ISDA Doubles Mid-Season Report
By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk © 2004; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Dec 16, 2004     

A Three Way Tie for Second Place….
As the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) tour takes its month-long holiday break, Gary Waite and Damien Mudge are still undefeated in the four ranking events (in Denver, Baltimore, New York and Montreal) thus far but they are being hotly pursued by four teams, three of which are statistically deadlocked at No. 2 while the fourth, the first-year pairing of Preston Quick and Ben Gould, is viewed as one of the most dynamic new partnerships in years and perhaps as the biggest threat, given their mid-20's vintage and athleticism, to the dominance The Champs have displayed throughout the ISDA's half-dozen year history.

This quartet of contending teams has been remarkable for how evenly they have divided the spoils to this point, with each having attained one final (Gould/Quick in Denver, Josh McDonald and Viktor Berg in Baltimore, Blair Horler and Michael Pirnak, another new pairing, in New York and Willie Hosey and Clive Leach in Montreal), each having reached at least one additional semi-final and each having lost at least once in the first round. As importantly, there have been five-game matches and even one-pointers galore among this group, a phenomenon that has been symbolized by the two split results between Horler and Pirnak versus Horler's former partner Leach and Pirnak's former partner Hosey in consecutive semi-finals at the New York Athletic Club in November and Club Atwater in Montreal four weeks later.

Both break-ups and subsequent realignments among these four elite doubles stars occurred late last spring, which if anything heightened the drama of these matches, in both of which the eventual victorious team faced at least one match-ball-against predicament. At the Big Apple Open, Horler and Pirnak led two games to love, had leads in both the third and fourth games that were overcome in overtime sessions, then trailed 4-2, set-five in the fifth-game best-of-nine tiebreaker before winning the last three points to emerge with an 18-17 win. Then in Montreal, Horler and Pirnak again won the first two games and let a match-point get away in the third game before losing the fourth and fifth in more routine fashion.

In the balancing Montreal semi-final, Waite and Mudge had by far their closest call of their (so-far) 12-0 season, emulating Hosey/Leach by dropping the first two games against McDonald and Berg, similarly facing match-point-against in the third and eerily similarly carbon-copying the other semi-final (though theirs actually came first) by squeaking through on a Waite shallow-rail winner and making the reversal stick by rolling through the final two games. As has also been true in their prior two seasons together, Berg and McDonald have gone through some perils of their own, trailing Jamie Bentley and Scott Stoneburgh 13-10 in the fifth in Denver before pulling through and having to default their NYAC quarter-final to Chris Deratnay and Alex Pavulans when Berg severely sprained his right ankle in the opening game.

Deratnay and Pavulans thus garnered one of the only two (of an overall possible 16) semi-final slots not taken by one of the top five teams, the other exception occurring in the season opener in Denver, where Aussies Scott Butcher and Jeff Osborne won in a close four-game quarter against Horler and Pirnak.

Sadly, the immensely gifted Osborne would depart the ISDA tour for his native land shortly thereafter to resume his college education and one can only hope that such a popular and talented performer will eventually re-appear on the scene. One player who HAS re-surfaced, and with style, has been the aforementioned Kiwi Horler, whose major knee injury last January effectively sidelined him for the remainder of that season (though he did make a quixotic return at the Kellner Cup, which he and Leach had won the year before) and required a substantial rehabilitation effort.

HORLER BACK ON TRACK
Though he and Pirnak stumbled a bit out of the gate this autumn, by early November it became fully apparent that Horler is fully recovered and once again blasting his power game at opponents from his left-wall slot and imposing his intimidating intensity upon the competitive milieu. Teams that began the season committed to "testing" his mobility have long since abandoned that game plan, and Horler and the left-handed but right-wall-playing Pirnak are dead even with the top teams chasing Waite and Mudge.

The latter has actually gone five for five this autumn, complementing the four ranking titles he has won with Waite by also teaming with PSA star Paul Price to conquer, though only barely, the field at the Cambridge Doubles, where Waite's three-year grip on the crown (with Mark Chaloner, Lee Beachill and Martin Heath respectively) finally ended with a Pools loss at the hands of Heath and Berg. These two then pushed Mudge and Price all the way, and REALLY all the way, to 17-all, simultaneous match-point, whereupon the new ball that had just been introduced into play (the SEVENTH of the match!) took a funny hop off the back wall, disorienting Heath enough to result in a tin.

This outcome was a welcome turnaround for Mudge, who (with Graham Ryding as his partner) had barely lost a five-game final in last year's Cambridge Club event and who had lost three final-round fifth-set tiebreakers in a 10-week span last winter: in Boston in mid-January, where he and Waite led McDonald/Berg 14-12 and lost 17-15, in the Teaching Pro event at Grand Central Station in mid-February, where he held multiple match-balls in the third, fourth and fifth games, eight match balls in all, yet failed to convert any of them; and during the U. S. National Doubles in mid-March in Chicago, where he and Morris Clothier rallied from way back to catch Quick and Eric Vlcek at 13-all, only to drop both ensuing exchanges after a "no-set" call.

The schedule really picks up in early-January, with consecutive-week stops in Wilmington, Boston and Greenwich, followed by February tourneys in Rye, Toronto and Brooklyn and a full spring time slate as well.

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