Merrill & Schwartz Into Finals
by Rob Dinerman © 2004; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Jan 3, 2004      

Fourth seed Andrew Merrill has rolled to the final round of the second annual Treddy Ketcham Yale Club Invitational without losing a game so far, having dispatched current Yale underclassmen Nick Chirls and Trevor Rees and Scotsman Hugh Evans by identical and decisive 3-0 scores.

He had expected to play his fellow Harvard Club member Daniel Ezra in tomorrow's 1
o'clock final, but Ezra dropped a tough five-game semi this evening to Yale junior
Josh Schwartz, who thus will have a chance to avenge his Eli teammates and become the first Yale undergraduate to win a Yale Club Invitational since Victor Wagner '83 did so (over John Bottger) in 1980 in the fourth edition of the 20 Yale Club hardball Invitationals that concluded in 1997.

After a four-year hiatus, the event was revived last year, this time as a softball tourney, by Tournament Chairman and four-time and current Yale Club club champion John Musto, who fielded two 16-man flights, a 6.0 and a second-echelon 5.5, featuring mostly Yalies past and present and many local players from the MSRA.

Merrill had been slated to face top seed Akiel Behl in today's semi-final, but Behl lost in five this morning to Evans (a first-round winner over Yale junior Chris Wyant), who started fast, lost his rhythm in one-sided third- and fourth-game losses, but began the fifth with a sequence of four consecutive dead nicks and was able to hold Behl off down the stretch for a highly satisfying 9-1 9-6 0-9 3-9 9-5 upset win over a player well more than a decade his junior that, however, took too much out of 40ish Evans for him to have anywhere near the energy that would have been required for him to combat Merrill's youth, conditioning level and intensity.

Evans controlled many of the points, but Merrill relentlessly legged nearly everything down, often applying his own considerable firepower in response and forcing Evans eventually to cut his shots too fine, with metallic consequences. By the end of Merrill's 9-4, 3 and 3 path to the final, Evans had run out of steam and options, but his win over Behl was either the best or at worst the second-best match of the tournament.

The other contender for this status was the balancing semi between Schwartz and Ezra, neither of whom had come close to losing a single game in their pair of pre-semi victories. Schwartz at least was extended somewhat by his teammate Alex Ende in his quarter, but Ezra was given no resistance whatsoever by Yale co-captain Ryan Byrnes, who seemed satisfied by his five-game round-of-16 Friday evening win over former Yale captain Roger Arjoon and clearly decided early on against the former ('96) Intercollegiate Individual champion Ezra that he had no chance of winning even a single game and wasn't about to expend himself in a futile attempt to accomplish the impossible, especially in a very perfunctory 9-0 third and final game.

Schwartz, by contrast, entered the court with Ezra several hours later hungry for an upset win that would expunge the ghosts of his Yale Club experience last year, when he had injured a hamstring muscle that wound up sabotaging the entire remainder of his season. Though he dropped the first game to Ezra's sleight of hand, Schwartz embarked early in the second on the strategy of steering virtually every ball to his left-handed opponent's backhand flank. This tactic elicited a flood a unforced tins that gave Schwartz enough of a cushion to eventually give him the equalizer.

Ezra responded with a well-played 9-4 third game, but by the end of it he was starting to wear down and showing the effects of the competitive lay-off he has taken in the past several months. Both the fourth and fifth games were even at 6-6, but in the closing stages of each, Ezra faded and Schwartz implacably bored in. He was frequently being wrong-footed by Ezra's deft wrist-flicks, but he was able to reverse direction and retrieve Ezra's salvos often enough to make the latter hit extra balls, a number of which he either tinned or mis-hit badly enough to give Schwartz the advantage.

By the end, Ezra's lower back was seizing up on him and Schwartz, who throughout that final game had been bellowing his disapproval at the referee for a number of close but correct calls that went against him (on one occasion opening the back wall door to demand, vainly, that the referee be replaced), was carrying the play. It is indicative of the course of the end games of the match that from 6-6 the last three points all ended in top-of-the-tins off Ezra's racquet, following which Schwartz, temporarily ignoring Ezra's outstretched hand, indulged his 1-9 9-6 4-9 9-7 9-6 victory with a self-congratulatory yell and sarcastically bade salutation to the referee as he exited the court.

TOP TWO SEEDS KLIPSTEIN AND ASTHANA IN 5.5 FINAL
The 5.5 final will feature No. 1 seed Vinny Asthana against second seed
Kevin Klipstein, formerly one of Peter Briggs's assistant pros at Apawamis who
recently returned to New York after spending much of the last decade out west,
the last several years in San Francisco. Klipstein defeated Jeff Hoerle, an
important member of the Yale 1990 squad that was the last to bring the Ivy
League and intercollegiate team titles to New Haven, and current Elis Shane Boyle
and Steve Fair, who won a close first game but lost the remainder 9-1, 0 and 1.

Asthana has not lost a game to this stage, though he did face four game-balls
in his semi against Michael Scherl (a 3-0 quarter-final winner over Kip Gould), who played beautifully throughout but was never able to conjure up that last elusive winner that would have given him the second game and was run downhill by his faster and much younger opponent in the 9-3 final third.

The Asthana-Klipstein match is set for Sunday at noon, with the Merrill-Schwartz 6.0 final to follow immediately thereafter.

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