Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: June 25/10
June 10th - Still riding the momentum of their second consecutive year as the top-ranked team on the ISDA tour, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg began the 2009-10 tour season brimming with confidence and going undefeated through the autumn portion of the season, creating an energy zone that overwhelmed the rest of the very talented field. By season’s end, however, they were in retreat, missing the mid-April Players Championship entirely (Mudge due to the lingering effects of a concussion, Berg from an undisclosed cause) and meekly submitting in three-love fashion to Clive Leach and Matt Jenson (whom Mudge and Berg had defeated in four games in the season-opening Briggs Cup six months earlier) in the semifinals of the season-ending Kellner Cup.
Conversely, Paul Price and Ben Gould, after being edged out for the second consecutive year by Mudge and Berg for the No. 1 ranking (in both cases resulting from a head-to-head loss to their ongoing rivals in the final tournament of the season), began this past campaign shakily, with straight-set losses first to Jenson/Leach in a Briggs Cup semi and then two weeks later to Mudge/Berg in a Big Apple Open final, and with Price becomingly increasingly plagued by chronic back problems. But by April they were at their peak, successfully defending their Players Championship title (with a final-round match-ending four-point run from 11-13 against Preston Quick and John Russell) and capturing the Kellner Cup for the first time in a 3-0 final against Leach and Jenson.
For their part, Leach and Jenson, as noted, were finalists in the season-bookending Briggs Cup and Kellner Cup, the two most lucrative purses ($100,000 and $50,000 respectively) of the entire season, but had to weather a midseason patch consisting of January quarterfinal ousters both in five games and both at the hands of Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, whose sequence of praiseworthy results during that stretch had been jump-started by a 17-16 fifth-game final-round victory in an early-December Challenger event in Wilmington over former mid-2000’s Trinity College teammates Jonny Smith and Yvain Badan.
This latter match, which ended (on a tin-defying Walker reverse-corner winner) the only tournament in the 10-year history of the ISDA to come down to a simultaneous-championship-point, also constituted the debut appearance for both pairings after all four players had endured disappointing fall results with other partners. Walker and Chaloner, first-round losers at the Briggs Cup (with Smith and Willie Hosey respectively), would, as noted, play exceptionally well all winter, only to capsize in the first round of the Kellner Cup at the hands of Whitten Morris and James Stout, a premature elimination that would enable James Hewitt and Greg Park to surpass Walker and Chaloner as the No. 5 team in the final standings. Indeed, there would be no fewer than three of these team-ranking swings in the wake of the Kellner Cup results, which also caused Price/Gould to unseat Mudge/Berg at No. 1, while Jenson/Leach were doing the same to Russell/Quick, who had been stopped short of the semis for only the second time all season, in a close four-game Kellner Cup quarterfinal vs. Smith and Badan.
The purpose of the foregoing passages is to demonstrate (1) what a tenuous and winding path comprises an ISDA tour season, and how many things can change during its course, for reasons ranging from injuries to slumps to partner realignments; and (2) how closely packed the top- and second-tier teams are, and how many of the season’s defining matches can come down to a roll-of-the-dice racquet-swing or ball-bounce. This latter phenomenon was compellingly evident in the number of incredibly close finishes to many of this past season’s final rounds --- never in the history of the Association have so many such matches hinged on such small margins, or seen so many stirring eleventh-hour rallies.
The 17-16 Wilmington final was followed by Boston, where Price/Gould trailed Mudge/Berg 2-1, 6-2 before a 13-3 run gave them that game and presaged their 15-10 fifth; the North American Open in Greenwich, in which Russell/Quick spotted their semifinal opponents Price/Gould the first two points of the fifth game’s best-of-nine tiebreaker before running off five straight, then forced a fifth game in their next-day final against eventual champs Mudge and Berg; Cleveland, where the first three games of the Price/Gould 3-1 final-round win over Mudge/Berg all were one-pointers; the venerable “Johnson” in Brooklyn Heights, where Price/Gould rallied all the way from 8-14 to 13-14 in the fifth game of the final against Mudge and Berg (who had badly sprained his ankle with his team ahead 10-4) before Mudge came up with an out-of-the-blue roll-corner winner from the depths of the back-left to avert an impending tiebreaker; the Players Championship in Long Island and Manhattan, where Russell/Quick rallied in the fifth game of their final from 6-11 to 13-11, only, as mentioned, to then fall victim to a four-point closing Price/Gould run to 15-11; and, finally, the Kellner Cup, where Price and Gould, leading 2-0, 14-8, surrendered not only those six championship-points but EIGHT straight points overall, putting them behind Jenson/Leach two points to love in the best-of-five tiebreaker, yet STILL managed to salvage that game on two consecutive Price winners followed by his lob that clung so closely to the right wall that not even the magically-handed Leach could scrape it back into play.
While the Price/Gould, Mudge/Berg, Jenson/Leach, Russell/Quick and Walker/Chaloner teams came away with most of the important trophies in 2009-10, there were several other noteworthy performances as well in a campaign which boasted an all-time ISDA-high five events with purses of at least $35,000 --- namely the Briggs and Kellner Cups, as previously detailed, plus Brooklyn ($35,000) and the North American Open and Players Championships ($40,000 in each case) --- while also adding a third presenting sponsor (Northsea Partners LLC) joining longtime ISDA sponsors Harrow and Inverness Counsel.
Badan and Smith, consistent quarterfinalists during the winter and spring, had their breakthrough to the Kellner Cup semis; Hewitt and Park emulated the Badan/Smith win over Russell/Quick by doing the same in a Cleveland quarterfinal; Whitten Morris got to the quarters of both the Briggs Cup (with Joe Pentland) and the Kellner Cup (with Stout, who just weeks earlier had added the U. S. Open court-tennis title to the Rackets world championship he earned in 2008); Imran Khan got to the finals of the Challenger events at the Racquet Club of St. Louis, the Philadelphia Racquet Club and the Germantown Cricket Club, all three times with rallies from two-love down in the semis --- at Germantown he and Park (who learned squash as a youngster in the host club) defeated Hewitt and Mark Price (who had previously won the Challenger tourneys in St. Louis (with Raj Nanda) and Philadelphia with Steve Scharff) and Hewitt, the ISDA’s Executive Director; Scharff followed up on his mid-February win with Price (over Khan and Nigel Thain) in downtown Philadelphia by triumphing a little over a month later both in the U. S. Men’s National Doubles (with Dylan Patterson) and the U. S. National Mixed Doubles with WISPA star Natalie Grainger.
All in all, the 13 events (eight full-ranking, four Challengers and the Cambridge Club special-event round-robin) that comprised the 2009-10 ISDA tour featured some newly prominent protagonists (any Players-To-Watch list would have to include Khan, two-time Challenger semifinalist and former PSA No. 1 John White, Stout and ’09 Trinity captain Manek Mathur), LOTS of airtight outcomes, financial growth that belied the recession swirling around much of the season, emergent contending teams and the promise of an even better 2010-2011 campaign. Some of the existing sites have already committed to upgrading their purses and some new venues will be making their appearance next season as well, as the top teams try to consolidate their hard-earned standing and hold off the newly formed pairings that will be in hot pursuit next season.