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Cambridge Club Preview

By Rob Dinerman, Nov 12 2002 © 2002 reproduction prohibited

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 The 29th Cambridge Club Professional Doubles Championship, presented by iPerform Hedge Funds, for the Jim Bentley Cup will take place this coming weekend in Toronto, featuring PSA pro softball stars
paired up with ISDA pro doubles stand-outs for the third consecutive year.

Run throughout its impressive history on Thanksgiving weekend, the event has been moved up several weeks in deference to the schedules of the PSA entrants, the final round of whose YMG Classic, also in Toronto, will take place this Thursday evening, one day prior to the black-tie festivities that commemorate the start of the Cambridge Club event.

Perhaps the most intriguing question surrounding this tournament is whether ISDA superstar Gary Waite, who last year swept to victory with his British partner Mark Chaloner, will be able to duplicate this success and hence capture the winner's trophy for what would be a record sixth time. The enormous and unforeseen degree to which Chaloner made a near-instantaneous adjustment to the hardball doubles game, especially the hard crosscourt drives he was hammering off his forehand volley by the second game of his opening match, played a major role in their trio of one-sided romps through
the draw, including over an out-gunned combination of Dean Brown and Jonathon
Power in the final.

This time the two defending co-champions are aligned with different teammates, and indeed placed in different pools, so if they DO wind up on the host club's glass back wall exhibition court at the same time this year, it will be because they are facing each other in the final. Chaloner will be playing with Michael Pirnak---who will thus have his fourth different partner in as many ISDA-sanctioned events, having already competed in Denver with the now-injured David Kay, in Vancouver with Eric Vlcek and in Philadelphia with
Willie Hosey---while Waite, whose pre-Chaloner Cambridge Club titles had come with Mudge in '99, Jamie Bentley in '95 and '96 and Scott Dulmage in '93, will be taking on the young Aussie Stewart Boswell, who, happily for those who have become Waite-weary, will be making his debut in hardball doubles competition. It should be noted, however, that the same was true of Chaloner last year, when after losing their first game of their opening match, they roared through nine consecutive games without the loss of more than 11 points in any game.

The tournament format will consist of two three-team round-robins scheduled in three two-match sessions on Saturday and Sunday, following which the 3rd/4th play-off between the second-place finishes in each pool goes on at 5 p.m. Monday evening, preceding the final between the respective first-place pool teams. In Pool A, Pirnak and Chaloner will be joined by 2000 Cambridge Club champions Hosey and Power, whom they play in Saturday's opening session, and by Mudge, a finalist with Aussie compatriot Anthony Hill two years ago, who along with second-time partner Paul Price will try to
better their fourth-place finish in 2001.

Pool B will feature at least one Canadian in every partnership, a crowd-pleasing phenomenon for sure, with Waite and Boswell facing Viktor Berg, who played No. 1 on the Canadian team that won the Pan American Federation Cup this past August, and the Scot Martin Heath, and the all-Canada duo of Bentley and Graham Ryding rounding out the pool. The softball players, who initially regarded their participation in this tourney
more or less as a lark when they were first included two years ago, have become increasingly engaged by the allure of the impressively improving ISDA
schedule and purses, the historical success some of their leading lights (Brett Martin a former world No. 2 and top-30 Clive Leach among them) have experienced in adapting to the hardball doubles game and the sheer grandeur of the Cambridge Club Doubles weekend.

Their own PSA tour has definitely had its bumps, both administratively and in prize money level, in recent years, and the steady growth of the ISDA circuit has now become a trend that shows every sign of continuing.

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