ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge And Gould Triumph In Boston By Rob Dinerman

Jan 17th --- Hard-pressed in each of their two pre-final matches (the second of which would have gone to a fifth game were it not for a razor-sharp close-out reverse-corner winner at 14-all in the fourth), top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould overwhelmed third seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach in a 15-6, 6 and 5 Sunday final to commandeer the Boston ISDA tour stop, hosted as always by the University Club of Boston, and title sponsored this year (and for the next two years as well) by Putnam Investments. It was the sixth Boston title for Mudge and the third for Gould, in each case spread out over three different partners --- namely Gary Waite and Viktor Berg with Mudge and Preston Quick and Paul Price with Gould --- and it extended to seven (in as many attempts) the number of ISDA tournaments that these undefeated Australians, who had never partnered up prior to this past October, have won so far during this 2010-11 tour.

After debuting Friday night with a highly competitive 15-14 13-15 15-11 15-13 quarterfinal win over Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda, Mudge and Gould faced a rematch in Saturday’s semifinal with their final-round Wilmington opponents six days earlier in Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, quarterfinal winners over fourth seeds Price and Fred Reid Jr. when the latter committed a racquet error at 14-all in that match’s third and final game. Walker and Chaloner fell behind two games to love, but barged through a 15-8 third game and battled on dead-even terms all the way to 14-all in the fourth, at which crossroads juncture, as referenced above, Mudge came through with a severely angled backhand reverse-corner that barely eluded Walker’s diving attempt to flag it down.

The bottom-half semifinal that followed, between Jenson/Leach and second seeds Preston Quick and John Russell, also went to 2-1, 14-all, but this time the team that trailed won the 14-all point when Russell’s backhand reverse was (barely) retrieved by Jenson, who, however, got only enough of his racquet on the ball to hit it weakly back at himself for a stroke call against him. But that was to be the parting shot for Russell/Quick, who fell way behind right away in the fifth game en route to 15-6 for Jenson and Leach, who thereby exuberantly raced into the final with a level of momentum that belied the blow-out loss that awaited them the following day. Russell and Quick had dominated their quarterfinal match against James Hewitt and Greg Park, as had Leach and Jenson in an opening-round 15-8, 6 and 6 tally that saw them forcefully avenge the four-game loss that they had suffered in St. Louis three months ago at the hands of that tournament’s eventual finalists Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan.

Jenson and Leach, previously runners-up in the Big Apple Open in early November, thus became the first team this season to challenge Mudge/Gould in an ISDA final for the second time; the prior six full-ranking ISDA events had all had a different team emerge from the competition in the bottom half of the draw. In light of the compelling manner in which Jenson/Leach had finished off their Russell/Quick semi, no one was expecting the anticlimactic course of the one-sided final, though one possible explanation lies in the somewhat complicated pro-am format that Boston always employs, which rewards the amateur participants with more match opportunities than most pro-ams allow but takes a correspondingly greater toll on their respective partners, i.e. the pros. In this case, though all four of the final-round ISDA players had pro-am matches Sunday morning, Leach’s match, which occurred in the Open final and went down to 14-all in the fifth before he and John Brazilian lost to Greg McArthur and multiple-times U. S. National Doubles amateur age-group champion Sandy Tierney, was the hardest, the longest and the last prior to the final, which indeed followed immediately after that match ended.

Leach clearly, and understandably, lacked the energy that normally characterizes his formidable on-court presentation, and this development seemed to have something of a ripple effect on Jenson, who often feeds off his partner’s arsenal. Seeing and seizing this crack in their foe’s armor, Mudge and Gould took off for the finish line and never looked back. This was not the first time that a grueling pro-am final has had an impact on the dynamics of the pro final that follows, and it will be interesting to see whether the ISDA considers taking some steps to prevent this unwelcome phenomenon from recurring. (Later this month, the ISDA will also be assessing their experiment of mandating the “no-set” tiebreaker call in the Wilmington/Boston/Greenwich January part of the schedule, as opposed to allowing the team that reached 13 or 14 first to choose a longer overtime session.)

Notwithstanding the Mudge/Gould sprint through the final, this tournament, the milestone 20^th at this highly popular venue, was a huge success, a tribute to its perennial Tournament Chairmen (and partners in many USSRA National Doubles age-group title runs) Len Bernheimer and Tom Poor. The entire Tournament Committee has always shown exceptional enthusiasm whenever this event rolls around, and it has become one of the true highlights of the ISDA schedule.