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Wyant bumps Crombie to 4th
STRONG OUTING BY TIM WYANT
Rob Dinerman © 2003 SquashTalk; all rights of reproduction reserved.
July 1, 2003      

In a momentous reversal of the pre-Trials status quo, 2000 Harvard captain Tim Wyant came up with a career-highlight four-day performance that was enough to earn him both a victory in the eight-man Trials and the third and final position on the squash team that will represent the U. S. next month at the quadrennial Pan American Games in Santo Domingo.

Wyant's undefeated path through two-time S. L Green champion Damian Walker (whom he had never previously come even close to defeating in a half-dozen attempts), 2003 Harvard captain Dylan Patterson, Richard Chin (who had eliminated Wyant in a special play-off match for the final position on the 2002 Pan Am Federation Cup squad) and current S. L. Green title-holder Preston Quick more than counter-balanced the lower-echelon standing his No. 5 season ranking and No. 6 S. L. Green ranking had burdened him with, and he became the first player in a number of years to successfully meet the daunting challenge of surmounting those numerical pre-trials obstacles and playing his way onto a team.

Wyant himself had been a beneficiary of the workings of this 40%-season-ranking, 20%-S.-L.-Green ranking, 40%-team-trials-ranking system two years ago, at the 2001 U. S. team trials, when he was both badly out-played and defeated head-to-head by Dave McNeely but still was awarded the last available team slot due to his higher pre-trials and S. L. Green ranking.

This time it was Wyant who would have been victimized had he not gone wire-to-wire this weekend, a run which he capped off yesterday afternoon when he took advantage of a slightly injured Quick, who late in his intense though straight-game Sunday
afternoon win over Jamie Crombie had re-injured the gluteus muscle pull he had
sustained in early June in the U. S. Pro tournament.

Crombie turned out to be the primary victim of Wyant's exploits, and his fate this weekend was the converse of Wyant's. Crombie carried a No. 2 season ranking and a No. 3 S. L. Green ranking into the trials, and a spot on the Pan American Games team was therefore his to lose. But the normally tireless former Canadian team veteran who became eligible for the American roster for the first time this season (after a messy and rancorous dispute the prior year that involved legal action) was under the weather and out of sorts all weekend. An upper-respiratory infection that plagued him all week substantially deprived Crombie of his usual formidable stamina and energy level, but in truth he has been a bit out of sorts all season.

Whether this latter phenomenon has been a carry-over from the eligibility issue or whether its roots lie in the five-game defeat he suffered at Walker's hands in the first U. S. Team Selection tourney (which immediately belied the preseason speculation that he would dominate those Americans-only events) is subject to speculation. What is known is that even more unexpected losses to Quick and Julian Illingworth would follow in the ensuing months, and though Crombie seemed to have righted himself by winning the U. S. Pro in June, he was jolted right at the outset of these trials when Illingworth beat him 3-0 on Friday, following which Quick administered a similar outcome Saturday afternoon.

By the time he and Walker entered the court yesterday afternoon for the last match of the entire event, everyone was aware that Wyant's just-completed win over Quick meant that the only way that Crombie could avoid the embarrassment of failing to make the U. S. team was by duplicating his U. S. Pro final-round win over Walker and thereby winning the third and rubber match of their 2002-2003 season series. The fact that these two highly decorated protagonists, who had been seeded to meet in the championship match, were instead squaring off in one of the "crossover" matches between 2nd and 3rd place finishers in their respective pools, bears compelling testimony to how swiftly the "youth movement" of the class of 2000 (two of whose representatives, Quick and Wyant, as noted played for first place earlier in the day) has progressed even during the course of this past season.

The strides that the teenager Illingworth has made just during his recently-completed freshman year at Yale is further proof of how quickly the future is becoming the present in U. S. squash, as Illingworth re-affirmed with a win in the other crossover match over Chin, reversing their U. S. Pro result three weeks earlier. It is a kind of sad irony, and proof yet again of how strong the U. S. program is becoming, that, at a time when Chin is playing quite possibly the best squash of his outstanding career, he failed to make what would have been his tenth consecutive U. S. team. Chin's pair of brutal five-game losses during the weekend to Walker and Wyant (whom he led two games to one before being passed in the stretch run) not only deprived him of some much-needed points but also exacted a physical toll that came to the fore as his four-game match with Illingworth evolved.

The prideful Walker, who had seemed a bit flat at the beginning of these trials, had been getting better and better as the event moved along. Though a position on the team had been mathematically secured by the time he and Crombie entered the court, the British native still had plenty to play for, including the No. 1 overall ranking-Green-trials quotient, which would go to Quick if Walker lost. But Crombie, as mentioned, had EVERYTHING on the line, which made his somewhat meek three-game defeat all the more puzzling. To be sure, Walker played at the absolute top of his game, much as he had throughout his magical fifth game when he overwhelmed Crombie 9-2 at the Harvard Club of New York final 24 weeks ago. But Crombie, normally the most whole-hearted of competitors, didn't or couldn't approach that level on this occasion and Walker cruised to victory.

Crombie did qualify for the four-man U. S. team that will compete in the biennial World Team Championships in Vienna this autumn, and he will join Walker, Quick and Wyant in that event, when the U. S. will try to improve on their 19th-place finish in Melbourne in 2001. The latter trio quite possibly constitute the strongest and most worthy contingent ever to carry the American banner in international squash competition. Certainly no one can dispute either the fairness of the team selection process (the criteria for which were disseminated more than a year ago, a refreshing change from the politically riven bad old days of the 1970's and 1980's) or the degree to which the team members earned their roles through an arduous season, a deep and powerful S. L. Green draw and an exacting team trials that produced some of the most memorable matches in the history of U. S. squash.

STATISTICAL RECAP (the lower the score, the better)

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