cup quarterfinalists Joe Pentland and Whitten Morris, and then saved a total of five match-balls-against in the 17-16 fourth game before winning the fifth 15-10) and fourth seeds Russell and Quick, both of whom progressed to the semis without dropping a game. The riveting 100-minute drama that ensued featured ferocious pace, hair-raising shot-making feats, especially by the left-wallers Russell and Price, a series of mid- and late-game rallies and, appropriately, resolution in the form of a pulsating best-of-nine fifth-game tiebreaker. Price/Gould took the first two points (a Gould reverse-corner followed by a Price inside-out forehand roll-corner) but Russell, whose front-court game had been on fire the entire match, contributed three winners to the five-point match-winning surge that closed out the 15-12 12-15 15-13 9-15 18-15 classic.

  Though the Sunday-afternoon final therefore involved teams that had undergone vastly differing semifinal experiences (the Mudge/Berg walkover contrasted with the uplifting but exhausting Russell/Quick marathon), and though Mudge and Berg were three points from a straight-game victory when they led 2-0, 12-10, Russell and Quick repeated their fifth-game-ending 5-0 heroics of the previous day when they took that game 15-12 and eked out the fourth when at 14-13 Quick (whose forehand cross-court nick had sealed the semifinal rally) scored on a perfectly placed forehand straight-drop. Mudge and Berg jumped out to 4-0 in the fifth, but Russell and Quick crept almost all the way back (to 7-8) before a swift and definitive burst of winners from Berg’s mercurial racquet largely accounted for the 5-0 run (to 13-7) that clinched the eventual outcome and brought himself and his superstar teammate to the winner’s circle for the third time in the four full-ranking ISDA events that have occurred so far this season. The tour will resume in February with scheduled stops in Cleveland, Philadelphia and Brooklyn.