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McNeely Upends Second Seed Chin

Feb 17, 2002  by Rob Dinerman

Feb 17, 2002          

Walker faces McNeely in Final

David McNeely: photo © 2002 Debra Tessier

Displaying a level of verve and sharpness reminiscent of his march to the S. L. Green crown three years ago, David McNeely emphatically signaled his return to the top echelon of American squash with a pair of straight-game victories over first John Musto and then second seed richard Chin to advance to the final round of the $ 5,000 Westchester Classic, where he will face reigning S. L. Green champion and top seed Damian Walker, whose 3-0 semi-final win over Tim Wyant balanced the McNeely-Chin meeting down below.

Hosted by Westchester Squash in Mamaroneck, NY, this event, along with its companion-piece, the early-January Trinity Open, was created specifically by the Team USA Committee in order to provide match data to form a basis for the eight invitations that will be extended for the Trials this spring for the four available spots on the American team entry into the Pan American Federation tourney scheduled to take place in El Salvador this summer.

To be eligible to participate in the Trials, an aspirant must play in the S. L. Green Championship at Yale next month and either the Trinity or Westchester events (though some exemptions may be considered for college players whose intercollegiate schedule precludes their playing in these tournaments or for those in the recognized player group who have been sidelined by injury), all of which are therefore open to American citizens only. U.S. Team head coach Paul Assaiante ran the Trinity Open but had to miss this weekend's action to coach his Trinity Bantam team to an 8-1 NISRA title-clinching win over heretofore undefeated Princeton at Jadwin Gymnasium in New Jersey, and U S. Team Manager Richard Millman, owner of Westchester Squash, was tournament chairman for this event.

There were 11 entrants, but only two pre-quarter matches Friday night, as Steve Polli was excused from his scheduled meeting with Eric Christiansen when, as has happened frequently over the years, the latter withdrew just before play was scheduled to begin. Musto dominated U. S. junior coach Mark Lewis, 9-0 in the fourth, and host club assistant pro Brian Mathias weathered several fourth-game match-points (one of which he brought upon himself with one of his three "out" serves in that game) against Meadow Mill's Paul Brogna before managing to win in five.

Exhausted from these travails and overmatched in any event in his ensuing quarter with Walker, Mathias dropped three 9-0 shut-outs, while in other quarter-final action, Chin, Wyant and McNeely ousted Polli, Jason Jewell and Musto respectively, all in three. Once he had righted himself after a slow start in the first game, Chin completely out-played Polli, while Jewell, a former Pan Am Fed U. S. team member in the late 1990's, was only able to really push Wyant in the third game of their hour-long clash.

Musto had defeated McNeely when the pair last met in the final of the 1996 William White Invitational at the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, when John was in 27 and in the prime of his career and Dave was a precocious high-school senior, but in the substantial six-year interim the time cycle has swung in McNeely's favor, and he surrendered just two points per game. With all four seeds thus safely into the Saturday evening semis via their quartet of 3-0 quarter-final wins, McNeely then engineered the conversation-piece of the weekend, at least so far, with a surprising and even more surprisingly thorough 9-7, 3 and 1 upset over Chin.

The 24-year-old winner was facing his second opponent of the day who was born in the autumn of 1968, but the genesis of his exploits on this afternoon and evening probably lie less in the calendar's relentless march than they do in the serious training, both on and off the court, McNeely has been diligently doing since returning last summer from several wilderness years in Europe and basing himself at Westchester Squash, where he has received valuable coaching from Walker at the nearby Greenwich Field Club, former ('76) U. S. team member and stand-out player Peter Briggs at the neighboring Apawamis Club in Rye, NY and Millman himself and his associate Mike Calloway at Westchester Squash. This degree of focus and dedication was bound to lead to a big result at some point, and it did so on this unseasonably warm mid-February evening.

McNeely's only moment of worry came when his smoking 7-0 dash from the starting gate was neutralized by Chin's slow climb to 7-all. But when McNeely managed to escape with that game, 9-7, there was no stopping him. He has really improved his ability to keep the ball right on the wall, especially on his backhand and most notably in his straight drop, normally a strong point for the veteran Chin, who in this match, however, found to his dismay that however tight a drop shot he hit, McNeely's responding drop was even tighter. The eventual finalist had really made Musto pay in their quarter-final for loose balls up front and he continued the trend in this later match with Chin, the S. L. Green finalist last March and clear-cut No. 2 player (behind Walker) on the American team that finished 19th in the World Team Championships in Melbourne last fall, who now for the second straight month has lost in three to a hard-charging member of the vaunted college class of 2000 whom Richard had previously always defeated.

McNeely's predecessor in this breakthrough had been Wyant, who had turned the trick at the Trinity Open before bowing badly to Walker in the final. In their rematch in the semis of this event, Wyant fared better, volleying more aggressively, forcing his 32-year-old opponent to run much more than when they played in Hartford six weeks earlier and probably pushing him harder than the 9-3, 0 and 5 tally indicates, but Walker for now still seems to have too sophisticated a game for his younger peers to successfully combat.

His 3 o'clock Sunday final with McNeely will be preceded by the third-place play-off between Wyant and Chin at 2:00 and a 7/8 play-off between Polli and Mathias at 1 p.m. Jewell had survived a tough four-gamer (two split mid-match overtimes) with Mathias, then received a 5/6 default from Musto after the latter had ripped through a demoralized Polli, while in the battle for ninth place, Brogna defeated Lewis in three.

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