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ISDA Season Nears Premature Conclusion for 2007
By Rob Dinerman, Apr 9, 2007    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2007 SquashTalk LLC

SAN FRANCISCO SEASON-ENDER CANCELLED

Still reeling from a number of physical maladies besetting its top performers and an accompanying series of shocking late-season results, the ISDA professional doubles playing members learned over this past weekend that the University Of San Francisco tournament, a popular and always well-attended tour stop of four years’ duration that had been scheduled for the last weekend of April as the final event of the current season, has been cancelled. This unhappy turn of events means that this upcoming weekend’s Creek Challenge Cup in Locust Valley, Long Island, will be the last ISDA event until the tour resumes next autumn.

While there is never a good time for an entrenched tournament to suddenly drop off the schedule mere weeks before it was supposed to take place, the timing in this instance seems especially unfortunate, coming as it does with the competitive scene thrown into such flux and the entire situation so in need of a degree of on-court resolution that is now no longer capable of occurring. Throughout the previous seven years of its existence, the ISDA always had the late-April Kellner Cup, with its imposing $ 70,000 – 80,000 purse and bright-lights-of-Manhattan location, to act as a kind of postseason playoffs and give psychological closure to the season. But the organizers of that event decided last spring to change to an every-other-year format, imbuing the 2006-07 tour with a decidedly midwinter-loaded character (the $ 40,000 mid-January Greenwich tourney and the $ 100,000 biennial Briggs Cup in Rye three weeks later being by far the most lucrative tournaments on the 11-stop tour) and leaving it headed for an anticlimactic ending even before the San Francisco pull-out.

Making it even more disappointing is the number of significant “firsts” that have characterized the past several tournaments, which in the aggregate have thrown into a state of healthy commotion what had previously been a season marked by relatively reliable and predictable patterns. First Ben Gould and Paul Price, whose tour-leading five titles (Maryland Club Open, Big Apple Open, North American Open, Boston Invitational and Briggs Cup) and 4-1 record against Gary Waite and Damien Mudge had finally dethroned the latter team after its seven years of domination, were ousted in the opening round in Denver in mid-March due to a Price back injury that forced a mid-match default (to Matt Jensen and Jeff Mulligan, who thereby advanced to their first-ever semi as partners) and sent him to the sidelines for the remainder of the season.

Then Waite and Mudge saw their undefeated (20-0) record this season against the non-Price/Gould rest of the ISDA field snapped in the Denver semis by Chris Walker and Viktor Berg, who then in the ensuing final broke through for the first time after three prior defeats against Preston Quick and John Russell. The severe head cold that beset Waite throughout that event only worsened during the next few days, to the point where by the time the U. S. Nationals began in Philadelphia that weekend he was unable to summon the reserves to prevent the shocking 3-0 first-round loss that he and Mudge suffered at the hands of Michael Pirnak and Tyler Millard, the first Waite/Mudge opening-round ouster in more than six years.

The Final Four of that Nationals semis featured four teams (Pirnak/Millard; Russell/Quick; Gould and Willie Hosey, who replaced Price after Hosey’s own partner, Jamie Bentley, sustained a season-ending arm injury; and ’06 Cambridge Club finalists Scott Butcher and Clive Leach) ALL of whom were seeking their first ever ISDA crown; never before in ISDA history had there been no prior pro ranking-tournament title-holders so early in an ISDA draw. The Merion Cricket Club members, who were hosting a pro squash tournament for the first time in the history of that venerable institution, got an eyeful that weekend, especially in a thrilling semifinal (balancing a four-game Russell/Quick win over Pirnak/Millard) in which Gould and Hosey staged a riveting 12-3 fifth-game run from 5-12 to 4-2, set-five, only to then yield a trio of Butcher/Leach winners to 18-17, in the wake of which, spent by that draining semifinal marathon and further hampered by Butcher’s shoulder injury, they lost an anticlimactic 3-0 final to Russell and Quick, who thus grabbed their first ISDA title as partners after four runner-up finishes.

Whether Waite and Mudge, whose milestone 75 career ISDA titles is more than 10 times the total of any other tandem, will continue their record-shattering partnership after the Creek Club event this weekend, is subject to speculation, especially in light of their collapses first in the 15-4 fifth game of their loss to Walker/Berg in Denver and then in the Pirnak/Millard debacle five days later; the six losses they have sustained this season in nine tournament appearances almost equals the seven defeats they absorbed during the previous seven seasons COMBINED, and both have been forced to deal with physical maladies throughout the current campaign, beginning with the shoulder injury that Mudge suffered while surfboarding last summer that almost required an operation. As noted, it has been a grueling season for many of the best players, so perhaps the impending offseason (which has now been moved up a few weeks by the San Francisco cancellation) might give everyone a chance to recover and reload for the 2007-08 ISDA tour.

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