Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: May 11/10
During the past 10 weeks, New York has hosted three important stops on the ISDA tour, namely the “Johnson” at the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn in mid-February and the Players Championship (formerly known as the Creek Challenge Cup) and biennial Kellner Cup, the 13th and last stop (eight of them full-ranking plus four Challengers and the special-event Cambridge Club tourney) on the 2009-10 tour, on successive weekends in late April. All three of these tournaments involved significant and even unprecedented rallies, sometimes in both directions, in the final game of the final round, making for some of the most memorable finishes, especially in such a compressed time span, in the history of the Association.
In Brooklyn Heights, top-seeded defending champions Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg ran off six straight points to go from 4-all to 10-4 in the fifth game of their final against Paul Price and Ben Gould, but a severe ankle injury to Berg on the ensuing exchange so deprived him of his mobility, normally one of his foremost traits, that a subsequent 14-8 edge melted almost completely away before, at 14-13, Mudge saved the day with a heroic tin-defying inside-out forehand roll-corner from the depths of the back-left corner to avoid what might have been a virtually unwinnable tiebreaker and salvage the victory for his team.
Though no one knew or could have expected it at the time, Mudge’s nervy and successful salvo, which gave him his record-setting ninth straight title (the first seven with Gary Waite before the last two with Berg), was to be his and Berg’s last hurrah, at least for this season. They were both sidelined for the Players Championship --- Mudge due to the lingering effects of a concussion caused by a racquet follow-through seven days earlier and Berg for an undisclosed cause --- and they were ousted in a straight-game Kellner Cup semifinal by Clive Leach and Matt Jenson in which Mudge, a record seven-time Kellner Cup champion who had never previously been stopped short of the finals, played as well as ever but an out-of-sorts Berg committed far too many errors (seven in the second game, nine in the third, four of them on serve-returns) for his team to sustain.
In each of those events, Price and Gould, tournament winners earlier in Boston and Cleveland, swept through the bottom half of the draw, defeating Leach and Jenson (who led 1-0, 11-8) in four games in the Players semi while John Russell and Preston Quick were doing the same to Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker, who had stormed through a top-quadrant left wide open by the Mudge/Berg pre-tournament withdrawal, which occurred too close to the start of play for the draw to be re-done. Russell and Quick, who had out-lasted Price/Gould in a fifth-set tiebreaker three months earlier in Greenwich, took a two games to one lead, but fell behind 11-6 in the fifth, seemingly curtains. However, they then embarked on a seven-point spurt fueled largely by Quick’s powerful cross-courts (which forced several errors from Price) and several nick-finding Russell front-court shots, the last of which, a perfectly-placed cross-court drop, gave his team a 13-11 lead.
But at this ill-boding juncture, a Price serve-return drop shot that surprised Russell was followed by a backhand drive that Gould lashed down the left wall for 13-all, leading to a no-set tiebreaker selection by Russell/Quick (who had succeeded with exactly this option two games earlier) and two match-ending tins by the heretofore brilliant Russell, the first when he tried to nail a backhand serve-return past Price and the second when he tried a reverse-corner from off the back wall.
A reprieved Price and Gould would effectively re-live both aspects of their Players experience just one week later when, on the last Monday night in April, they again squared off against Leach and Jenson, who had roared through nine consecutive games in attaining the Kellner Cup final while Price and Gould were out-playing Whitten Morris and James Stout (first-round winners over Walker/Chaloner) in their quarterfinal and former mid-2000’s Trinity teammates Yvain Badan and Jonny Smith (quarters winners over Russell/Quick by a 15-13 fourth-game tally) in the semis, in each case by a 3-1 tally. Though the actual on-court play before a packed and vocal gallery at the Racquet & Tennis Club was much closer than the score, Price and Gould won the first two games 15-7, 15-10, and when from 7-all in the third they surged to 14-8, they seemed assured of victory within the next point or two.
Instead, the match took 11 more points (and 29 more minutes) to complete, the first eight of which landed in the Jenson/Leach column, as the latter pairing, incredibly, saved all six championship-points-against (something never before achieved in ISDA competition, though, as noted, Price and Gould came close to doing so in Brooklyn), four of them on Jenson winners, and when he hit another one on the second point of the best-of-five tiebreaker, he and his partner had a triple-game-ball of their own. Losing a game in which they had held all those match-points in the final round of a championship of this magnitude might have proved calamitous in terms of where it would have left Price/Gould for the fourth and possibly fifth game.
Whether they could have re-grouped and recovered from a collapse of such dimension, or whether they would instead had a whole agonizing summer to contemplate their failure to convert a 2-0, 14-8 lead, was rendered moot when Price first laced a backhand reverse-corner winner and then (on the shot of the night) conjured up a totally unexpected three-wall nick off a powerful Leach cross-court. Then after the first three attempts to play the ensuing simultaneous-game-ball ended in lets (fewer than half of the EIGHT lets that had occurred at 12-14), Price lofted a high backhand cross-court lob over Leach’s head which, after hitting the back wall just below the out-of-bounds line, ran so tightly along the right wall that even Leach, with his wondrously gifted hands, was unable to steer it back to the front wall, eliciting a sympathetic groan from a crowd that was hungering for this splendidly entertaining match to continue and a mid-court embrace from a vastly relieved Price and Gould (fifth-set tiebreaker losers to Mudge/Berg in the prior edition of this tourney two years ago) in celebration of their first Kellner Cup title.
