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Walker Captures Westchester Squash Title without Losing a Game

Feb 18, 2002  by Rob Dinerman

Feb 18, 2002          

Walker repulses McNeely in Final

Damian Walker: photo © 2002 Vaughn Winchell

Top-seeded Damian Walker of the nearby Greenwich Field Club defeated surprise finalist Dave McNeely three games to love in a battle of S. L. Green champions (Damian '01, Dave '99) to win the $5,000 Westchester Classic Sunday afternoon.

Since taking the fifth game of his Green final with Richard Chin 11 months ago, Walker has placed first in the U.S. Team Trials in August (also hosted at the same Westchester Squash site), the Trinity Open last month and now this event, winning a total of 10 matches spread out over these three Americans-only events in the minimum total of just 30 games.

Now just a few months shy of his 33rd birthday, this soft-spoken British-born protagonist who got his American citizenship in 2000(when he lost the Green final to Marty Clark) is playing as well as ever and, by his own assessment, enjoying the game even more than he did 10 years ago, when he attained a career-high PSA world ranking of No. 36 after a stellar Junior career that brought him to the final of the renowned Drysdale Cup. The Walker-Chin final was preceded first by Steve Polli's 3-0 win over the young host club assistant pro Brian Mathias (who had by then exhausted himself in a five-game round-of-16 win over Paul Brogna and a subsequent four-game (two 10-9 tiebreakers) feed-in consolation loss to Jason Jewell) and then by an entertaining and revealing third-place play-off between losing semi-finalists Tim Wyant and second seed Richard Chin.

David McNeely: photo © 2002 Debra Tessier

CHIN AND WYANT REVISITED
The latter, a record five-time U.S. Team member in World Team Championships, had followed up on his aforementioned advance to last March's Green final in Seattle by placing second in the team trials last summer and hence playing in the No. 2 position in the World Team event in Melbourne this past October.

In the third round of those four-day trials, Chin, 32, had faced the much younger Wyant and defeated him in four after dropping the first game. The key to that match was a tight and pivotal third game, which Chin finally won 9-7, and the sentiment among many spectators that night that had the veteran three-time Green finalist ('94, '97 and '01) not made off with that game, the match outcome might have been reversed.

That feeling seemed to be borne out five months later in Hartford when Wyant defeated Chin in just three games to reach the Trinity Open final, and by winning this third-place play-off in four well-played but convincing games, the 24-year-old Wyant may have consolidated his six-week-old Trinity Open win and permanently shifted the balance between these two American stars. After perhaps over-exerting himself in his 9-6 opening-game win, Wyant fell behind 5-1 in the second. He rallied to 4-5 but Chin was able to serve the rest of the game out in one hand to even matters at a game apiece. Both of the final pair of games saw Wyant jump well ahead(5-0 in the third, 6-0 in the fourth), Chin mount a hardy mid-game rally (to 3-5 and 4-6 respectively) that he was in each case unable to sustain, as Wyant closed out both games with surges too strong for his tiring opponent to withstand.

Final recap: 9-6, 4-9, 9-3 and 9-4 for Wyant, who thereby collected his second straight win over an opponent he has heretofore never defeated in their careers.

MCNEELY NOT QUITE UP TO WALKER'S COMPLETE GAME
The final that followed this match saw Wyant's Class of 2000 contemporary McNeely also sharing with Tim the termination of his main-draw life-span this weekend at Walker's powerful and accurate hands. Dave had motored to the final with straight-set wins over John Musto and Richard Chin, the No. 1 players and four-time first-team all-Americans in the Class of '91 at Yale and Cornell respectively.

In each of those Saturday conquests, McNeely had demonstrated a degree of maturity and ball control that had been lacking prior to the rigorous stretch of drilling and training he had pursued since returning to America last summer after more than a year of relatively unstructured squash wanderings in Europe. His former tendency towards misplaced concentration, whose noxious effects had surfaced as recently as the early-January Trinity event, in which he had let slip a 2-0, 5-0 quarter-final lead over Preston Quick and wound up losing in five, was nowhere to be seen in either the Musto or Chin matches, both of which he closed out in decisive fashion.

In spite of the foregoing, Walker is still a little too experienced and tenacious for the any of the clearly improving young Americans, McNeely included in this Sunday late-afternoon summit, to conquer, at least for the time being. His ability to pick up his pace and quality and thus draw away in the end portion of a predominantly close game tellingly emerged yet again in the 9-2, 5 and 6 close-out to the hectic weekend's action. Walker's targeting and selection of his shots is immaculate and he creates great pressure by the way he alternately either holds the ball or takes it early as the situation warrants.

Notwithstanding these praiseworthy traits, he had to endure long exchanges, especially along the left wall, to which the ball was frequently glued via either rail or straight drop in what tournament chairman and U.S. team manager Richard Millman later characterized as "the tightest squash I have seen played by two Americans." Walker is still the class of American squash, as he proved yet again this weekend, but this event also showed the improvement young competitors like McNeely and Wyant (and also Quick, who was playing doubles in the Canadian Open in Toronto this weekend and hence was forced to miss the Westchester tourney) are making and the capacity they increasingly are displaying to make a real impact on future American teams and championships for many years to come.

FINAL WESTCHESTER CLASSIC RANKINGS: 1. Walker, 2. McNeely, 3. Wyant, 4. Chin, 5. Jewell, 6. Musto, 7. Polli, 8.Mathias, 9. Brogna, 10. Lewis.

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