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ISDA Mid-Season Summary: After Shaky Start, Price And Gould Regain Their Footing
By Rob Dinerman, Dec 18, 2007    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2007 SquashTalk LLC

Although it is now mid-December with the holiday season in full throttle and the autumn portion of the 2007-08 ISDA pro doubles tour safely in the books, a six-point, ten-minute stretch late in the evening of November 5th might well turn out in retrospect have served as the defining period not only of the first-half of the season but of the season as a whole.

It occurred late in the fifth game of the final round of the Big Apple Open, hosted by the New York Athletic Club, which one day earlier had served as the headquarters of the New York City Marathon, and which on that humid and charged Monday night was providing the climactic crossroads of another New York marathon, this one between defending champions Paul Price and Ben Gould, who were teetering on the jagged edge of what would have been a third straight late-match collapse, and their adrenalized challengers Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, who had swatted aside two match-balls against them in a fourth-set tiebreaker and had moved to an 11-9 lead in the decisive fifth game.

Price and Gould, who last season had singularized themselves as the team that had finally displaced Gary Waite and Mudge as the No. 1 ISDA team after the latter tandem had held that distinction for seven record-shattering years, had however started the current season on a terribly disheartening note, first confoundingly squandering a 2-0, 14-9 semifinal advantage in the season-opening tourney in St. Louis against eventual champs Chris Walker and Clive Leach (who ran away with a 15-8 fifth game), and then letting a less emphatic but still substantial 2-1, 11-8 lead get away against Walker/Leach a week later in the mid-October Maryland Club Open final. Both Aussie stars had given vent to their double-frustration at the end of that second loss by taking it out on their respective racquets: Gould had hurled his 40 feet from the back wall to front wall, while Price had shattered his in the small alcove just outside the host club’s exhibition court.

Now in the hot lights of New York, especially when that pair of championship-points fell to a shallow Mudge cross-court winner followed by a Gould tin, Price and Gould were looking right down the barrel of a third straight blown lead and the possibly permanent demoralization that might have resulted from it, had they not responded to the cruel exigencies of the moment like the champions they are by conjuring up a magnificent 6-0 spurt (almost entirely on their winners rather than opponents’ errors) that rescued that match, enabled them to retain this title and, much more importantly, jumpstarting them to subsequent tournament-winning runs in Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver and a return to the No. 1 team ranking from which they had been temporarily evicted by Walker and Leach.

In compiling their 14-1 post-Baltimore slate (whose only blemish occurred when John Russell and Preston Quick  edged them out in a fifth-set tiebreaker in a Wilmington semifinal), Price and Gould have defeated their October tormentors Walker and Leach in the semis in New York as well as in the Chicago and Toronto finals. The latter British pair of first-year partners are co-ranked at No. 4, just behind Mudge, against whom Walker/Leach have gone 4-1 this season, but who in his first year both on the left wall and as Berg’s partner won the U. S. Pro event (whose $ 40,000 purse is the largest of the season to this point) and were finalists in (as noted) New York and Vancouver, where they stood at 1-all, 7-all against Price/Gould when a Gould follow-through to Berg’s face wound up requiring 20 stitches and a long mid-match hiatus, after which Berg, who had been hampered much of the fall months with a lingering hamstring pull, was never the same.

Co-ranked at No. 7 right behind Berg are Russell and Quick, three-time (in St. Louis, Baltimore and Chicago) semifinalists as well as U. S. pro runners-up, followed by Willie Hosey, who partnered Mudge to the St. Louis final while Berg was sidelined with his hamstring pull, and Joe Pentland, who moved into the top 10 for the first time when he and Mark Price attained the Vancouver semis (the first time that either of them had progressed to that pont of an ISDA draw) by defeating Waite and Jeff Mulligan.

The top four ISDA teams – namely Price/Gould, Walker/Leach, Mudge/Berg and Russell/Quick --- have formed an aristocracy of sorts sitting atop the rest of the tour, against whom this foursome have amassed a virtually upset-proof 24-1 mark in the seven sanctioned events so far, the sole exception being when Scott Butcher and Hosey defeated Russell and Quick in the Big Apple Open quarterfinals. It marked the last career appearance for Butcher, who at the end of this month will be ending his 10-year tenure at Racquet & Tennis (the last seven as its head pro) and moving back to his native Australia, where he and his wife await the birth of their first child later this winter. Also recently retired are two Canadian superstars, namely Waite (whose 76 ISDA titles with Mudge from 2000-2007 are nearly 10 times as much as the nine that their closest pursuer, Price/Gould, have garnered) and Jamie Bentley, who had meant the late-November Toronto event, the Jim Bentley Cup, named after his father, to be his swan song but was prevented from playing even in that event (which he and Paul Price won last year, making Price the THIRTEENTH player with whom Bentley had won a pro doubles tournament, a record by a wide margin) by the knee and elbow injuries that have plagued him for the past several years.

International Squash Doubles Association Rankings As Of December 11, 2007
1 Paul Price/Ben Gould (tie)
3 Damien Mudge
4 Chris Walker/Clive Leach (tie)
6. Viktor Berg
7 John Russell/Preston Quick (tie)
9 Willie Hosey
10 Joe Pentland
11 Mark Chaloner/James Hewitt/Jeff Mulligan/Michael Pirnak (tie)
15 Mark Price
16 Matt Jensen
17 Tyler Millard
18 Ayman Karim
19 Ben Howell
20 Whitten Morris
21 Scott Butcher
22 Andrew Cordova
23 Tim Porter
24 David Rosen
25 Rob Dinerman
26 Trevor McGuinness
27 Jamie Crombie/Michael Puertas (tie)
29 Steve Scharff
30 Michael Ferreira

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