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2002 DOUBLES SEASON - Unequaled but Monotonous Waite and Mudge Show

By Rob Dinerman, May 30 2002 © 2002

Gary Waite and partner Damian Mudge Beat all Comers from the Beginning to the End of the ISDA Season - STATISTICAL SUMMARY

ISDA: YEAR TWO
Waite and Mudge's 53 match unbeaten string presented the best and worst of the two-year-old doubles tour. On the one hand an electrifying and successful unbeaten run. On the other, an all-too predictable tournament outcome with the same players in the winner's circle and the same aspirants on the outside looking in. The ISDA tour, which by any standards has been an unqualified success in its ability to attract prize money and tournament locations, will need to grow beyond a "one team show" in order to gain a lasting foothold in the North American sports scene - Editor

CRUCIAL MOMENTS
Maybe the greatest peril to their eventual 53-0 record arose in late February in Brooklyn, where a flu-ridden Gary Waite, spent by both the debilitating virus he was reluctantly harboring and the pair of matches he had already played that day, was on the deck and seemingly at the mercy of the tour's hottest new team, which held double-game point to go up two games to one after the most spectacular point-ending shot of the entire weekend. Maybe it instead came six weeks earlier in Wilmington, the site of their lone career defeat one year before, where Waite was dealing with a tight left hamstring, his partner Damien Mudge was experiencing jet lag and ring rust after his return just a few days earlier from his annual several-week holiday visit to his native Australia and the cool-court conditions were rewarding the shooting salvos of their inspired opponents, who forced them deep into a fifth game.

Or perhaps it occurred two weeks after Wilmington in Boston, the only event that is played with a singles hardball, whose substantial mitigating impact on the power edge they always otherwise enjoy may have contributed to the only two games to one deficit they faced all season. Or in Denver in early April, where after leading two games to love they saw the most dangerous rivals they faced all season even the match and go up 9-6 in the fifth game. Or possibly later that month in the final of the Kellner Cup, where early in the second game a follow-through caught Mudge in the forehead with such force as to knock him dizzy, forcing a 15-minute play stoppage during which Waite later admitted he seriously doubted whether his partner would be able to continue the match.

TALENT, FOCUS, LUCK
To go undefeated wire to wire throughout an entire professional doubles season requires not only enormous talent but dedication, physical stamina and durability, the ability to survive the crossroads moments that inevitably present themselves and a substantial dollop of luck. It is so difficult to navigate the entire schedule without stumbling at least once, as Todd Binns and Tom Page did, for example, in the final of the seventh and last tournament of their heretofore undefeated 1987-88 campaign, where they dropped the first and third games in tiebreakers and wound up losing in a close four to Alan Grant and Jamie Bentley to mar what would otherwise have been a perfect season-long record.

Waite himself had previously been part of three undefeated years, twice in the mid-1990's with Bentley and two years ago with Mudge, but, as extraordinary as those achievements were, the schedule even as recently as 1999-2000 consisted of fewer than half as many events and offered less than a quarter the prize money than this past 17-tournament season provided. Furthermore, the player pool has tripled in response to this expansion and, though not as readily quantifiable, the depth and quality of the current field is correspondingly far greater than at any time in the history of doubles squash, which adds to the magnitude of their seven-month accomplishment.

Waite complemented these ISDA ranking event victories with wins in all three pro hardball singles events (in Denver, Baltimore and Long Island), the USSRA National Singles tourney (whose final was sandwiched between the semis and finals in Heights Casino), the Cambridge Club Invitational with English softball star Mark Chaloner, the World Mixed Doubles with Jessie Chai and the USSRA National Doubles with Morris Clothier, where they won a memorable five-game final over Eric Vlcek and Clive Leach on the same Racquet & Tennis court where less than a month later Waite and Mudge would survive Viktor Berg's blameless but frightening hit on Mudge and win their third straight Kellner Cup final. His overall 24 for 24 performance in open and professional hardball singles and doubles competition constitutes a historic, record setting performance unlikely to be equalled.

BIG YEAR FOR DAVID KAY
As noted, there was a number of occasions on which their quest for a perfect season record came under considerable duress. David Kay, who had easily the best season of his six-year pro career, combined with Scott Dulmage, to force a fifth game in Wilmington and take a 2-1 lead going into the fourth game in Boston, which seesawed along to 8-8, just one quick shooting streak from an upset, before Mudge seized the action by the throat, keying a 7-0 game-ending run which continued through the 15-5 fifth. Then in early February, in the most significant of several midseason partner switches, Kay joined forces with Michael Pirnak in an alignment that produced five final-round advances the first of which occurred in Brooklyn, in just their second tournament together, when Pirnak and Kay won the first game and went up 14-13 in the third when Pirnak finished off a long and tense exchange with a daring forehand reverse three-wall that rolled dead out of the nick several feet in front of a disbelieving and exhausted Waite.

Even after the pair of ensuing game-points fell to first a bad Kay tin and then an even worse "no-let" call, Kay and Pirnak went up 10-7 in the fourth game, the match outcome still very much in the balance, before Mudge again came to the rescue and Waite reached down deep to conjure up several winners in an eight-point run that closed out the match. Less than a week later, the reprieved winners faced their most frequent (10 times, thrice in finals) and formidable rival of the season in the imposing and constantly improving forms of Blair Horler and Leach, who emulated Kay and Pirnak six days prior by winning the first game of their semi-final by a single point, a breakthrough for Horler and Leach, whose five previous matches this season had contained no fewer than seven one-point games, all of which they had lost.

The reversal in Chicago was a real team effort, with Horler's sizable dimensions occluding Waite's vision enough to keep him from seeing Leach's screaming forehand down the middle in time for his belated let request to be granted, following which Horler and Leach sped to 10-8 in the second and threatened to put The Champs in a two games to love hole for what would have been the only time all season. But, as happened all season at crunch time, Waite and Mudge were able to respond with one of their patented late-game charges that rescued that game 15-13 and brought them to the final, where they hammered Kay and Pirnak in the second and most decisive of their quintet of finals (Brooklyn, Chicago, Buffalo, Denver and St. Louis), 15-10, 3 and 2.

Kay and Pirnak, who had seemed so in control for long stretches of their match at Heights Casino, were never able to recover from their Illinois battering, and lost in the three-game minimum in all five of their subsequent meetings that late winter and spring. They won their first 11 matches against non-Waite/Mudge opponents during their first six tournaments together, and the only other team to defeat them in their 10-tournament collaboration was another second-half duo, Bentley and Josh McDonald, ironically Pirnak's and Kay's former partners early this season and all of last season respectively, who followed their early-April upset in Long Island by advancing to the final and whose subsequent win in the rematch in Toronto at the Worlds later that month coincided, possibly causally, with Kay's 30th birthday party that weekend.

The fact that Kay's quintet of finals with Pirnak were the first in his six-year pro doubles career amply demonstrates the extent and instantaneity of the chemistry they were able to develop and the speed and degree of the return with his of Pirnak's confidence. This latter quality had been severely shaken by the fact and fall-out of the tin he had committed on an attempted forehand three-wall at simultaneous match-point in the first match of the opening tournament of the season in Denver in late September, ironically against Kay, who thereby successfully capped off the best day of his career, during which he notched a pair each of singles wins over Berg and Mudge and doubles victories with his autumn partner Chris Walker over the all-Aussie pairing of Scott Butcher and Brett Martin and the third seeds Pirnak and Bentley.

This denouement in the season's inaugural event, which had already been preceded one night earlier by a 15-14 fifth-game win from 12-14 down by Todd Binns and hometown hero Jeff Mulligan over Tyler Millard and McDonald launched a bevy of one-point-in-the-fifth matches, which occurred at a dizzying rate throughout the first half of the season, most emphatically in Boston, where Millard and Ken Flynn first won over Preston Quick and Andrew Slater, then lost in the last round of the qualifying to Steve Scharff and Peter Briggs, who then lost the last four points from 14-11up against Binns and Mulligan, with all three of these matches being decided on simultaneous match-point! Pirnak's tin also and perhaps more importantly packed enough of a psychological punch to send the nascent Pirnak/Bentley reeling throughout a half-dozen star-crossed performances marked by their unwanted ability to find novel ways of losing from one event to the next, some of them from seemingly unloseable positions, the worst example being the 2-0, 9-1 advantage they fumbled away in the semi-finals of the North American Open in mid-November.

Continued: Part two - Hosey and Berg

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