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Mudge and Berg Capture Kellner Cup
By Rob Dinerman,    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2008 SquashTalk LLC

Mudge And Berg Capture Kellner Cup

Trailing 2-1, 12-9 and forced shortly thereafter to stare down the gun barrel of a double-match-ball against them, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg survived that perilous predicament (on a risky and amazingly-angled Mudge backhand reverse-corner preceding a top-of-the-tinned Paul Price forehand volley), as well as a late-fifth-game 13-12 deficit, and rallied to a thrilling 10-15 15-9 10-15 16-15 16-13 victory Monday evening over Price and Ben Gould in the final round of the $ 70,000 Kellner Cup before a packed gallery at the Racquet & Tennis Club in mid-town Manhattan. In this the most important (by far) match of the ISDA season, between the tour’s two top-ranked teams and with the No. 1 end-of-season ranking, the biggest winner’s purse and arguably the most coveted trophy in professional doubles all hinging on the outcome, Mudge and Berg rose superior when it mattered most, in those two pressure-packed match-defining best-of-five tiebreaker sessions, and thus concluded the first year of their partnership in glorious fashion.

Mudge, who had played the right-wall while combining with Gary Waite to win six of the previous seven Kellner Cup tourneys prior to switching to the left when he and Berg teamed up this fall following Waite’s retirement, thereby became both the only seven-time Kellner Cup champion and the only player to win this event on each wall, while Berg, a three-time Kellner Cup runner-up (in ’02 with Willie Hosey, in ’04 with Josh McDonald and in ’06 with Chris Walker), broke through for the first time, though he was able to only celebrate briefly before having to dash into a waiting taxi cab in order to (barely) catch his late-night plane ride back to his home base in Vancouver.

The pairing have attained the last nine ISDA finals, winning seven of them, three of which (namely Greenwich, Brooklyn and now the Kellner Cup) have come at the final-round expense of Price and Gould, who are however 3-3 in the season-long head-to-head tally between these two titans. The 15-tournament 2007-08 ISDA schedule has only one event remaining, a $ 20,000 stop this coming weekend in Sea Island, Georgia, but the Kellner Cup constituted for all intents and purposes a post-season playoff competition and definitively settled the question of which duo deserves to be recognized as the best doubles team for this season.

Both final-round tandems were challenged in their respective semis Sunday afternoon at the Union Club (Mudge/Berg were forced to a second-set tiebreaker by John Russell and Preston Quick, who, however, tinned away all three points of the best-of-five overtime, while Price and Gould trailed Walker and Clive Leach 10-7 in the fourth game, with a fifth seemingly looming, before an 8-1 run effectively sealed the 15-12 tally) but both were at full strength for the final --- at least they were for the BEGINNING of the final, during the course of which both left-wall players rolled their ankles, Price when his feet got tangled with Mudge’s in the fourth game, and Mudge when he went over on the side of his foot in the fifth. There were a number of other tension-building play stoppages as well (several balls broke; there were a number of urgent between-point partner consultations; the floor often had to be toweled off on this humid, rainy evening; the between-games breaks usually well exceeded the two-minute scheduled time span; and of course a few of referee Larry Sconzo’s calls were disputed by the players, though his decisions were almost always sustained by the line judges), all of which gave the lengthy evening a kind of dislocating quality as the match undulated erratically but rivetingly along to its airtight conclusion.

The play itself among these four inordinately contemporaneous (all are more than six months past their 30th birthday, none has yet attained his 32nd) and athletically gifted superstars, though always enormously high-paced, alternated between bursts of brilliance and occasional miscues (the tin count was fairly high, especially at the very end, of which more anon) which consequently led to wild swings in momentum. The first game seesawed evenly and patchily along, with never more than a single point separating the teams until 9-all, at which juncture three consecutive Mudge/Berg tins gave their black-clad opponents the opening they needed to finish off that game. Mudge contributed a quintet of varied front-court winners to the 11-3 lead his team gained in the second game, an advantage that even a spurt of answering Price winners (which got the score back to 9-12) could not overcome. The third game was close until mid-game, when Price erupted for several tightly angled forehand front-court winners that opened that game up. The latter, a former top-four PSA singles player, has done nothing short of revolutionizing the left-wall position, both with his creativity and touch and due to his predilection for “turning” on the ball, an anomalous but extremely effective parlay that has made him the only right-handed left-waller to account for more winners on his forehand  (especially on inside-out roll-corners and straight-drops into the right-wall nick) than on his backhand, a trait that has actually impacted the way opponents have to operate, forcing them to take extra measures to deprive Price of the angles that he is so adept at exploiting.

If the first three games were entertaining and impressive, it must be said that ultimately they served mostly as a prelude for the terrific fourth and fifth, which elevated the overall competitive and spectating experience to an entirely different level of intensity and drama. After Mudge and Berg had jumped out to leads of 4-0 and 6-1 in the fourth game, Price and Gould embarked upon a sustained run of excellence (paradoxically ENHANCED by Price’s ankle injury, which disrupted the Mudge/Berg game plan by enticing them to concentrate on moving Price, who made them pay with countering winners) in an 11-3 surge, capped off by a pair of Price nick-winners, that put them at 12-9, just three points from the title.

A furious three-point Mudge/Berg rally (on a daring Berg serve-return drop shot, a Mudge rail past Price and a Berg three-wall nick) made it 12-all, but in a bit of terrible bad luck, Mudge’s inside-out cross-court from the back wall hit his partner Berg’s racquet, jarring it from his hand and putting Price and Gould at 13-12. Berg then cleanly passed Price with a cross-court winner, and on the first point of the best-of-five tiebreaker, Mudge scored on a shallow drop shot. His lob attempt on the ensuing point sailed just over the front-wall boundary, and on the next exchange, both Mudge and Berg were caught up front tracking down a Price three-wall, leaving Gould the whole court for his sizzling rail winner and a double-championship-point opportunity, which, as noted, was thwarted first by Mudge’s off-balance and severely-angled reverse-corner (upon which Price threw up his hands in triumph, initially and perhaps wishfully thinking that it had caught the top of the tin) and then when Price tinned one of his wickedly angled roll-corner volleys that seldom are returned.

Two years ago, Gould (partnering Quick at the time) had similarly had a Kellner Cup double-match-point chance slip away (in the fourth game of their semi against Walker and Berg) and wound up losing in five. It appeared that the same fate awaited him this time around as well when Mudge and Berg moved out to a 10-5 lead in the fifth. But a trio of Price winners, the last on a backhand cross-court that rolled out in front of Berg, made it 8-10, then 8-11 on a compelling Berg forehand reverse-corner. A mis-hit Price overhead that trickled just over the tin and a backhand cross-court drop nick that froze Berg keyed a 4-0 Price/Gould run (7-1 overall from 5-10) to 12-11, preceding a miraculous look-away reverse-corner winner from Berg (12-all), then a tinned Mudge reverse-corner equalized by another Berg winner for 13-all.

To that point, after more than two hours of exhausting and pulsating action, it has to be said that the two teams had played each other to a total statistical and territorial standstill. Price had garnered far more winners (as well as more errors) than anyone else; Gould, who had committed only one fully unforced error to that juncture, had been relentlessly firing away with his scorching cross-courts and drives, making Mudge play more defense (which he had done brilliantly) than he has ever been forced to do; and Berg, who like Price had had his ups and downs, had come up with his best sustained performance exactly when it had most been needed, in the testing crucible of those fourth and fifth games. All three had been magnificent in their own individual way.

But if there was one overriding and outcome-determinative phenomenon in this gripping five-part, 140-minute epic drama that played out in the cathedral-like confines of Racquet & Tennis on this memorable Monday evening, then surely it had to have been Mudge’s irrepressible fighting spirit, his incomparable athletic skills and his indomitable competitive ardor. Five years to the day removed from the only Kellner Cup defeat that he and Waite sustained (at the hands of Leach and Blair Horler, who prevailed 15-13 in the fifth in ’03), Mudge imposed his will on the frenzied final stretch of the match, wearing his Aussie-compatriot opponents down and playing at least a partial role in the trio of early-point tins (the first by Gould, who appeared to lose track of a Mudge cross-court, and then two in a row by Price, first on an attempted shallow rail winner and then on a routine-appearing cross-court) that accounted for the fifth-set best-of-five tiebreaker.

If it seemed poetically unjust that a match heretofore characterized by such captivating, lengthy all-court exchanges would end on three swift (consuming less than two minutes combined) unforced tins, like finding a misspelled word in the last paragraph of a cherished book, it must be said that the story of the entire Mudge/Berg 2007-08 season was their ability to somehow find a way (just as had been the case with Price/Gould in 2006-07), and that therefore the rally that the eventual champions were able to generate from the late-game deficits they overcame in the fourth and fifth games constituted a fitting calling-card for the supremacy that is currently theirs in the professional doubles squash world.

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