Greenwich NAO Doubles 2001


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			WAITE/MUDGE TRIUMPHANT IN NORTH AMERICAN OPEN DOUBLES By Rob Dinerman, Nov 21 2001 Forced for the first time this season to a deciding fifth game and faced with the strong possibility of their first defeat in nearly a year, the top-seeded team of Gary Waite and Damien Mudge responded like the champions they are by jumping out to a commanding 5-0 lead and were never seriously threatened down the stretch, winning the final against second seeds Willie Hosey and Viktor Berg 15-12, 16-18, 17-16, 9-15 and 15-9 and thereby capturing their second consecutive North American Open Doubles Championship. It was actually five straight North American Opens for Waite, who had won in 1997-99 with Mark Talbott and who had also won the 1993 North American SINGLES title in Detroit, where he defeated Talbott in four to seal the first of his two Singles No. 1WPSA rankings. With their victory in this event, which was hosted on an unseasonably warm mid-November weekend at the Round Hill and Greenwich Country Clubs in southern Connecticut, Waite and Mudge have now won four consecutive ISDA ranking events(the season-ending Kellner Cup last spring and tour stops in Denver, Philadelphia and now Greenwich this fall)and raised their career team record to 16 tournament wins in just 17 attempts. Even before the main-draw action began, a pair of injuries in preliminary-round play partly defined the tone of this $27,500 event. Chris Walker and David Kay, who made such a big splash in their collaborative debut in late September in Denver, where they rode several tight upset wins all the way to the semis, were nearly derailed in the first-round of the qualifiers by a pair of local Greenwich-area amateurs, John MacAtee and Jay Burke, who swiftly shocked their heavily-favored opponents and assumed a two-game lead. Walker and Kay recovered to win the next three games in fairly decisive fashion, but the match would exact a price in the form of a lower-back injury to Kay, whose mobility was greatly curtailed both in a four-game win the next morning over Andrew Slater and Ken Flynn in the last round of their qualifying bracket, in which the fleet Walker understandably wound up doing the lion's share of the retrieving, and in their ensuing quarter-final match with Waite/Mudge that evening, by which time Kay's injury had worsened and which became a rout. Kay's misfortune was equalled by a key member of the other successfully qualifying team when Scott Butcher---who had teamed with fellow Aussie Brett Martin both in a rallying four-game win(from 0-1, 7-11)over Dave Rosen and Preston Quick in the qualifier and then in a first-round victory, also in four, over the Canadian pairing of Scott Bulmage and Chris Deratnay---severely sprained his left ankle late in a Saturday morning pro-am match, barely an hour before what was thought would be an intriguing quarter-final match with the third-seeded Canadian duo of Mike Pirnak and Jamie Bentley. Butcher and Martin, who last season really extended a number of seeded teams without ever being quite able to defeat any of them, had the momentum of their three pre-quarters victories behind them and were very much looking forward to this encounter against a Pirnak/Bentley alignment that had dropped their first-round matches in both previous 2001-2002 ISDA ranking events, albeit by one point in the fifth in Denver and 15-12 in the fifth, from 12-all, in Philadelphia, two matches lost by a total of four points. But what had been shaping up as a potentially significant confrontation between one team on the rise and hungry to finally gain the breakthrough win that had heretofore eluded it and another seeking to reverse their early-season eleventh-hour misfortunes was cruelly affected by Butcher's pre-match accident, which a 30-minute ice application and an emergency tape job administered by his right-wall partner weren't nearly sufficient to heal. Though noticeably gimpy even in the warm-up(during several junctures of which Scott later acknowledged he seriously considered telling Martin he simply couldn't go and they would have to default), Butcher gutted his way through an astonishing first-game overtime win, following which Pirnak and Bentley with discompassionate professionalism directed much of their attack to the court's front left-wall quadrant with predictably successful results. It was the kind of match which was almost as painful for the cringing spectators to watch as it must have been for the clearly pained Butcher to play, but it must be said both that he and Martin nevertheless played admirably even in the last three losing games and that Pirnak and Bentley, both of whom had regained the form that landed each of them in the ISDA top-ten last season, would have been extremely tough for even a healthy Butcher/Martin to defeat. They proved this in an extremely competitive semi that afternoon with Waite and Mudge that saw each of the first three games resolved by a tiebreaker, the last by a single point when Pirnak extricated his team from a match-point predicament with a tin-defying topspin reverse-corner that caught Waite completely on his heels. Gary and his partner promptly squelched any thoughts that may have arisen about that brief reversal spawning a complete match turnaround by jumping out to a 5-0 fourth-game lead and cruised from there to their spot in the finals. The bottom-half semi was contested by one winner of a blow-out quarter and one winner of the closest match of the entire weekend. After the power-hitting pair of Todd Binns and Jeff Mulligan had won their first-rounder over James Hewitt and Doug Lifford, they duplicated their Denver advance to the semis by routing an unaccountably flat Josh McDonald and Anders Wahlstedt, who joined forces for this event only when Wahlstedt's normal partner, Scott Stoneburgh, with whom he had won this prestigious title five years earlier, became unavailable due to his coaching commitments at Cornell. Presumably this experiment, which bombed badly, will not be repeated, as their was little cohesion or passion in their efforts. By contrast, the balancing quarter-final battle between Hosey/Berg and their semi-final conquerors in the immediately prior ISDA event in Philadelphia, Blair Horler and Clive Leach, had both of those qualities in major measure, as Horler and Leach were as eager to affirm their newly-won elevated stature as Hosey and Berg were to avenge their three-week-old straight-game defeat. The resulting slugfest on an unseasonably warm evening took five games, two hours and four doubles balls to resolve and established both that Hosey and Berg, who are partnering up for the first time this season, have already meshed as a formidable team and that the Leach/Horler advance to the finals in Pennsylvania, far from being a fluke, is a feat they are fully capable of repeating in the future, this match's disappointing outcome notwithstanding. In fact, they had forged their way to a 10-8 fifth-game lead whereupon a combination of a few Horler tins and, mostly, a shotmaking eruption from Berg caused a 7-1 match-closing run for the second seeds. Though professedly frustrated at times during the match with the hot-court environment and its mitigating effect on his ability to successfully go for shots, it was actually Berg's sharpshooting that spelled the difference down the fifth-game stretch, notably a particularly audacious and perfectly placed forehand reverse-corner winner he struck in front of a diving Leach at 13-11 that pretty much sealed the victory. Following a fairly routine four-game semi over Binns and Mulligan, Viktor left his mercurial handprint all over the final as well, especially in his and Hosey's second-game overtime win and in the 13-7 advantage they forged their way to in the third. In what eventually proved to be the match's defining period, Waite and Mudge were able to rally from this unpromising juncture largely by keeping Berg from attaining the front-court positioning from which he had heretofore caused such damage. Even at that, the top seeds were able to escape with that game only after facing two sets of double-game-points, the first at 12-14 and the second at 1-2, set-3, from which they benefited from first a blasted Mudge winner and then, at simultaneous game-point, from a daring Berg cross-court drop serve-return attempt that appeared headed for a left-wall nick but barely failed to clear the tin. As noted, Waite/Mudge were convincingly out-played in the final's single-digit fourth game but, for the second straight match, asserted themselves in the fifth with a quick and imposing early-game spurt that effectively clinched the championship. Five straight North American Open titles for Waite, two in one day for Mudge(who had teamed with the wonderfully-named Icy Frantz to defeat Chris Deratnay and Stephanie Barrett, also in five, in the inaugural Mixed Doubles Pro-Am event), but a great performance as well for the losing finalists, who have now reached the finals in two of the three ISDA ranking events this fall and seem poised to be a potent force on the tour throughout the 2001-2002 campaign. *** * * * * * * *** To reach Rob Dinerman write to robd@squashtalk.com
	Excerpts From David Page's Comments At the Trophy Presentation Following The Final Of The 2001 Tom Page Invitational: "...My brother Tom was a quiet man and would have been more comfortable with the pace we saw on the right wall today than with this recognition that the Racquet Club (ed Note; The host Philadelphia Racquet Club) has been kind enough to make…We have seen today a great deal of skill and strength and speed…We should all appreciate the sportsmanship that these four players also showed us…something else important for which Tom was renowned…Thank you all. "
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