Tournament Results:
Mudge And Berg Take Third Consecutive Johnson Crown In Brooklyn By Rob Dinerman
Feb 23--- Deadlocked at two games apiece and 4-all, two-time defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg engineered a 6-0 burst, then weathered, albeit barely, a potentially disastrous Berg injury and managed to just hold on for a 10-15 15-6 15-10 8-15 15-13 victory Sunday afternoon over Paul Price and Ben Gould in the final round of the $35,000 Johnson Memorial at the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn on a glorious and tin-defying Mudge winner on his team’s sixth match-ball. His brilliant inside-out roll-corner from the depths of the back-left corner gave Mudge his ninth straight Johnson title, tying the record set by Gary Waite, Mudge’s Brooklyn partner from 2002-06, though Waite’s nine were not in a row. This final-round tally, a reversal of the outcome the last time these two rivals met in the Cleveland final two weeks back, was the sixth and most significant five-game match of the weekend (preceded by three in the qualifying, including both qualifying-bracket finals, as well as a pair of main-draw matches featuring wild eleventh-hour momentum swings) and the third in which the winning team avenged a recent bare-margin setback.
The most notable example of the foregoing genre was the quarterfinal meeting between the Chris Walker/Mark Chaloner and Matt Jenson/Clive Leach pairings, who were actually clashing for the fourth time this season. Walker and Chaloner, after narrowly falling short in the late-October Big Apple Open match, had prevailed in the two January tilts (in Boston and Greenwich) but were getting hammered 15-8 15-2 11-7 before they saved a total of five match-balls-against in winning the third and fourth games, both by a single point, and, astonishingly, charging out to a 10-3 advantage in the fifth that, equally surprisingly, dissolved in the face of a 12-2 match-ending Jenson/Leach run. The latter pair then fought on virtually even terms (1-1, 6-7) in their semifinal against Mudge and Berg (whose four-game quarterfinal opponents, Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan, had rallied from 7-11 to win their first-round fifth game vs. Raj Nanda and Mark Price) before a Jenson dash to the front wall resulted in a knee injury that doomed his team’s chances in the anticlimactic pair of close-out 15-6, 15-5 games.
In the draw’s less chaotic bottom half, Preston Quick and John Russell, victimized by an 18-17 quarterfinal loss to James Hewitt and Greg Park in Ohio, restored order in a straight-game rematch before losing their semi in four to Price/Gould, who had previously subdued Willie Hosey and Hamed Anvari, also in four and who entered the weekend seeking victory in the only one of the annual ISDA tour stops to have eluded them to this juncture of their three and a half years of partnership.
None of the final’s first four games was especially close --- Mudge and Berg darted out to leads of 8-1 in the second game and 11-3 in the third, and a fourth-game Price/Gould 6-0 skein from 6-5 to 12-5, keyed largely on the former’s shot-making, sealed that game as well --- but the fifth contained a plethora of dramatic twists and turns. After the teams evenly divided the first eight points, the six-point Mudge/Berg skein was equally apportioned as well, with a pair of winners by Berg (on a forehand three-wall that broke the tie followed a few points later by a forehand cross-court passing shot), a pair of winners by Mudge (on a tightly-angled backhand reverse-corner and a wall-clinging backhand rail) and a pair of tins by Price, the second of which, on a backhand reverse-corner attempt, gave Mudge/Berg a 10-4 lead and a seemingly certain victory --- until on the ensuing point Berg severely sprained his left ankle, resulting in a brief play stoppage, a MAJOR reduction in his mobility (normally his strongest asset) for the remainder of the match and the consequent existence of a huge hole in the front-right for Price/Gould to exploit.
Remarkably in light of his heavily-limping status, Berg pulled off three winners (including one look-away forehand roll-corner that Price never saw) which, complemented by a tinned Price three-wall at 13-8, gave the Mudge/Berg team a 14-8 lead and six match-balls, every one of which they would wind up needing, as the end-game evolved into a macabre countdown, with Price and Gould having absolutely no margin for error and Mudge and a badly hobbled Berg desperately (and, for a long time, vainly) seeking the one point they still needed to fall over the finish line. Their lead melted swiftly away, with a combination of Berg tins and Price front-court winners narrowing the margin to 12-14, whereupon a Gould hard serve dead-nicked off the back wall behind a diving Mudge to make the score 13-14.
Never before in the history of the ISDA (which celebrated the 10th anniversary of its January 2000 founding last month) had a full-ranking tournament gone down to simultaneous-championship-point, as would have almost certainly been the case had Price and Gould won the 13-14 point, nor had any ISDA team ever failed to convert a final in which they had six match-ball opportunities. But any thoughts of a precedent-setting conclusion to the 62nd edition of this fabled event foundered when Mudge, undeterred by his mental mistake on the previous point in not volleying a Gould hard serve that had trouble written all over it, circled around a Gould cross-court lob and conjured up his wondrous angle-shot winner, catching both of his opponents flat-footed and well out of position and punctuating his remarkable achievement with a double-fist-pump and a heartfelt embrace of his wounded and valiant partner.
The Brooklyn event capped off a highly active stretch in the ISDA schedule (five tournaments in a six-week period), which will resume with a Challenger tourney in Philadelphia and which will culminate with two major New York tournaments, the Players Championship and biennial Kellner Cup, in mid-April.