Final Stretch Run for the ISDA 2005-06 Season
By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk © 2006; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Apr 17, 2006     

Waite and Mudge Try for Third Straight Lucrative Kellner Cup
The seventh annual Kellner Cup this coming weekend at the Union, University and Racquet & Tennis Clubs in Manhattan will mark the culmination of the 2005-2006 ISDA schedule, as every top team will be on hand to vie for both the winner's share of the season-high $ 80,000 purse and possession of one of the most coveted titles in doubles squash on this continent.

At one juncture a few months ago, it appeared that the season-end No. 1 team ranking might be at stake as well, but a recent three-tournament surge by Gary Waite and Damien Mudge that saw them topple in sequential finals first Preston Quick and Ben Gould in Brooklyn, then Paul Price and Jamie Bentley in St. Louis and finally Chris Walker and Viktor Berg in Long Island, has guaranteed The Champs this distinction for the seventh consecutive year.

Waite and Mudge have been aided not only by their own brilliant play but also by the inconsistent performances and occasional folly of their closest pursuers: Quick and Gould, winners at one midseason stretch of three of four tournaments (enough for them to briefly occupy the top spot on the ranking computer), have reached only two of the next five finals, losing both times, and have been eliminated in the opening round of each of the past two events. They will in fact be playing with different partners in the season-ending tourney in San Francisco in early May, when Quick joins up with John Russell and Gould aligns himself with his Australian compatriot Price in a partnership that is expected to carry over into next season.

Walker and Berg saved a fourth-game match-ball-against and then routed Waite and Mudge in the 15-4 fifth game of their mid-February semifinal in Cleveland, whose final round they then proceeded to capture, also in five games, over Quick and Gould. The much-anticipated rematch in Long Island earlier this month effectively ended before it began due to a fluke but severe injury to the index finger of Walker's playing hand while he and Berg were fooling around with bowling balls during the evening before their Waite/Mudge final. The next day Walker could barely hold or swing his racquet, leading to a trio of single-figure walkthrough games.

Berg and Walker, whose finger should be fully recovered by the time the first round of the Kellner Cup begins this Friday evening, will be facing David Kay, Walker's partner during the past several years, and Russell, and they are in the bottom half along with second seeds Quick and Gould, last year's Kellner Cup finalists, who have won three of the five matches between these two elite teams this season (including two evenly divided finals) in what has evolved into an excellent back-and-forth rivalry. Up top, five-time Kellner Cup champions Waite and Mudge, whose sole setback in this event occurred at the hands of Clive Leach and Blair Horler in the '03 final, are on track to face Price and Bentley (who pushed them to a fifth game in the St. Louis final) in the quarters, with Long Island and Brooklyn semifinalists Leach and Scott Butcher and fourth seeds Willie Hosey and Michael Pirnak favored in the draw's second quadrant.

The absence from the San Francisco finale of several of the tour's top performers, most significantly Mudge (who will be celebrating his 30th birthday that weekend) will lead to some intriguing match-ups. Waite and Berg, who won all four events in which they played while Mudge was injured during the winter of '01 but who lost in a Boston semi a few months back to Leach and Pirnak, will partner up out west, as will Hosey and Bentley (who are reuniting after several years in an attempt to create the magic of their early-2000's run as the tour's No. 2 team, having defeated Chris Deratnay and Alex Pavulans in their one 2006 salvo in Boston), and three debuting duos, namely Leach and his British compatriot Walker and, as noted, Quick and Russell and Price and Gould. As well, the extent of the partner alteration between the first of this pair of closing tournaments and the second, combined with the fluctuation that these late-season changes augur for next season, figure to exert an intriguing impact on the dynamics of the action at the Kellner Cup later this week.

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