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Leach Upsets Martin to Win Hartford Golf Club Event
by Rob Dinerman Dec 6, 2001 © 2001 Rob Dinerman and SquashTalk, may not be reproduced without express permission.
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By Rob Dinerman, Dec 6 2001
[Review complete Hartford Golf Club Draw]
Former PSA performer and current rising ISDA doubles star Clive Leach survived a pair of five-game battles, both of which required him to regroup after losing the fourth game and the last of which occurred in the final against top seed, host club head pro and former PSA top-three Brett Martin, to win the $7500 PSA/NA tour stop at the Hartford Golf Club during the first weekend in December.
This upset victory capped off a productive past few months for Leach, who reached the finals
 |
| Clive Leach (ISDA Photo) |
in Los Angeles (before bowing to Chris Walker) late last summer and became the ISDA tour's biggest "mover" this autumn, during which he rocketed from a season-end No. 21 ranking last spring all the way to his co-No. 5 position, largely on the strength of his and partner Blair Horler's achievement at the Tom Page Invitational in late October, where they upset several heavily favored opponents in moving through the qualifiers and all the way to the final round.
Like his eventual final-round conqueror, Martin has spent the last year focusing his competitive energies on the ISDA pro tour, partnering up with fellow Aussie Scott Butcher to form one of the half-dozen teams massed together as challengers to the near-invincible pairing of Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, winners of all three ranking events so far in the 2001-2002 campaign.
Notwithstanding both this career alteration and the nearness of his 39th birthday, he still possesses much of the firepower that brought him as high as No. 2 on the PSA rankings during the late 1980's and early 1990's, when he was one of the best of a number of PSA stand-outs whose unfortunate destiny it was to have their careers dovetail with the dominance first of Jahangir and then of Jansher Khan, who between them won every British Open throughout the 16-year period from 1982-1997 and who gobbled up as well almost all of the other major championships during this extended period, leaving precious few trophies available to anyone else in their formidable wake.
Though his stamina has faded a bit during the past few years of relative softball inactivity, Martin swept to the semis relatively easily by defeating first Harvard star Pete Karlen (who this past summer made the U.S. team for the Pan American Federation Cup until the Americans withdrew from the competition in the wake of the September 11th tragedy) and then Imran Khan of Pakistan.
His semi-final opponent, fleet Canadian Sean DeLierre, had reached that level of the draw by recording successive four-game wins over two members of the three-time defending NISRA Intercollegiate Team Champion Trinity College varsity, fourth-seeded senior Lafige Ragonste and freshman prodigy and Colombian native Bernardo Samper, who had debuted with a solid win over Nigerian Segun Maku.
It is not surprising that Trinity entered four players from its imposing squad, given the school's Hartford location and head coach Paul Assaiante's understandable wish to expose his players to the kind of gritty regional PSA aspirants hovering just out of the PSA top-100 who formed a substantial part of this draw. What IS surprising is that Samper is the only one of this quartet to make it out of the first round; Rohan Bhappu fell to Harvard's Dylan Patterson(who then became the second-seeded Leach's first victim) and third-seeded Michael Ferrera lost in five to England's Mark Allen, a denizen of Essex who is currently based as a teaching pro in Washington D.C.
The disappointing results experienced by Trinity's entrants may prove a blessing in disguise, constituting as it should a cold dash of reality that will make it easier for their decorated coach to motivate his players both for the USSRA National Team Championships this coming weekend and for the college season, which really heats up shortly after the start of the new year. The two bottom-half quarters, both three-gamers, saw a tired Allen fall to Zambia's Robbie Lingashi and Karim Yehia, a recent winner at a small event in Florida, bow to Leach's superior racquetwork and tactics.
The ensuing Martin-DeLierre and Leach-Lingashi semis both went to a fifth game, but the outcome of the final may have been foretold by the wildly differing graph of those two match-deciding games. For while Leach jumped out to a 5-0 lead and sprinted to victory over a progressively fatigued Lingashi, Martin went point-for-point with the tenacious Canadian DeLierre before finally responding to the urging of his home-club fans (who had never seen Brett pressed in this fashion before) and eking out an exhausting 15-12 fifth game.
Relieved but somewhat depleted by this narrow escape, Martin then fell behind 2-0, 8-5 in the final before responding to this dire situation with a wonderfully crafted 7-0 run that enabled him to stay in the match, 15-11 and force a fourth game, which he also won, though barely, 15-13. Throughout this mid-match turnaround, the prideful Martin showed both the racquetwork that at one time had made him one of the most dangerous sharpshooters in the world and the incredible ability to mask his intentions, holding the ball seemingly forever before flicking a dart-like winner, that have always been one of the foremost trademarks of his game.
But in the fifth game of the final, Leach for the second consecutive time was able to halt his opponent's momentum by seizing a sizable early advantage. Clive's game is less spectacular than that of his famed opponent, but he is effective, patient and accurate, and the age advantage he enjoyed by virtue of the recency of his 29th birthday may have played a role in this stretch drive as well. Martin never stopped competing but he never threatened to close the gap either, and the final tally of Leach's 15-9, 15-11, 11-15, 15, 13-15, 15-7 victory properly documented the nature of the control he had by match's end and made him a deserving winner of the 2001 Hartford Golf Club Open.
