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Ferreira and Clothier Get Doubles Win at NY R&T Club
By Rob Dinerman, Oct 7, 2006    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2006 SquashTalk LLC

Playing with confident efficiency on their "home" Racquet & Tennis Club court, Morris Clothier and Michael Ferreira rose superior to a strong 15-team field this past weekend in the 14th holding of the annual Silver Racquet Weekend. Byed into the quarters by virtue of their top-seeded standing, Clothier and Ferreira recorded a pair of pre-final straight-set wins over first John Conway and Noah Wimmer (winners of this tournament three years ago) and then Matt Jensen and Duncan Pearson, then split the opening pair of the games in their final with Ryan O'Connell and Pat Milloy before controlling the remaining pair of single-figure games.

Ferreira thereby made his way to the winner's circle for the second year in a row, having partnered Whitten Morris last year without dropping a game.

The two then went on to win the U. S. Nationals A Flight six months later in St. Louis, but Morris injured his knee severely enough to require surgery over the summer, and he will not be returning to the competitive fray for at least another month. Clothier and Morris play different styles, and it is a tribute to Ferreira's athleticism and adaptability (which evinced itself as well in his singles win over Jeff Stanley earlier in the week in a pro event at the University Club before pushing eventual champ and former world No. 1 John White throughout their subsequent first-round meeting) that he was able to play with equal effectiveness with each of these two right-wall partners.

Like the final round, which swung heavily in the Ferreira/Clothier direction once they went from slugging to a drop-and-lob all-court strategy and cut out the tins that had cost them the second game, the weekend as a whole was marked by solid squash and a drama-free atmosphere. There was not a single fifth game in any of the 13 matches (there was also one default when Ayman Kerim, who had planned to play with Hamed Anvari, injured his leg earlier in the day in a Big Apple Open Pro-Am match at the nearby New York Athletic Club and had to pull out, thereby giving Kip Gould and Matt Sharnoff a bye into the quarters, though Kerim DID play an additional pro-am match after he had withdrawn from the SIlver Racquets), and the heavy concentration of R & T members among the entrants gave the tourney the flavor of a club-championship weekend.

Ferreira and Clothier had a one-point opening game with Conway/Wimmer, but once Clothier fooled Wimmer with an inside-out backhand rail down the right wall to seal that stanza, the remaining two games were not nearly as close. Neither was their ensuing Sunday morning semi with Jensen/Pearson (quarterfinal winners over Sharnoff and Gould), who switched walls (with Pearson moving to the left) for the first two games, then switched back again for the third, with neither alignment making much of a dent on the Ferreira/Clothier attack.

Down below, O'Connell (who won this tourney two years ago with James Ardrey) and Milloy defeated R & T assistant pros Jeff Mulligan and Yasser Kamel in a four-game quarter, and head pro Scott Butcher and Addison West dominated the final three games of their 3-1 quarter over Rob Whitehouse and Greg Park. Butcher then raced over to the NYAC for his Big Apple Open quarter, which he and Leach won convincingly over John Russell and Preston Quick.

Butcher, a Silver Racquets titlist with Clothier in 2000, would have had THREE matches on his two-tournament Sunday schedule had he and West prevailed in their semifinal, but they lost to O'Connell/Milloy in three games, the first of which went to a tiebreaker. West committed several errors both in that session and in the end-portion of the third game, including on match-ball, when he over-hit a serve-return, which sailed just beyond the boundary line at the back wall.

O'Connell and Milloy then played their best squash of the final in the second game, which they made into a slugging contest and won 15-12. But Clothier and his youthful partner then slowed down the play and mixed it up to a degree that enabled them to move out to big early leads in both the third and fourth games, each of which they were able to win fairly handily to close out the weekend's action.

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