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WAITE AND MUDGE CAPTURE CONNECTICUT DOUBLES EVENT

By Rob Dinerman, Feb 10 2002

GREENWICH OPEN TITLE GOES TO WAITE AND MUDGE---By Rob Dinerman

Champions in 2000 but prevented from defending last year due to a fluke off-court mishap shortly before the event, top seeds Gary Waite and Damien Mudge returned to the winner's circle of the $25,000 Greenwich Open without dropping a single game. In so doing, they restored the order that had been temporarily undone by Mudge's left-wrist fracture while roller-blading last winter on a Manhattan sidewalk, completed their sweep of the four January ISDA tournaments and extended to seven their run of ranking events this season without a defeat.

KAY AND BINNS JOINED
After handling James Hewitt and Doug Lifford in the quarters, the eventual champs then met David Kay and his first-time teammate Todd Binns, who was playing for the first time in the last two seasons with any partner other than Jeff Mulligan, who was attending a friend's wedding.

Kay himself had been plagued by the flu most of the week prior to the event, and his normal partner Chris Walker, had to withdraw because of softball commitments to the overlapping Tournament of Champions.

This somewhat patchwork pairing reached the semis by rallying from a first-game loss to win in four against Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt, who had toppled qualifiers eric Vlcek and Andrew Slater and seemed to be well positioned in this quarter before Stoneburgh began suffering cramps in the same right calf muscle that he had injured three weeks earlier in Wilmington. Sidelined by that pull during the interceding events in Manhattan and Boston, Stoneburgh seemed to be in top form for a match and a quarter, but when the cramps began to take hold, his mobility, especially in covering short shots to his side, was correspondingly affected, and Kay and Binns were able to take advantage in winning the match's final three games.

BENTLEY-PIRNAK SWAN SONG
While these developments were unfolding in the draw's top half, most of the weekend's drama was taking place down below. In one of the two round-of-16 matches in the tourney's 10-team draw, Jamie Bentley, who had won the 2001 Greenwich Open title with Willie Hosey, was playing this time, as he has all season, with Michael Pirnak in a what had already been decided would be their last tournament as a team, at least for the rest of this season.

Both are proven great players but, in a phenomenon that is somewhat rare but far from unprecedented in squash doubles, they have both under-achieved and seemed almost snakebitten as a team, managing to lose close matches in virtually every permutation, whether from way ahead (as happened three weeks ago in Delaware, where they led Hosey and Viktor Berg 2-0, 9-1, their place in the finals a seeming certainty) or way behind (as when they rallied from 5-12 to 12-14 against the same team last week in Boston before falling) or close all the way, the 18-17 in the fifth defeat to Kay and Chris Walker in the season's opening event in Denver being the best of several examples.

BUTCHER AND MARTIN
In this tournament, they led Australians Scott Butcher and Brett Martin two games to love before the weight of this season-long history surfaced in the remaining three games and dragged them down for a final time. By the end, they had stopped believing and stopped communicating, and a rash of tins brought the curtain mercilessly down on this failed experiment and brought the tight-knit Aussie pair to the quarters, where they lost to Blair Horler and Clive Leach in a hard-hitting and competitive four games.

Ironically, Horler and Leach had been trounced by Pirnak and Bentley two weeks earlier, and on Leach's home turf at the City Athletic Club, in a performance that gave a glimpse of what might have been for this star-filled but star-crossed alignment, whose experience this weekend was at least partly salvaged when Pirnak and his amateur partner, Ted Danforth, managed to reach the finals of the pro-am event, where they lost in five to Lifford and John MacAtee.

That Horler/Leach wound up in a rubber match against second seeds Hosey and Berg in the semis was borderline miraculous, as qualifiers Steve Scharff and Preston Quick (who had been colleagues last year in the pro shop at Round Hill, less than a mile up the road from the host Greenwich Field Club site) led Hosey/Berg 4-1 set-five in the second-set tiebreaker before dropping those four game points, led 2-1 in games before losing the fourth and led 14-12 in the fifth before losing that game 17-15. For a beleaguered Scharff, whose reverse-corner was on fire for much of the match before he became perhaps too conservative in that match-ending 6-1 stretch, it was the second straight week in which he had multiple match-points for what would have been his first-ever ISDA semi-final berth; seven days earlier in Boston, he and Peter Briggs, after winning their last-round qualifier on a simultaneous match-point, were ahead of Binns and Mulligan 14-11 in the fifth before dropping the last four points.

Perhaps mindful of the unhappy outcome of that no-set call in Boston, Scharff and Quick (who ALSO was a simultaneous-match-point loser with partner Andrew Slater in Boston!) opted for the three-point tiebreaker this time, but by then Berg had regained his touch and he and his veteran partner were able to survive the overtime session and advance to the semis. There they trailed throughout the match and throughout the fifth game against Horler and Leach, who had defeated them in three(two overtimes) in Philadelphia in October before they evened the slate at the North American Open, also held in Greenwich two months earlier, when Hosey and Berg had rallied from 8-10 to 15-11 en route to the finals, where they pushed Waite and Mudge to a fifth game for the only time in their four final-round meetings this season.

On this occasion, Hosey and Berg had to rally once too many times. They won the second and fourth games and rode a Berg hot spree from 8-14 all the way to a nervous-making 11-14 in the fifth, at which crisis juncture Leach lined up an overhit Hosey crosscourt off the back wall and buried a severe and unreturnable forehand to land himself and his powerful Kiwi partner in an ISDA final for the second time this season.

WAITE AND MUDGE TOO STRONG
Their opponents on both of those occasions, of course, were Waite and Mudge, who had also played them in Denver and Boston and who got to the final this time with a fairly routine straight-set semi over Binns and a still slightly under-the-weather Kay. This Greenwich final was quite possibly the best of the four, with Leach coming up with perhaps his best performance of the season and Horler almost living up to the scintillating standard of play he had established that morning in the semis, throughout which he was exploding to the ball and rifling crosscourts that broke in on Berg or otherwise drew him out of his formidable comfort zone. They went up 14-11 in the first game, but a Waite winner and consecutive tins from Horler and then Leach (on an attempted forehand reverse-corner serve-return that Mudge almost certainly would not have retrieved but that just caught the tin) tied the score at 14. A brief conference resulted in a "set-three" call for the tiebreaker, but Waite and Mudge closed the game out at 17-14, won a tight second game, 15-12 and rallied from 4-9 to 15-13 in the third.

Throughout this four-match series, Horler and Leach have been right on the brink but have never been able to break through; of the twelve games these duos have played against eachother this season, no fewer than six have needed a tiebreaker to resolve and Horler/Leach have held at least one game point in five of those games. It will be interesting to see what happens when they finally take one of these taut games, though Waite and Mudge have been able to handle everything that has been thrown at them so far and no doubt will be prepared to deal with this eventuality as well if or when it arises.

MIXED MADNESS
Mudge did lose in the final of the Mixed Doubles, where and his partner Christine Danforth fell in five to Hosey and 1979 Yale No. 1 Cynthia Kempner, but whether he and his nonpareil partner lose in ISDA tour competition during this season still very much remains to be seen.

To reach Rob Dinerman write to robd@squashtalk.com

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