Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: December 28/09
Dec 15 --- Chris Walker’s tin-defying forehand reverse-corner on the first simultaneous-championship-point in ISDA history at the U. S. Pro Championship in Wilmington on the first Saturday in December brought to an emphatic close an autumn portion of the 2009-10 pro-doubles schedule that has been filled with undulating outcomes, the emergence of a number of new faces in late-round play and the continued supremacy of Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, the No. 1 team for both the 2007-08 and 2008-09 tour years. The eclectic five-stop tour to this point has included two full-ranking tournaments (the season-opening Briggs Cup and Big Apple Open in October, both won by the Mudge/Berg duo, though in each case only after getting through a perilous predicament) followed by a post-Halloween stretch of two Challenger tourneys (in St. Louis and Wilmington) sandwiching one non-ranking round-robin six-team “special” event, the Cambridge Club Doubles in Toronto.
As noted, even Mudge and Berg, winners now of five of the last six ranking events going back to last winter, encountered serious difficulty along the way this fall, first in Rye, where they fell behind Clive Leach and Matt Jenson 1-0, 6-2 in the final before rallying to a four-game win, and then at the New York Athletic Club, where they were forced to dig their way out of a substantial 2-1, 9-2 hole in their semi against Preston Quick and John Russell before eventually subduing three-time defending champs Paul Price and Ben Gould in the ensuing final. During that pair of competitions, five different players – namely Walker, Jonny Smith, Raj Nanda, Mark Price and Walker’s Wilmington partner and British compatriot Mark Chaloner --- both won and lost a first-round match, an astonishingly large group for such a small number of events; two players ranked inside the top fifteen never cleared the first round while four players ranked outside the top fifteen made it to both quarters; and the members of three teams that began the season as a unit coming off strong 2008-09 performances have already gone their separate ways and realigned themselves with brand-new partners.
Even the Challenger tournaments have had wildly varying outcomes, most notably in the case of the newly formed Australian-born but Westchester-based pairing of Nanda and Mark Price, who first swept through the St. Louis draw without dropping a single game (defeating Tom Harrity and Imran Khan in the final after Harrity/Khan, trailing two games to love, had overtaken top seeds James Hewitt and Greg Park in the semis) and then lost badly in the first round in Wilmington at the hands of Harrity and former PSA No. 1 John White, who incidentally is one of five former PSA top-sevens (Walker, Chaloner, Paul Price and Martin Heath are the others) who have already made a significant mark upon the ISDA tour this season.
So have Joe Pentland, a quarterfinalist both at Apawamis with first-time partner Whitten Morris (at the expense of Walker/Smith, who had been 5-1 in round-of-16 play last season) and in New York with first-time partner Smith over Nanda and Mark Price; former ISDA top-five Michael Pirnak, who shocked the squash world when he and Gould, first-round losers their only previous time as teammates last winter in Brooklyn, teamed up to win the Cambridge Club Doubles just before Thanksgiving with a 3-0 final over Leach and Walker; the Park/Tim Porter pairing that reached the Wilmington semis after quarterfinal appearances in Rye and New York, in both cases via five-game round-of-16 upset wins following five-game qualifying-round near-losses; the established James Hewitt/Steve Scharff tandem, semifinalists in Wilmington last season when they upset Leach/Jenson, who have built upon their solid 2008-09 campaign by reaching both ranking-tournament quarterfinals and pushing Russell/Quick to a close fifth game in the Big Apple Open; the newly-formed Walker/Chaloner team that was assembled after both had had disappointing Briggs Cup results with other partners and that nearly beat Leach/Jenson in New York (ahead two-love, they barely lost the 15-13 third) before triumphing in Wilmington, as noted on Walker’s aggressive ultimate-point salvo; the team that they beat in that final, former mid-2000’s Trinity College teammates Smith and Yvain Badan, who debuted as partners in Delaware and barged into the final, where they took the first two games and led 10-6 in the fourth; and Rob Dinerman, winner of two pro-am titles this past fall, namely the Jennings Cup portion of the Briggs Cup with Walker, and the Tim Chilton Cup portion of the U. S. Pro Championship, in which his partner was the deceased honoree’s son, Tournament Chairman Ed Chilton.
The top-four-ranked teams – namely Mudge/Berg, Paul Price/Gould, Jenson/Leach and Russell/Quick – did manage to reach the semis of both ranking events, with eventual champs Mudge and Berg defeating Russell and Quick each time while in the bottom-half semis Jenson/Leach and Paul Price/Gould split their two encounters. But the pre-ordained feel that used to permeate the atmosphere has vanished, displaced by a flood of zealous, talented and realigned new faces that stormed into the competitive picture throughout the autumn months and are clearly capable of a successful assault upon the Fearsome Foursome’s domain as soon as the ISDA tour (founded in early January 2000) begins its second decade when the 2010 portion of the current campaign launches itself with important January ranking tournaments in Boston and Greenwich.