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WAITE AND MUDGE CAPTURE BOSTON DOUBLES EVENT

By Rob Dinerman, January 22 2002

Trailing two games to one for the first time this season and ensnared in their most dangerous predicament in 2001-2002 in their opening match of the ISDA tour stop at the University Club of Boston, top seeds Gary Waite and Damien Mudge showed their champion's mettle by extricating themselves from a 1-2, 9-11 deficit, preserving their undefeated season-long record and proceeding to add this title to the five they had already amassed during the current campaign.

Brett Martin (l) and Scott Butcher (r) freeze the author (Rob Dinerman) in Boston (photo © 2002 Vaughn Winchell

It was the sixth consecutive Boston doubles title and eighth in the past decade for Waite, who had won this event last year with Anders Wahlstedt while Mudge was sidelined last winter with a severe left wrist injury, and who had also won a pair each with Mark Talbott and Jamie Bentley to go with victorious mid-1990's one-time collaborations with Jeff Stanley and Pepe Martinez.

As noted, this year's ultimately successful salvo nearly never made it out of the gate, as David Kay and Scott Dulmage, who had taken the champs to five games in the semis at Wilmington two weeks earlier, rode a one-sided first game and a 15-13 third to put themselves in position for what would have been a major breakthrough.

BALL EXPERIMENT
The fact that the Boston event is the first ISDA stop this season to use the singles hardball rather than the more souped-up doubles ball may have played a role in this near-upset by depriving the top seeds of the momentum they often feed off of by camping out at the tee and overpowering their opponents, as they did so vividly just six days earlier in romping through a one-sided final at the City Athletic Club in Manhattan against Josh MacDonald and Wahlstedt.

KAY AND DULMAGE PUT TOP TEAM UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE
The completeness of Kay's recovery from a mid-November back injury and of Dulmage's recent return to top form after a flat autumn also contributed to the score, as did the confidence this team must have gained from the closeness of the early-January contest in Delaware. Whatever its genesis, Kay and Dulmage at 8-8 in the fourth were just one short streak away from saddling their formidable foes with their first loss in the 54 weeks since Wahlstedt and Scott Stoneburgh handed them their only defeat at the 2001 Wilmington event and from thereby snapping Waite/Mudge's undefeated skeins in ISDA ranking events of six consecutive tournaments and 19 straight matches.

At this crisis juncture, Mudge took the match by the throat and led a full-court blitz that keyed a 7-0 game-closing rally and force a fifth game, in which the understandably deflated Kay/Dulmage pairing swiftly trailed by an imposing 8-2 gap that only grew as the 15-5 final tally evolved.

Reprieved by their successful extrication from this perilous quarter-final, The Champs then ran off six straight games en route to the winner's circle, though the first pair of this sextet were each by a single point in their semi with Blair Horler and Clive Leach, who had advanced to that stage with a convincing four-game quarter over successful qualifiers Josh MacDonald and Dean Brown.

MACDONALD AND BROWN
MacDonald had joined forces with Anders Wahlstedt to reach the final of the previous week's ISDA stop at the City Athletic Club in midtown Manhattan, while Brown had partnered Jonathon Power to the final of the Cambridge Doubles in late November. These recent successes and their four-game win over the all-Aussie duo of Scott Butcher and Brett Martin in the last round of the qualifying seemed to augur well for their main-draw prospects, even more so when they took the opening game in a tiebreaker, but from that point onward Leach and Horler dominated the remaining trio of single-figure games, then, as noted, pressed Waite and Mudge to 14-14 in the first game, whereupon Waite validated the wisdom of Mudge's unexpected no-set call with a scorched crosscourt that overwhelmed Leach's racquet and bounded harmlessly skyward.

Undaunted by this unhappy conclusion to the opening game, Horler and Leach grabbed a 12-8 advantage in the second and later had a double game-point, the second of which vanished on a brainy Waite misdirection shot that caught Horler crossing over to the sidewall and Leach too far back in the court for either to retrieve. The third game swiftly went at 15-4, the double-disappointment at having two superbly played games both fall one agonizing point short proving too much to recover from, at least on this occasion, though it should be noted that Leach regained his equanimity sufficiently to team with former Dartmouth all-Ivy Sandy Tierney to win the concomitant pro-am competition.

BRIGGS SHOWS GLIMPSES OF OLD FORM
The bottom half contained five-gamers, one-pointers and heroism as well, much of the latter finding its personification in the 50-year-old form of doubles legend Peter Briggs, a two-time('72-'73)Intercollegiate Champion at nearby Harvard whose domination of the professional doubles scene during the 1983-84 season was so complete that all five of his titles that year were with different partners.

Absent from pro doubles tournaments for five years, sidelined by back woes most of the past autumn and now several months into his sixth decade, Briggs entered the qualifying with Greenwich neighbor Steve Scharff and transfixed the admiring gallery with his positioning and shot-making through three spell-binding five-game matches that brought this putatively unthreatening alignment to within a point of a berth in the semis!

First, they defeated their bracket's top seeds James Hewitt and the University Club's favorite son and multiple club champion Doug Lifford; then they earned their way into the main-draw by one point in the fifth over the strong Canadian-based team of Ken Flynn and Tyler Millard, with Briggs passing Millard on the match's deciding point with a crosscourt that clung too close to the back wall for Millard to steer it back into play; and finally, they moved to 14-11 in the fifth over fourth seeds Todd Binns and Jeff Mulligan, the match and a Cinderella story seemingly firmly in their grasp.

But this pair, who saved triple-match-point and won 15-14 in the season's opening event in Denver 16 weeks earlier, ran off three points to even the score and force a match-determining tiebreaker. Briggs and Scharff chose the same no-set option that had worked so well for them earlier that very day, only to be undone this time when Binns pounced on a slightly over-hit Briggs reverse-corner and unleashed a screamer down the middle that a diving Scharff was unable to get his racquet on.

BRIGGS - BINNS HISTORY
That the stand-out southpaws Briggs and Binns had the last two strokes of this last-point match was absolutely fitting; incredibly, of the five previous pro doubles matches in which they have opposed each other over their careers, all have gone the five-game limit and no fewer than four have been resolved on the fifth game's last possible point, with Binns coming away with the victory on three of those occasions, including this one.

Though somewhat obscured by these fireworks and excitement above, the draw's lower-most quarter was an excellent match in its own right, with second seeds Willie Hosey and Viktor Berg determined to redeem themselves after an upset first-round defeat six days earlier in New York and Michael Pirnak and Jamie Bentley, who days earlier had decided to split up as a team after January's events were over, equally bent on expunging the memories of the haunting manner in which they had seen a 2-0, 9-1 lead over these same opponents dissolve into a five-game defeat that may have made inevitable the ensuing team break-up. The rematch was tight, competitive and very well-played, especially in the two split overtime sessions that resolved the second and third games.

After Pirnak and Bentley had rebounded from their 18-17 loss in the third to take the fourth at 11, Hosey and Berg raced to a 12-5 lead in the fifth, yielded a 7-2 run that reduced their margin to a nervous-making 14-12, but escaped to the semis on a match-ending winner off Berg's dynamic racquet.

FIVE GAME FRENZY
This was the last of a host of five-game matches at both the main-draw and qualifying levels of an enormously competitive tournament, beginning with the very first round of the qualifying, where, in addition to the aforementioned Briggs/Scharff win over Hewitt/Lifford, Butcher and Martin had had to overcome surprisingly strong resistance from mid-1970's Yale teammates Rob Dinerman and Derrick Niederman(who had won the fourth on a reflex Niederman drop winner at 14-13) and Flynn and Millard had preceded their one-point-in-the-fifth loss to Briggs/Scharff with a win by that same irreducibly narrow margin over Preston Quick and Andrew Slater, who was unable to retrieve a screaming reverse-corner winner off the bat of Flynn, his early-season partner, on Thursday evening's final point.

And the bottom-half semi between Hosey/Berg and Binns/Mulligan seemed destined to require a fifth game as well when the latter team rebounded from a two-game deficit by romping through a 15-6 third and earning a 13-10 advantage in the fourth. But this prospect was thwarted when Hosey and Berg ran off the match's final five points, several of them coming on low-percentage but perfectly placed forehand three-walls by Berg, including a dead-nick winner on the last point. Ironically in view of how close so many of the pre-final matches had been, the final itself, the fourth such meeting at this ultimate stage of the six ISDA events so far this season, was never in doubt.

Hosey and Berg had forced a fifth game in the North American Open in Connecticut two months earlier, but on this occasion, as in their final last week against MacDonald and Wahlstedt at the City Athletic Club, Waite and Mudge were in control from the start and won by a revealing score of 15-10, 11 and 10. In this match, as in many of the others this weekend, the presence of the singles ball created more shotmaking and all-court play than usual, and may have been an equalizing element that perhaps played a contributory role in the closeness of many of the matches. But it was the same pair of performers who occupied the winner's circle in the end, and whether they can be defeated this season with any ball and on any court very much remains to be seen.

To reach Rob Dinerman write to robd@squashtalk.com

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