ISDA Update: 2006 To Begin without Waite and Mudge
By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk © 2005; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Dec 24 , 2005     

Quick and Gould Seeded Number 1 in Wilmington and Boston

When the 2006 portion of the current ISDA pro doubles schedule kicks off during the first full weekend of January with the U. S. Pro Championships at the Wilmington Country Club, one of the most popular sites on the schedule, it will be without the presence of the No. 1 team of Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, the reigning four-time champions who dominated the 16-tournament 2004-2005 tour by going undefeated wire-to-wire for the third time (also 1999-2000 and 2001-2002) during their seven-year partnership.

Mudge, who is currently on his annual three-week Christmas vacation in his native Australia, will also miss the Boston tourney (which he and Waite have captured in three of the past four years) one week later before he and Waite (who will be playing in Boston with Viktor Berg) re-join forces the following
weekend in Greenwich, where they will attempt to win their sixth consecutive North American Open title. Ben Gould and Preston Quick, who opposed Waite and Mudge in all three fall 2005 ISDA tanking tournaments, losing to The Champs 3-0 in Baltimore before beating them (for the first time in 12 attempts) 15-14 in the fourth in New York and coming within an 18-17 fifth-game simultaneous
match-point of taking the rubber match six days later in Toronto, will be seeded No. 1 in both Wilmington and at the University Club of Boston.

The pair of early-January events will constitute the first tournaments that either Waite or Mudge will miss other than when they have been injured since the formation of the ISDA in the late 1990's, when the pair first embarked on the partnership that has subsequently shattered every significant record for
achievement in the history of professional doubles on this continent. The only serious challenge to their skeins of 24 consecutive ISDA ranking tournaments and 76 matches set in the early 2000's occurred when they themselves had a recent run that had swollen to 19 tournaments and 64 matches before it ended at the Big Apple Open in the New York Athletic Club early last month.

ISSUES OF PREDICTABILITY
Ironically, that very degree of extended success may have contributed to its at least temporary suspension by creating an atmosphere of predictability and preordainment that left the tour shorn of its existential spice and led to an increasing level of resentment on the part of both the ISDA playing group
and, importantly, tournament chairmen, who increasingly were forced to seek ways of making their events more exciting.

One of the proactive and aggressive methods several site organizers (namely those in Denver and Montreal) resorted to this past autumn was to remove their event from the ISDA schedule and
simply "match up" partners in a manner that they thought would result in a competitively "balanced" draw, a controversial move that had mixed success but did produce some new winners in the wake of the decision by both Waite and Mudge not to participate in these now non-ranking tournaments.

A BREATHER CALLED FOR
Disheartened by this festering element of negativity and fully aware of the importance of regaining their mental competitive peak if they wished to successfully withstand the major challenge that the emergent Quick/Gould tandem (Waite and Mudge's co-finalists a tour-leading five times during their inaugural 2004-2005 campaign as partners) clearly pose, Waite and Mudge decided late this past autumn to give themselves a breather in order to re-load (and in Waite's case to also recover from a collarbone injury he sustained last week) before plunging back into the fray with a defense of the coveted North American Open crown.

By that time, it is likely that the dynamics of the ISDA circuit will have been affected by what happens in Wilmington (the scene five years ago of the only pre-finals loss Waite and Mudge have ever sustained, which came at the hands of eventual champs Anders Wahlstedt and Scott Stoneburgh in the first round) and Boston, where they have had several close calls in recent years. The first-year teams of Blair Horler/Willie Hosey and Berg/Chris Walker, seeded second and third respectively in Delaware, are both fully capable of contending for the U. S. Pro trophy, as are third seeds Clive Leach and Michael Pirnak, who would oppose Gould and Quick in the semis if the seeding holds up.

In Boston, as noted, Waite and Berg, who won four consecutive ISDA events together in the late winter/early spring of 2001 while Mudge was recovering from a severe wrist injury, will be seeded second, and Hosey will be reuniting as well with a 2001 partner when he and Jamie Bentley, who reached the final in Boston (as well as a half-dozen other ISDA events) that year, will be trying to re-conjure up the magic they generated for several years during the late 1990's and early 2000's. But whatever happens in those two longstanding and well-respected tourneys, the big question heading into Greenwich now is whether this unusual and voluntary Waite/Mudge hiatus will prove to be just a brief respite within the configuration of their continuing domination or the first tangible step in the double-edged ending of a legendary era.

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