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US National Doubles: Quicks Earn the Sweep in PA
By Rob Dinerman, Apr 2, 2007    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2007 SquashTalk LLC

Geaves & Quick Come From Behind to Win Championships 

Trailing 14-11 in the fifth game of the final round of the Sotheby’s International Realty U. S.  Doubles Championships yesterday afternoon at the fabled Merion Cricket Club, Meredeth Quick and Fiona Geaves twice saved triple-match-ball against them and managed to defeat ’06 Worlds and ’07 Canadian Nationals champs Narelle Krizek and Steph Hewitt when on simultaneous championship-point Quick from the depths of the back wall (in the wake of a terrific Hewitt cross-court lob) miraculously conjured up a double-boast that barely eluded Hewitt’s desperate effort to track it down.

The Quick/Geaves rally back from the dead and its scintillating denouement (neither of which would have been possible had they not first overcome an 11-7 fourth-game deficit) properly exemplified a wild weekend that seemed to have a little bit of everything, including match-ball-saving heroics, physical maladies befalling two iconic forty-something multiple-time defending Open champions, several unprecedented ISDA occurrences and a family sweep of the men’s and women’s Open titles.

This latter phenomenon was accomplished when Preston Quick, accompanied by first-year partner John Russell, followed his sister onto the host club’s main exhibition court and partnered Russell to a 15-12, 13 and 10 win over their understandably exhausted opponents, Clive Leach and Scott Butcher, who had won their Saturday evening semifinal 18-17 in the fifth over Ben Gould and Willie Hosey in what was widely viewed among ISDA observers as quite possibly the highest-quality and most riveting game of the entire season. Leach and Butcher had actually led 12-5 before a ferocious charge, fueled in part by two Gould service aces that rolled out from the back wall against Butcher, forced the best-of-nine tiebreaker, in which Gould and Hosey went up 4-2 (aided by three Hosey drop-shot winners) before an amazingly creative cross-court volley drop winner from a back-pedaling Leach and a tin-defying Butcher backhand reverse-corner winner evened the score, leading up (four lets later) to a nick-finding Leach shallow forehand cross-court which Hosey was unable to steer back to the front wall. The entire game, and especially the tiebreaker, was replete was lengthy all-court exchanges as all four players rose to the fore and played at the top of their formidable respective games.

The top-half Men’s Open semi, though out-done by the Butcher/Leach one-pointer for sheer excitement and entertainment value, was a fine match in its own right between Russell/Quick and Toronto residents Michael Pirnak and Tyler Millard, who had advanced to that stage by pulling off perhaps the biggest upset win in the eight-year existence of the ISDA when they ambushed No. 1 seeds and defending champions Gary Waite and Damien Mudge. Only once before had Waite and Mudge, universally recognized as the best doubles team ever, suffered a first-round defeat, and that Wilmington setback more than six years ago (in January ’01) had been at the hands of ’96 North American Open champions Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt.

Waite, who had also won the ’02 and ’05 U. S. Nationals with Morris Clothier before it became an ISDA prize-money event in ’06, was severely hampered by a bad cold that he had picked up in Denver (where he and Mudge had lost a five-game semifinal to Chris Walker and Viktor Berg) the week before, but he and Mudge have successfully played through illness and injury before, and no one could have expected that, in their and the ISDA’s first-ever appearance in one of squash’s most revered venues, The Champs would be so unceremoniously expelled from the competition. Pirnak and Millard then split the first two games of their Russell/Quick semi and proceeded to a 12-8 lead in the third, but when Russell and Quick wound up winning that game in a tiebreaker, they were home free in the 15-10 fourth and on their way to their eventual spot in the winner’s circle, their first ISDA ranking-tournament win as partners after four 2006-07 runner-up finishes (in Baltimore, Vancouver, Boston and Denver) and the first such win of Russell’s career.

A FEW FIRSTS
This weekend contained some other significant “firsts” as well: never before in ISDA history had all four semifinalists been seeking their first-ever ISDA title as a unit, and never since Julie Harris and Joyce Davenport had won the ’95 women’s tourney 12 years ago had Alicia McConnell (who followed a nine-year run with Demer Holleran by partnering Pochi Holdefer to the crown in ’05 and ’06) been denied the right to hoist the trophy. She and Jessica Dimauro were playing Geaves and Meredeth Quick to a standstill through the first two-dozen points of what appeared to be shaping up as a highly competitive semifinal (in contrast to which Krizek and Hewitt won their semi in three against the Belknap twins, Berkeley and Mary) when McConnell ruptured her Achilles tendon as she accelerated to the front wall for a drop shot, abruptly terminating play and necessitating her transport via ambulance to a nearby Philadelphia-area hospital.

It was NOT the first time, however, either that the Quick siblings had swept a high-profile ’07 Merion tournament (Preston and Clothier had annexed the early-January William White Invitational, whose women’s softball and men’s hardball singles draws Meredeth  and Preston respectively had also captured), or that Krizek had seen a 14-11 fifth-game final-round advantage in U. S. National competition metamorphose into a one-point defeat; three years ago, at the U. S. Mixed in Boston, she and husband Rob had led Hewitt and HER husband James by that margin, only to drop the final four points.

In fairness, Krizek has also WON some taut national-championship finals; she and Gould’s regular partner Paul Price (who is currently sidelined with a back injury) defeated the Quicks, 18-17 in the fourth six weeks ago in the finals of the U. S. Mixed in New York, and just last month she and Hewitt had rallied from two games to love down to edge McConnell and Dimauro in a fifth-set tiebreaker in the final of the Canadian Nationals in Toronto. There should be some great women’s doubles tournaments next season, assuming a full recovery for McConnell, with at least three truly elite teams (namely McConnell /Dimauro, Krizek/Hewitt and Quick/Geaves, who also triumphed in Denver in Geaves’s competitive doubles debut) vying for supremacy.

In other noteworthy action this past weekend, Michael Ferreira and Whitten Morris successfully defended the Men’s A title they won in St. Louis last year (making Morris, who won the inaugural A flight two years ago with Ryan O’Connell, three for three in this event), overwhelming ’05 Men’s A runners-up Beau Buford and Geoff Kennedy in the final. Andrew Cordova and Duke junior Tim Porter, who have been threatening to crash an ISDA quarterfinal all season, came within a third-game match ball of doing so before Jeff Mulligan (who rescued that point with a forehand rail winner) and Matt Jensen managed to win in five.

DAVENPORT STILL A WINNER
On the women's side, Joyce Davenport, 65 years old, won her fifth consecutive Women’s 40’s title when she and partner Harris squeezed out of two pre-final 2-1 deficits (the first requiring them to survive a fourth-set tiebreaker against Kate LaGrand and Marjin Wall, and the second culminating in a 15-13 fifth-game semi over Sara Luther and Leslie Freeman when at 14-13 Davenport dove to retrieve a drop shot and re-dropped it for a winner) prior to their anti-climactic 3-0 final-round win over Canadians Caro Paskulin and Julie Walker.

AGE GROUP HIGHLIGHTS
Also in the age groups, ISDA stand-out Doug Lifford partnered Chris Spahr to the Men’s 40’s title at the final-round expense of ’96 National Doubles champs Jamie Heldring and Dave Proctor, while former (’87, 88 and ’91) National Doubles winner Rich Sheppard did the same in the Men’s 45’s with recently crowned 45’s singles titlist Dominic Hughes and ’83 Open winners Jay Gillespie and Victor Harding both did likewise in the 50’s (with Tom Boldt) and 55’s (with Sean McDonough) respectively, in Harding/McDonough’s case overcoming their frequent Nationals age-group nemesis Gordy Anderson and Mike Pierce. Sandy Martin and Joe Fitzpatrick avenged their three-week-old 16-15 Canadian 60’s semis loss to eventual champs Tony Swift and Molson Robertson in straight-game fashion en route to winning the Men’s 60’s division and finally Lolly Gillen and Sandra Shaw prevailed in the Women’s 50’s flight.

All told, 134 teams participated, almost equaling the New York totals of 136 in 2002 and a record 148 in 2005, slightly out-doing the 123 in the Canadian Nationals last month and compellingly bettering the 85 that competed in St. Louis last year and the even smaller turn-outs in Chicago in ’04 and Denver in ’03. There seems to be no question that, while doubles is growing in every region of the nation, the most significant expansion is concentrated in the major north-eastern cities, something the USSRA would do well to bear in mind when their administrators are planning future editions of this highly popular tournament.

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