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Fitz-Gerald and Owens in Class of their Own.

Feb 7, 2002  by Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk, may not be reproduced online or in print without express permission. Photos © 2002 Debra Tessier.

Feb 7, 2002          

A LOOK BACK AT THE 2002 CAROL WEYMULLER CUP

Sarah Fitz-Gerald's decisive final-round 9-4, 0 and 3 victory over No. 2 seed Carol Owens on the four-wall portable tour court at the southern end of Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan earned her the Carol Weymuller Cup for the second time and compellingly confirmed her status as the top player in the women's professional game, seemingly by a formidable margin, given the ease with which both she and Owens had advanced to their final, the one-sided nature by which they had dispatched Natalie Pohrer and Stephanie Brind in their respective semis and the dominant score of the 29-minute final this past Friday evening.

Fitz-Gerald kept moving against Owens

The 33-year-old Fitz-Gerald also serves as President of the Women's International Squash Professional Association (WISPA) and has therefore established herself as a true leader of the women's game in every sense of the term. By her win in New York, the reigning British and four-time and current World Open Champion extended to five her final-round winning streak over her closest challenger, the New Zealander Owens, who last defeated Fitz-Gerald in the 2000 British and World Opens, while consolidating her position atop the WISPA rankings and recording the 51st title in ranking WISPA competition in her Hall of Fame career.

The serious knee injuries that necessitated two major operations in 1999 and sidelined her for more than a year seemed like ancient history to anyone who had the pleasure of watching her in action last week, throughout which she displayed extraordinary mobility, surprisingly explosive power borne of her full shoulder turn, perfect timing and severe snapping action at the point of contact, complete command of all the shots (whose effectiveness was abetted by how well she masks her selection until the last possible moment) and a level of mental toughness that none of her colleagues can approach.

SARAH'S TOTAL DOMINANCE
Ironically, the degree of Fitz-Gerald's current level of excellence is actually becoming somewhat problematic for the WISPA circuit she is trying so diligently to promote. Her present statistical average of 2796 points is more than 1200 points above that of second-ranked Leilani Joyce, who will be out at least until well into the summer due to an Achilles tendon rupture she sustained this past autumn, and almost twice Owens's total of 1405 and more than three times that of No. 4 Cassie Campion, whose tally stands at 921 in the newly-released February rankings.

Other than pair of aforementioned defeats by Owens in 2000 and losses to Joyce at the Al-Ahram Invitational in 2000 and at the Hong Kong Open in August of 2001, Fitz-Gerald hasn't dropped a match in ranking tournament play since the end of 1999, when she rejoined the tour following her rehabilitation from the second knee surgery. And her triumph at the Weymuller was preceded by a similar outcome two weeks earlier in Hartford (though Owens did win a game in their final), thus making her two for two in 2002 and giving her five straight tournament wins going back to the fall of 2001 and 12 of her last 13 overall.

OWENS ALMOST AS DOMINANT
Complicating this situation somewhat is the fact that the superbly built 30-year-old Owens has been almost as dominant over the other presently active players as Fitz-Gerald has been over the entire WISPA field. Since losing to Pohrer in the final tournament of 1999, the outspoken Kiwi has entered 18 tournaments, winning four of them, attaining 15 finals (including five in a row) and, more importantly, losing only one match (to Sue Rose in the semis of the 2000 British Open, after defeating Fitz-Gerald) to anyone other than Fitz-Gerald or Joyce.

Owens stopped Kawy

And in compiling her 39-0 record against all those players ranked below her, Owens has been extended to a fifth game only once, by current No. 5 Linda Charman-Smith in the 2001 British Open semi-finals.

Those imposing facts plus the absence of five members of the WISPA top ten from the Weymuller draw made it little wonder that, even before the tournament began, the advance of the top two seeds to Friday night's final was viewed, accurately as it turned out, as a foregone conclusion.

Everyone else was simply too young (like the the teenage Omneya Abdul Kawy, who nonetheless had an outstanding tournament in qualifying and reaching the quarters), too rusty (Pohrer and first-round loser Tania Bailey, who failed to convert any of her five match-balls against Kawy, were both returning from extended injury-generated lay-offs), too wounded (as was the case with the 38-year-old Suzanne Horner, who sustained a knee injury on the very last point of her comeback opening-round win from an 0-2 deficit against qualifier Jenny Tranfield that forced her to withdraw from her scheduled quarter-final) or too exhausted (i.e. seventh-ranked Stephanie Brind, Owens's co-finalist in the final of the Macau Open in November 2001, whose titanic quarter-final win in a fourth-set tiebreaker late Wednesday night left her too spent to offer any resistance to Owens one night later) to pose any real obstacle to either of them.

STRONG COMPETITIVE ROSTER
This is not to diminish the very real achievements of the remaining members of this first-ever Women's Championship in the Tournament of Champions event. The 28 total participants (including the two round of qualifying for the four available spots) came up with some of the most entertaining matches of the entire week-long event, a development which belied the concern voiced early on by one prominent women's seed that "We tend to get lost a bit when we're playing along with the men."

Rebecca Macree, whose placement on the fringe of the top ten despite being virtually completely hearing disabled is an enormous tribute to her spirit, resourcefulness and determination, became locked in two consecutive memorable battles, the first of which occurred Sunday evening at Heights Casino, when a let-point that went against her in a second-game tiebreaker gave her a two games to love deficit against South African qualifier Annalise Naude, who however slowly but surely fell victim in her third match in two days to accumulated fatigue and a loss of racquet sharpness in surrendering the ensuing three games.

Brind out-battled Macree in NYC

Several nights later, Macree hooked up with Brind in by far the most gripping of the evening's four quarter-finals (two each in the men's and women's draws), a morbidly fascinating and contentious duel whose sad fate it was to be slated last on the schedule. As a result of this bit of caprice, it was well after nine o'clock before the match began, and the two contestants were therefore subjected to the humiliating sight of hundreds of spectators streaming towards the exits following the conclusion of the preceding men's match, a shrinking process that continued during each between-games break, to the point where by the bitter end only a few dozen people remained in the cavernous gallery to witness their airtight struggle.

After dropping the opening game against her fellow English countrywoman, the fourth-seeded Brind evened the issue in the second and eked out a close third game to go up two games to one. There was pushing and shoving, arguments, controversial calls and many stretches where not a point was registered in the none-point hand-out scoring that prevails on the WISPA tour. Finally, torturously, Macree climbed to 8-6 in that game, seemingly on the verge of her second consecutive comeback win and a spot in the semis. But Brind relentlessly ground her way to and then through the clinching tiebreaker, and ending that left both players completely drained and Macree terribly disappointed as well. The victorious Brind was accompanied both in the tiebreaker-in-the-fourth rallying nature of her quarter-final win and in her collapse in the semis Thursday evening by the recently married Pohrer (nee Grainger), whose successive pre-semi upsets over seeds Natalie Grinham and Charman-Smith in her first major appearance in eight months were perhaps the most heart-warming story of the entire tournament, constituting as they did proof of the extent to which she has recovered from both the emotional anguish of her brother Keith's death at the age of only 22 last September after a four-year battle with bone cancer and the physical damage of a knee injury last fall.

Pohrer is one of the most popular players on the tour, and the return of her excellent all-around game and luminous smile was a most welcome sight after the traumas that plagued her throughout the last half of 2001.

KAWY FUTURE STAR?
There were other bright moments as well, especially in what they augur for the future. The graceful Abdul Kawy plays with a skill and sophistication that belie her 16 years. She appears to be a star in the making, as does the young 14th-ranked New Zealander Shelley Kitchen, who showed her impressive talent and athleticism even in her first-round loss to Fitz-Gerald. Though she was unable to bank any of her quintet of match points against Abdul Kawy and wound up on the losing end of a fifth-set overtime session, causing her ranking to fall from No. 13 to 17, the young English star Bailey, 22, who had been ranked in the top five before incurring a serious and initially undiagnosed knee injury in a car accident almost exactly a year ago, demonstrated the completeness of her recovery in this, her first tournament back after a long rehabilitative absence following an operation last June. There is every reason to believe that a climb back up the rankings will follow over the next few months as she sheds the ring rust and regains her full form.

Also well along in the comeback trail is the young Scot Pamela Nimmo, who had a frightening bout last winter with deep vein thrombosis leading to blood clots forming in her lungs that became so severe that her complexion actually turned yellow from oxygen deprivation. She lost in three in the first round to Brind, but feels she is slowly but surely finding her form and regaining her confidence after her harrowing and potentially experience.

Vicky Botwright played beautifully in taking the second game from Owens Sunday evening in Brooklyn and the top-ranked Dane Ellen Petersen, who, remarkably, has secured a top-twenty WISPA ranking while simultaneously pursuing a medical degree, survived her pair of qualifying matches, lost in the first round to Charman-Smith, then found herself on a court in Kuala Lampur barely 72 hours later for her first-round in that event, where she subsequently advanced all the way to the final!

Petersen's praiseworthy demonstration of endurance, energy and initiative seems to symbolize the pluck and promise of the WISPA tour, which had so positive an impact on the Tournament Of Champions extravaganza in their inaugural appearance that succeeding editions of the Carol Weymuller Cup will no doubt become a fixture in that raucous venue for many years to come.

Tournament Namesake Carol Weymuller in 1979 action against legendary champion Heather McKay

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