ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Mudge and Gould Prosper At Heights Casino, Win 63rd David Johnson Memorial Trophy By Rob Dinerman

     Feb28^th --- Trailing 14-9 in the second game of their semifinal against a rising contender coming off its second Challenger tournament title of the season earlier this month, top seeds Damien Mudge and Ben Gould rescued that game with a 6-0 run, then never looked back, running off four straight games and finishing off their weekend’s work with a high-paced and wonderfully-played but decisive 15-9, 7 and 8 final-round win over Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker to claim the 63^rd edition of the David C. Johnson Memorial Championship, held as always in the cozy confines of Heights Casino. The outcome, incredibly, marked the TENTH consecutive year in which Mudge has triumphed in this event, namely six straight years (from 2002-07) with Gary Waite, followed by a three-year run from 2008-10 with Viktor Berg preceding this year’s event with Gould. No one has come close to winning this tournament, or ANY tournament, on the ISDA schedule for 10 years in a row.

   Mudge had had close calls in each of the two prior finals – in ’09 he and Berg were down 2-1, 13-12 against John Russell and Preston Quick and last year Mudge/Berg saw a 14-8 fifth-game advantage over Gould and Paul Price almost disappear before Mudge converted his team’s sixth match-ball with an improbable inside-out forehand roll-corner winner after the margin had been whittled all the way down to 14-13 --- but this time he and Gould were in command throughout to a degree that belied both how well Chaloner and Walker had played throughout the tournament (INCLUDING in the final) and how many of the pre-final matches all weekend had gone to a fifth game.

  Each of the first two (of three) qualifying rounds had a route-going match – the most noteworthy example occurring late Thursday night, when Will Mariani and Ian Power saw a 2-1, 13-9 lead wiped out against Graham Bassett and Asad Khan, who then got to double-match-ball in the fifth before losing 15-14 – as did the round of 16 (in which qualifiers Bernardo Samper and Mark Price went from 6-all to 15-9 against Willie Hosey and Hamed Anvari) and the quarters, where Chaloner and Walker, who had debuted with a 3-0 round-of-16 win over Imran Khan and Steve Scharff, overcame a two games to one deficit against second seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach by weathering a tight 15-12 (from 11-all) fourth game and doing the same in the fifth. This latter encounter constituted, at least for the moment, the “rubber match” between the Jenson/Leach and Walker/Chaloner tandems, who had split a quartet of clashes last season, all but one of which, like the two-hour seesaw battle this past Saturday afternoon, had been extended to a fifth game.

   Buoyed by their comeback win as the latest chapter in this fierce rivalry, Walker and Chaloner proceeded to duplicate their win in last month’s Wilmington semis over third seeds Quick and Russell, who had advanced with a 3-1 quarter over James Hewitt and Greg Park, first-round four-game winners over qualifiers Mariani and Power. The graph of the Walker/Chaloner vs. Russell/Quick tilt was extremely tight (namely 15-9 13-15 15-13 15-13), ending on a Quick overhead attempted kill volley that instead rang loudly off the tin, a rare crunch-time miscue for the latter, who was coming off another 15-13 in the fourth outcome, this one a win, over three-time defending champion Eric Pearson last week in the final round of the U. S. Hardball Nationals in Boston. Quick thereby became the only player ever to win the U. S. Nationals in hardball, softball (in 2003 and 2004) and doubles (with Eric Vlcek in 2003 and 2004 and with Russell in ’07, when the event was a stop of the ISDA circuit).

   While these airtight matches were occurring at all stages of the draw’s bottom half, Mudge and Gould dropped the second game of their quarterfinal against Raj Nanda and Jonny Smith, which they closed out with a 15-5 fourth game. They then faced fourth seeded Apawamis Club pairing of Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, who had first ended the Cinderella run of their cross-town Rye rivals Samper and Price in a straight-set quarterfinal. Samper had initially entered the draw with Tim Wyant, whose early-week shoulder injury had forced Samper to tap his Westchester Country Club colleague Price as a last-day replacement. Price and Samper had earned a pair of qualifying-round victories (over first Los Angelinos Stefan Castelyn and J. P Rothie and then New Yorkers Josh Schwartz and Dylan Patterson) preceding their match-deciding mid-fifth-game surge at the expense of Hosey (a Johnson champion with Jamie Bentley 11 years ago) and Anvari. By the time they faced Mathur and Badan, who had been byed to the quarters by virtue of their fourth-seeded status, the Samper/Price duo was drained and Samper’s forearm was bothering him, necessitating his switch to the left wall (he later switched back for the third game, but to no avail).

  Mathur and Badan, finalists in St. Louis three months ago and tournament champions in Challenger events in both Buffalo and two weeks ago in Philadelphia, dropped a 15-13 first game of their semi vs. Mudge/Gould but fully deserved the 14-9 lead they gained in the second. At 14-all, no-set, Mathur scored on a forehand roll-corner winner, only to have it nullified when a referee’s inspection of the ball found it to have broken, and on Gould’s ensuing lob serve opening the replayed point, Mathur went for a straight-drop kill return which just tipped the top of the tin to the sympathetic groans of the packed gallery. Thus reprieved, Mudge and Gould finished off the match with a solid 15-10 third game.

  It must be said about the final that from the start Chaloner and Walker, teammates on the British squad that won the prestigious biennial World Team Championships in Egypt in 1995, performed at an exceptional level, showing the power and mobility that has fueled their torrid winter-long surge, covering for each other beautifully whenever a scrambled-court situation arose (as happened often in the furious all-court exchanges that defined much of the action) and competed as whole-heartedly as ever. That they still were unable to exceed single figures in any of the three games was totally due to the absolute brilliance, both individually and as a unit, that characterized the performance that both Mudge and Gould produced on this brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn Heights.

  No stretch more graphically personified this quality than the opening portion of the third game, which began with a mid-court look-away Mudge backhand roll-corner volley winner, followed by two forehand cross-court volleys that Gould spiked directly into the front-left night and a reverse-corner winner that he audaciously threaded from off the back wall and (after a Mudge roll-corner winner with both opponents back-pedaling) another that he hit from up front, after which he hoisted a cross-court lob that barely eluded the host club’s notorious overhanging beam and died in back in a way that gave a frustrated Walker nothing to swing at. Seven straight excellent points, all of them ending on pure winners from either Mudge or Gould. Walker and Chaloner valiantly fought back as well as they could, but by this time both the scoreboard tally and the level of the Mudge/Gould play were too much to overcome. Still, a terrific tournament for Walker and Chaloner, who based on the January/February stretch of this season may have earned the right to be considered the top ISDA team other than Mudge/Gould, who now need only to win the mid-April Players Championship in New York and the early-May biennial World Doubles in Toronto to complete what would be an undefeated 2010-11 campaign.