Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: March 08/10
The ISDA tour has just capped off its busiest stretch of the season, five tournaments in the past seven weeks, four of them full-ranking, with three of that quartet of finals going to a fifth game and the lone four-game exception featuring three one-point tallies. In the past month alone, there have been wild momentum swings; opportunities, most of them successful, for revenge among the top- and second-tier teams; history-making accomplishments; late-tournament injuries heavily affecting the outcomes; and a series of tiebreaker and 15-13 conclusions in semifinal and final-round play. Every one of those dynamics was encapsulated in Brooklyn Heights this past weekend in the 62nd edition of the Johnson Memorial Invitational, the longest continuously running doubles tournament in North America, where two-time defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg managed, however barely, to both win their tour-leading fourth tournament (of the six full-ranking events that have been played) this season and even their 2009-10 record against main rivals Paul Price and Ben Gould at two wins apiece. Mudge’s ninth straight Johnson crown equaled the record held by Gary Waite, Mudge’s partner in the 2002-07 title runs, though Waite’s were not in consecutive years. Price and Gould, who have won every annual ISDA tour stop OTHER than Brooklyn, came into the Sunday-afternoon final having defeated Mudge and Berg in both the early-January and early-February finals in Boston and Cleveland respectively, as well as having spent Saturday evening avenging their late-January fifth-set overtime Greenwich semifinal loss to John Russell and Preston Quick, who themselves earlier in the day had gotten revenge on James Hewitt and Greg Park after the latter team had pulled off an 18-17 fourth-game upset win over Russell/Quick to advance to the semis in Ohio. The Brooklyn final was dead-even at 2-all, 4-all, whereupon a series of dramatic undulations ensued: first, Mudge and Berg erupted on a 6-0 run (strongly evocative of the 5-0 skein from 8-7 to 13-7 that had sealed their Greenwich final-round fifth-game win over Russell and Quick four weeks earlier), all of them at Price’s expense, that gave them a safe-looking 10-4 lead. Safe-looking, that is, until on the ensuing point Berg, while pursuing a drop shot, sustained an ankle injury so severe that his mobility, normally his best trait, was tremendously impaired, reducing him to hobbling at the red line and requiring his partner to cover the front-right, where Price and Gould were understandably directing their attack. When play resumed, Mudge and Berg held a five-point advantage (i.e. 10-5) but were also five points away from victory, an imposing remaining distance given Berg’s badly restricted state and the lethal capabilities of his opponents. Even at 14-8, there ensued a cruel countdown while Price/Gould relentlessly closed the gap and Mudge and his wounded partner desperately sought the one point they still needed. At 12-14, Gould dead-nicked a hard serve behind a diving Mudge, but on the sixth and last of their match-balls, with a potentially ruinous tiebreaker staring them in the face, Mudge conjured up a miraculous inside-out forehand roll-corner from the depths of the back wall’s left edge that speedily angled well away from any attempt at retrieval. It was a shot for the ages by any possible interpretation, and one which, along with the tournament's Cleveland final-round forebear 15 days earlier (which Price/Gould won 15-14 14-15 18-17 15-11), vividly demonstrates how closely matched are these two teams, who between them have now won the last 32 full-ranking ISDA tournaments that have been held dating back to October 2007. In the top-half semifinal, Mudge and Berg were embroiled in a tough struggle (1-1, 7-6) against their Briggs Cup co-finalists Clive Leach and Matt Jenson when the latter, who had been battling Mudge to a virtual standstill on the left wall, tweaked his left knee on an exchange up front and was never the same during the anticlimactic 15-6, 15-5 pair of close-out games. Leach and Jenson had survived a wildly shifting five-game marathon against Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, January victors in this match-up in both Boston and Greenwich, in which Leach and Jenson led 2-0, 11-7, lost both that game and the fourth by a single point (five unconverted match-balls in all), then trailed 10-3 in the fifth, yet STILL managed to prevail on the strength of a 12-2 match-finishing run to 15-12. All told, the venerable court in Brooklyn Heights witnessed six fifth games during the course of the four-day event, including both final rounds of the qualifying brackets, and of the six overall rounds comprising the tournament (two qualifying and four main-draw), only the semifinals did not contain at least one 3-2 outcome, proof of how deep and competitive the ISDA tour has become, at all levels of the draw. Though sandwiched between, and hence possibly obscured by, the Cleveland and Brooklyn tourneys, the Tompkins Invitational, a Challenger event hosted by the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, was a strong tournament in its own right, one which saw Imran Khan reach his second Challenger final (preceded by St. Louis in mid-November) in as many attempts, in each case when he and his partner (Tom Harrity in Missouri, Nigel Thain in Philadelphia) overcame a two games to love semifinal deficit against Park and Hewitt. Also in the case of each of these events, Khan would then lose in the final to Mark Price and his partner, namely Raj Nanda in St. Louis and Steve Scharff at the Tompkins competition. Scharff, normally a right-waller, made a seamless transition to the left for this event, a positioning alignment that this pair deemed advisable in light of their one prior foray, at the ’09 U. S. National Doubles in Denver 11 months earlier, when with Price on the left they had lost in straight games to Morris Clothier and Michael Ferreira. The switch enabled Price to return to the right wall, where he has always been at his most productive, and the pair posted two 3-0 pre-final wins (over Shane Coleman/Scott Devoy and Hamed Anvari/Andrew Slater) before out-playing Khan and Thain in four hard-fought but convincing games. The tour resumes in mid-March with another Challenger tournament, this one at Germantown, leading up to major New York metropolitan stops, the Players Championship and biennial Kellner Cup, in April.