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WAITE AND MUDGE CAPTURE CANDIAN DOUBLES EVENT

By Rob Dinerman, Feb 20 2002

Waite and Mudge Go Eight For Eight So Far This Season

There were new team alignments, saved match-point predicaments and several intriguing developments during the $30,000 Canadian Open, hosted at the Mayfair Parkway facility in Markham, a Toronto suburb, during the third weekend in February.

WINNER'S STREAK
What wasn't novel at all was the appearance in the winner's circle of a pair of very familiar faces, namely those of top seeds Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, who now have won nine straight ranking ISDA tourneys going back to the concluding event of 2000-2001, the Kellner Cup last April.

Since first joining forces at the very end of the 1998-99 campaign, when they were colleagues in the University Club of New York pro shop, this near-invincible duo has won 20 of the 21 events they have entered and since extricating themselves from a two games to one deficit in their opening round against Dave Kay and Scott Dulmage in Boston, five weeks prior to the Canadian Open, they have now won eight straight matches (the last two in Boston and three each in Greenwich and Markham) without dropping a single game.

HOT-COURT HEAVEN
The hot-court environment in which this tournament was held suits this pair perfectly; to the extent they are vulnerable at all, it has been when the event is played either with a singles ball (as happened in Boston), which blunts their power game a bit, or in a colder, deader court, like at the Wilmington Country Club, where they suffered their only defeat last year and were pushed to five games last month by Kay and Dulmage, and where sharpshooters like Dulmage or Scott Stoneburgh (who combined with Anders Wahlstedt to deal Waite/Mudge their Delaware defeat en route to winning that event) can have success with their short game.

Stoneburgh especially has become frustrated this season when forced to deal with a warm court and overly active ball, and he tinned heavily in his and Wahlstedt's opening match against Blair Horler and Clive Leach, which the latter duo, runners-up in previous 2001-2002 ISDA tour stops in Philadelphia in October and Greenwich in the most recent ranking event in late January, won in a fairly comfortable three games.

DULMAGE AND BENTLEY GET IT TOGETHER
They then proceeded to the very brink of victory in their quarter-final battle with one of the newly formed pairings, Dulmage and Jamie Bentley, both of whom had enjoyed enormous success in their long pro doubles careers but neither of whom had experienced anything but failure with the partners, Michael Pirnak and Dean Brown respectively, with whom they had played all fall. Dulmage and Brown have had a run of very solid campaigns, reaching a half-dozen semis and the Greenwich final as recently as last season, but played poorly in the first event of 2001-2002 and never recovered.

Pirnak and Bentley lost their first match this season, 18-17 in the fifth and their second, 15-12 in the fifth from 12-all, and this pair of close losses set off a downward spiral in blown leads and crucial tins that culminated in their mutual decision to part ways after the Greenwich tourney, three weeks before the Canadian Open. Everyone involved appeared to benefit from these midseason partner adjustments. Brown, who had reached the Cambridge Club final with Jonathon Power last November, combined with Josh MacDonald to qualify for the main draw before losing to Kay and Pirnak, who then defeated Todd Binns and Jeff Mulligan in three before their semi with Waite and Mudge.

Pirnak seemed much more enthusiastic in the company of his new partner, with whom he is likely to play most of the remainder of this season in view of the degree to which Kay's season-long teammate, the softball star and 2001 British Open finalist Chris Walker, seems likely to concentrate on singles for the next several months. And Bentley and Dulmage seemed both to have revived their formidable games and to have a most welcome change of fortune as well; when faced with a match-point predicament in the fourth-game of their Horler/Leach quarter, the exact type of situation in which fate had been so cruel to both of them all season, they caught a lucky break this time when Horler was denied a let he requested when he tinned an attempted winner after his racquet brushed against Dulmage on his backswing.

Thus reprieved, Dulmage and Bentley won the fifth game 15-12 and thereby advanced to a semi-final match against the tournament's sentimental favorites, second seeds and four-time (Denver, Greenwich, Wilmington and Boston) ISDA finalists Viktor Berg and Willie Hosey, the head pro at the host club.

VLCEK AND QUICK SOLID
The latter had debuted with a four-game quarter-final win over Eric Vlcek and Preston Quick, who last month in Greenwich had combined with his former Round Hill pro shop colleague Steve Scharff to come within a single point of defeating Berg and Hosey. Both Quick and Scharff had also lost simultaneous match-points one week before Greenwich with different partners (Quick with Andrew Slater and Scharff with Peter Briggs) in Boston, but, like so many of its seven predecessors this hectic season, this Toronto event would have a one-pointer, with Tyler Millard and Shane Doherty doing the honors in the qualifying at the expense of Taylor Fawcett and Duncan Peake before the survivors lost their first-round match with Binns and Mulligan.

The Toronto meeting between Vlcek/Quick and Hosey/Berg was more routine than any of the foregoing, but the winners were unable to sustain their momentum in the ensuing semi with Dulmage and Bentley, who dropped the first game but pretty much controlled the rest of the four-game way. Dulmage and Bentley, who had considerable success when they last played together in the late 1990's, thus reached the final of their first collaborative effort in several years, but their progress reached a dead end on Sunday when they faced Waite and Mudge. Part (maybe even most) of the reason Bentley and Hosey had decided to split up as a team at the end of last season, even though they had failed to reach at least the final of only one event in each of the previous two seasons, was that they never could defeat Waite and Mudge.

OVERTIME OUTAGE
This trend has of course continued for Bentley, Dulmage and everyone else, and when a Dulmage/Bentley first-game 14-12 advantage dissolved into a 17-14 defeat, the outcome was pretty much determined. Any team realistically hoping to snap what has become an extended winning streak has to win the overtime games---as Horler and Leach, who have had a half-dozen of them but cashed in nary a one in their four matches against Waite and Mudge this season, have learned to their dismay---and when their promising beginning was thwarted by the disappointing tiebreaker session, the 15-8 and 11 chapters that followed were almost inevitable.

Results: Canadian Doubles, Markham Ontario
Quarterfinals:
Waite/Mudge def Butcher/Martin 15-14, 15-6, 15-5
Pirnak/Kay def Binns/Mulligan 18-17, 15-11, 15-10
Bentley/Dulmage def Horler/Leach 15-18, 15-13, 8-15, 17-16, 15-11
Hosey/Berg def Quick/Vlcek 15-7, 18-16, 18-16

Semifinals:
Waite/Mudge def Pirnak/Kay 15-14, 15-5, 15-10
Bentley/Dulmage def Hosey/Berg 13-15, 15-13, 15-13, 15-5

Finals:
Waite/Mudge def Bentley/Dulmage 18-15, 15-10, 15-8

To reach Rob Dinerman write to robd@squashtalk.com

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