Tournament Results:
Price And Gould Conquer Cleveland By Rob Dinerman
Feb 9 --- In a riveting four-game final between the tour’s two best teams the first three games of which needed to be resolved by a single point, second seeds and recently crowned Boston winners Paul Price and Ben Gould defeated two-time defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg 15-14 14-15 18-17 15-11 in the final round of the Tavern Club Invitational in downtown Cleveland this past Saturday evening. Price and Gould thereby raised their mark against their chief rivals to 2-1 this season while winning their 18th ISDA tour title in three and a half years as partners.
Mudge and Berg were nearly bounced from the tournament in their Friday-evening opening-round match against Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker, who in their prior three tournament appearances had captured the early-December Wilmington Challenger event and recorded consecutive January quarterfinal wins over Briggs Cup finalists Clive Leach and Matt Jenson in both Boston and Greenwich. A late-match knee injury to Chaloner that swelled up dramatically overnight in that Greenwich win had caused his team to default their scheduled semi against Mudge and Berg two weeks ago, but in Ohio Chaloner showed no lingering effects of that mishap as he and his British compatriot Walker pushed Mudge and Berg all the way to 12-all in the fifth game, at which stage Mudge surprised everybody with a nervy drop-shot winner off the back wall, following which Walker tinned a drive and Mudge raced over from his left-wall post to the front right and crushed a floor-hugging forehand down the right wall to close out the match.
The top seeds then faced another team that was buoyed by a dramatic upset win over a seeded foe, namely James Hewitt and Greg Park, whose 18-17 fourth-game quarterfinal victory over third seeds John Russell and Preston Quick was especially noteworthy in light of the latter pairs so-recent march to the Greenwich final, which had been keyed by an 18-15 fifth-game semi over Price and Gould. Trailing 4-3 in the best-of-nine tiebreaker in that probably do-or-die fourth game, Hewitt laced a backhand reverse-corner winner and on the ensuing simultaneous-game-ball Park swiped a backhand cross-court drop that surprised Quick (who had been expecting Park to hit the ball hard and deep, as he had been doing all night) and barely eluded his desperate attempt to run it down. The outcome marked Park’s first career appearance in an ISDA ranking semifinal and the second straight Cleveland quarterfinal win over Russell/Quick for Hewitt, who a year ago had teamed up with Jonny Smith to accomplish this feat.
After posting a qualifying-round win over Will Mariani and Dane Sharp, Smith and his current partner, former Trinity College teammate Yvain Badan, lost their first round match to Matt Jenson and Willie Hosey, who were then subdued in three by Price and Gould, first-round winners over Scott Denne and Ian Sly, the head pro of the host club, who had qualified into the main draw with a five-game win over the Boston-based Dan Roberts/Greg McArthur duo. Meanwhile in the top-half semi, Mudge and Berg dropped only the third game against Hewitt and Park before closing out the match with a fairly comfortable 15-10 fourth game.
They then staged what could have been a back-breaking rally from 8-14 all the way to 14-all in the final, only to have Price and Gould give themselves a seventh consecutive game-ball by opting for the no-set call and justifying that decision when Berg over-hit a drive that soared over the boundary line on the back wall. The Canadian star, who is well known for his aggressive shot-making style, then successfully pulled off two brilliant winners from 12-14 in the second game to force another no-set call which boomeranged on Price/Gould when the former tinned a reverse-corner attempt. Notwithstanding the fact that the third game also came down to one point and also ended on an error (this one being on a Berg tin), the match as a whole mostly featured a host of winners, many of them spectacular, including the several that Gould contributed (two of which came on crackling forehand cross-courts that had too good an angle for even Mudge to handle) to his team’s match-ending four-point run from 11-all in the fourth game.
The next full-ranking ISDA tournament, in Brooklyn two weeks hence (with a Philadelphia Challenger tourney in between at the Racquet Club), should be extremely provocative, with potential quarterfinal matchups that would pit Walker/Chaloner against Jenson/Leach for what would be the fourth time this season, and Hewitt/Park similarly on course to meet Russell/Quick, assuming, of course, that none of these teams lose in the round of 16.