ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Gould And Mudge Capture U. S. Pro Crown by Rob Dinerman

Jan 10 --- Picking up seamlessly from where they had left off at the end of an undefeated run through the autumn portion of the 2010-11 ISDA tour schedule, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould swept to victory with a trio of convincing wins (over qualifiers Imran Khan and his brother Asad, Matt Jenson and Clive Leach, and defending champs Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner) this past weekend in the 17^th annual U. S. Pro Doubles Championship, hosted as always by the Wilmington Country Club courts and expertly Tournament Chaired by the club's longtime and highly popular pro Ed Chilton. It was the record-setting eighth time that Mudge has won this tournament (previously five times with Gary Waite and each of the last two years with Viktor Berg), his only misstep having occurred 10 years ago, when he and Waite lost in the opening round to Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt, who would then proceed to become the only team in ISDA history to win an ISDA event that they had been forced to qualify their way into the main draw. Mudge has won this event every year since that decade-old misadventure other than in 2006, when he and Waite didn’t enter and Gould and Preston Quick won the tournament with a final-round victory over Berg and Walker.

The latter, as referenced above, has historically played some of his best squash at this site, as witness his pair of consecutive-year final-round appearances (in ’06 and ’07) with Berg and his title run last season with Chaloner, when the tournament had a Challenger status and when the two British stars rallied from love-two down and 6-10 in the fourth to defeat Yvain Badan and Jonny Smith 17-16 in the fifth on a knifed Walker forehand reverse-corner winner at simultaneous-championship-point. One-pointers (partially abetted by a pretournament ISDA executive-office decision to mandate that all games in the January portion of the schedule be played to 15 points, rather than allow teams to choose the length of the ensuing tiebreakers after being caught at 13 or 14) played a significant role in the Walker/Chaloner advance this time around as well, as they took the second game of their 3-0 quarterfinal win over James Hewitt and Greg Park in that manner (on a nick-finding Walker serve-return cross-drop winner) before rolling through the close-out third.

They then took on second seeds (and two-time Wilmington finalists) John Russell and Preston Quick, who had been deadlocked at 2-all, 8-all in their quarterfinal against qualifiers and St. Louis finalists Badan and Manek Mathur before pulling away in the final stretch. Their Friday-evening narrow escape notwithstanding, Russell and Quick were on fire in darting out to an 8-0 lead in the opening game of their Saturday-morning Walker/Chaloner semi, only to then yield an out-of-the-blue 14-2 run that pretty much sealed that game and carried Walker and Chaloner through a 15-7 second and to a 14-11 advantage in the third. But here Quick and Russell were able to save three straight match-balls-against and escape with the game on a winning Russell backhand drive on the 14-all point. The fourth game also seesawed to 14-all, whereupon Walker nailed a drive down the middle that Quick was unable to fend off on his backhand, a denouement that ushered Chaloner into an ISDA full-ranking tournament final for the first time in his career.

Waiting for them there in the Saturday-evening final, as noted, were Mudge and Gould, hot off their extremely high-quality balancing four-game semifinal win over Jenson and Leach (first-round 3-0 winners over Smith and Raj Nanda) and facing their sixth different final-round tandem (and ninth and tenth different players) in as many full-ranking tourneys so far this season, to wit Russell/Quick in Baltimore, Mathur/Badan in St. Louis, Jenson/Leach in New York, Paul Price/Berg in Vancouver, Price/Leach (the only two players to have reached more than one final, though in each case with different partners) in Philadelphia and now Walker/Chaloner in Wilmington. As was the case in their opening-round victory 24 hours earlier, the final match of the Walker/Chaloner weekend hinged largely on a 15-14 second game, though this one went against them when, with Walker flat on the floor after a diving front-right retrieve, Mudge cracked a drive to the back-left that a scrambling Chaloner was able to barely get his racquet on but with not quite enough action to get the ball to the front wall. He and Walker promptly appealed what the latter subsequently would term a “dodgy” Mudge get earlier in the point of a Walker straight-drop kill volley, but in a split-decision the referee’s ruling was upheld, following which Mudge (who with partner Andy Houston would also win the Sunday-afternoon pro-am final in a fifth-set tiebreaker over Ian Power and his amateur partner Todd Anderson, who had led 14-12) and Gould dashed off to a big lead early in the third game and coasted in single-figure fashion across the finish line.

Despite the anticlimactic and disappointing ending, this weekend re-established Walker and Chaloner as deserving contenders after their unproductive autumn 2010 performance. They had been sub-par in a first-round straight-game October loss in St. Louis to Price and Nanda, then missed the remainder of the fall due to Walker’s commitments first as USA Men’s Team Coach (which put him in Guatemala for the Pan Am Fed event while the November events were occurring) and then as a fundraiser for the Access Youth Academy in San Diego, which prevented him from playing in the early-December Philadelphia tourney. But he and Chaloner (now fully recovered from a minor knee procedure in August to remove a cyst) plan to play an active ISDA schedule from here on out, and if this past weekend is any indication, they are definitely capable of having a major impact on the dynamics of the winter/spring tournaments that await, including Boston and Greenwich this coming weekend and next.