Tournament Results:
Steve Scharff and Mark Price Take Tompkins Invitational By Rob Dinerman
Feb17 --- In an efficient display of shot-making accuracy and positioning acumen, second seeds Steve Scharff and Mark Price rolled to victory this past weekend in the Tompkins Invitational, hosted by the Philadelphia Racquet Club. They won in straight sets over first Shane Coleman (a finalist in this event last year with Gavin Jones) and Scott Devoy and then Hamed Anvari and Andrew Slater to reach the final, where they prevailed 15-5 10-15 15-6 15-9 against Imran Khan and Nigel Thain, whose unexpected advance to that stage was the $10,000 ISDA Challenger tournament’s main conversation-piece.
Khan and Thain had taken the measure of Carl Baglio and Tyler Millard in their opening round but then fell behind two games to love in their Saturday semifinal against top seeds James Hewitt and Greg Park, who at that stage appeared to be well on the way to consolidating their season-highlight four-game (18-17 in the fourth) victory over recent North American Open finalists John Russell and Preston Quick in Cleveland just eight days earlier, an outcome that marked Park’s first career appearance in an ISDA semifinal. The latter, whose backhand cross-drop winner at simultaneous-game-ball had sealed that breakthrough victory, is a member of the host Racquet Club, where Hewitt had partnered Willie Hosey to the inaugural version of this event last February, so this team was on familiar territory and had plenty of momentum on their side as well --- but it all unraveled during the last three games against Khan/Thain, who came actually won the last three games (15-10, 10 and 6) fairly handily by becoming more aggressive in forcing the action and taking advantage of some uncharacteristically sub-par play on the part of the normally reliable Hewitt. This marked the second time in the past three months that the Hewitt/Park pairing, which has played extremely well the rest of the time in this, their first season as partners, has let a two/love lead in a Challenger semi against Khan slip away, the prior occasion having occurred in mid-November in St. Louis, where Khan had been partnered up with Tom Harrity.
While this disruption of the status quo was taking place in the top half of the draw, Scharff and Price, as noted, were proceeding in orderly fashion to the Sunday-afternoon final, demonstrating in the process the wisdom of a pre-tournament alignment switch from their one previous salvo as teammates. That had come last March, in Denver in the U. S. National Doubles in Denver, where this pair of normally right-wall players had gone with Price on the left wall and had lost a 3-0 semi against Morris Clothier and Michael Ferreira. Chastened by that precedent, they decided for this weekend to move Price back to the right wall, where he flourished all weekend, complemented by the excellent play of his partner, whose game seemed negligibly affected (if at all) by moving to the left. Only in the second game of the final were Khan and Thain able to seize the initiative, but when Scharff regained the desired height and depth on his cross-court lobs, Thain was forced to retreat to the back wall, thereby enabling Price and Scharff to establish front-court positioning and impose their shot-making skills upon the dynamics of the action.
Fully back in the saddle by the middle of the third game, they moved comfortably through the remainder of that stanza, as well as the close-out fourth. This was the second Challenger title this season for Price, who had successfully teamed up in St. Louis with Nanda, with whom, incidentally, they had lost a first-round match just three weeks later in Wilmington to Harrity and John White, yet another example of how deep and competitive the tour has become and therefore how unpredictable the results can be from one tournament to the next.