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Hyder Open 2002 Review
by
Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk
May
26, 2002 © 2002
One Dominant
Performance, One Near Perfect Comeback
Damien Mudge's dominant performance and Katie Patrick's rallying victory were the story lines for the34th annual Quentin Hyder Invitational, the longest continually running softball event in the United States, which took place this past weekend at the New York Athletic Club on West 57th Street in Manhattan.
The 160 entrants in the host of accompanying amateur flights played their matches at several other New York clubs, but the eight-woman and 32-man Open draws were contested at the NYAC, where the tournament had its sparsely-attended and humble beginnings on narrow (even narrower than American-width) courts in 1969 and to which it returned following the construction of international courts in 1999 after several decades when it was hosted primarily by the Uptown Racquet Club on East 86th Street.
ANEMIC WOMEN'S TURNOUT
The low turn-out for the women's open draw reflected a disturbing trend
in the women's game in America, which Dr. Hyder himself, still going strong
at age 72, specifically addressed during Sunday's afternoon's trophy presentations,
when he noted how important he felt it was for more women to enter next
year's tournament, which has had a women's draw since 1980, when Alicia
McConnell, a precocious high-school senior at St. Ann's at the time, won
the first edition of the event and thereby launched what would become
a Hall of Fame career.
Of course, one of the main problems was the juxtaposition of this famous event against two new USA WISPA events - the Las Vegas and Seattle WISPA Opens.
The only New York area women to enter the open draw were high-school junior Kate Rapisarda, who originally entered only the A flight but was successfully lobbied by the tournament committee to also play in the Open flight to make it a full and bye-free quarter-final, Julie Lilien, fresh from her win in March in the 5.0 flight of the U. S. Nationals, Blair Clark, who led her Harvard Club A team to the MSRA finals earlier this spring and Julia Beaver, the 2001 Princeton alumna and three-time Intercollegiate individual champion who was making her return to competitive play after being sidelined for medical reasons for the entire 2001-2002 season.
BRIGHT RETURN FOR
BEAVER
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| Julia Beaver - in first comeback competition © 2002 Debra Tessier |
This tournament therefore represented the first step in Beaver's comeback, which she hopes will have her game back to its full competitive pitch by the time the trials for the Pan Am Fed Cup team take place next month.
She defeated both Clark and Lilien in three games, showing some ring rust, especially in the impatient tins she committed in the face of Lilien's gritty retrieving, but also demonstrating the racquet skills and stretching ability that served her so well at Princeton.
The top-seeded Patrick, a Canadian who nevertheless attended the University of Pennsylvania and spearheaded the intercollegiate team title that the Quakers won for the first time in 2000 during her senior year, had consistently lost to Beaver during their substantially overlapping college careers, but had sharpened her game this past season in the qualifying brackets of the demanding WISPA pro women's tour. After easily defeating Rapisarda, Patrick had considerably more difficulty in her semi-final with Spain's Olga Sola, losing the third game and going down 6-4 in the fourth before rallying to win that game and seal the match.
BEAVER-PATRICK: FAMILIAR FINAL
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| Katie Patrick, file photo © 2002 Debra Tessier |
The final therefore had several competing undertones, matching the head-to-head history between the two co-finalists against their substantially differing tournament exposure throughout the current campaign. Patrick's solid ground strokes and freedom from the tin enabled her to control a 9-6 first game against an error-prone Beaver, who however then settled into the match and easily took the next two stanzas. During this time, and especially in the end stages of those games, in each of which Beaver was able to break away en route to 9-4 decisions, Patrick appeared to be having flashbacks of her bevy of losses to her nemesis, committing unforced tins out of either panic or despair, and getting ruffled as well by some close calls that went against her. Despite losing her glasses between games and only locating them after the match was over, Beaver was able to commandeer a two games to one lead and appeared on her way to capturing the Hyder crown and reasserting her career-long dominance over her frowning foe.
It is to Patrick's credit and a sign of the maturing of her very solid game that she stood strong in the face of both history's burden and an early fourth-game deficit and resolutely engineered a mid-game charge from 2-4 to 7-4 in one hand that swung both the score and the momentum permanently in her favor. She regained her temporarily misplaced length, kept the pressure on and ran her opponent around the court enough to induce errors and fatigue from her lean and lanky opponent, whose footwork began to suffer accordingly.
With the equalizing 9-4 game against her in the books, an increasingly beleaguered Beaver mustered one final struggle at the beginning of the fifth game, which stood at 1-1 after seven mostly scoreless points, but Beaver's courageous resistance eventually gave out and Patrick was home free, sprinting to a 9-1 finish to a match whose dramatic 16-1 statistical turn in the last laps gave Beaver a good gauge of the amount of work that lies ahead of her after what was nevertheless a highly praiseworthy weekend-long performance, especially in view of the length of her enforced hiatus and the recency of her return to serious training.
As different as they are in style and background, in some ways Beaver can use her near-contemporary and Hyder men's champion Damien Mudge as an inspirational role model as she continues along the comeback trail.
MUDGE MAURAUDER
Though seemingly indestructible in both his rugby-type demeanor and linebacker-like
dimensions, Mudge was forced to miss more than a year due to a bout with
chronic-fatigue syndrome several years ago and was sidelined for three
months in the winter and spring of 2001 due to a severe left-wrist injury
incurred in a roller-blading accident on Manhattan's sidewalks that required
the insertion of several steel pins to stabilize the damaged joint.
Mudge demonstrated the fullness of his recovery from last season's mishap throughout the just-concluded 2001-2002 ISDA pro doubles campaign by teaming up with his superstar partner Gary Waite to sweep through all 17 ranking events and compile a 53-0 record in the process in what has to be the greatest single-season doubles performance in squash history given the strength and size of the field they conquered week in and week out throughout the seven-month period from the last weekend of September through the first weekend in May.
Interestingly, he is one of a number of ISDA doubles stars who began their squash careers as softball specialists (Clive Leach, Willie Hosey, Viktor Berg, Anders Wahlstedt, Blair Horler, Scott Butcher, Josh McDonald and former world No. 3 Brett Martin, all ranked in the ISDA top 16, fall into this category as well) and whose current softball games have clearly benefited from their intense and prolonged concentration on doubles.
Former world No. 26 Leach was the only member of this group to enter this year's Hyder event, whose final Berg reached a few years back, and the quality of his and Mudge's play in a squash discipline they had been basically forced to eschew until the end of the doubles season just a few weeks ago bears compelling testimony to the athleticism and racquet skills required to thrive on the ISDA circuit, which this year had far more events, prize money and teams than ever before. Leach motored to the semis with wins over Alex Pavulans and Imran Khan, whom he dominated in a lopsided fifth game, before barely falling in the semis to top-seeded English compatriot Julian Wellings, a world No. 48 two years ago, who looked dead in the water when Leach stormed back from down 5-10 in the final fourth game to grab an 11-10 lead.
Wellings, who had been forced to a competitive four in his quarter-final with Leach's ISDA colleague and recent S. L. Green finalist Preston Quick, was able to salvage that game with a match-ending five-point run, while Mudge, after rampaging over Quick's 2001 U. S. Team teammate Richard Chin 3-0 in his quarter, was locked in a close duel for a game and a half with second-seeded Egyptian Kerim Yehia, currently an assistant pro at the NYAC, who won a close first game and trailed Mudge 8-6 in the second, at which point he sustained a muscle pull in his left thigh that basically ended the match: eight straight points for Mudge to end the second, eight of nine points for him to begin the third, which ended at that juncture when an increasingly immobilized Yehia accepted his fate and retired.
The Mudge-Wellings final was a tribute to the winner's overwhelming physical talents, which simply proved much too great for the smooth game Wellings possesses to counter. Prior to his move to Cincinnati late last autumn, Wellings had trained in his native England, where he is part of renowned coach Neil Harvey's impressive stable, which features world No. 1 Peter Nicol, and the influence of this exceptional environment shows clearly in the Briton's thoughtful, accurate and nuanced game.
BUTTERFLY AND BEE
But Mudge's game as well has a degree of touch and subtlety especially
on his soft backhand drop and wonderfully well-placed and arcing lobs,
that he rarely presents on the doubles (or hardball singles) court, where
he essentially bludgeons his opponents into submission with the enormous
pace he creates on his forehand blasts, which inevitably result either
in outright winners or defensive returns for he or Waite to exploit.
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| Damian Mudge, file photo courtesy ISDA |
One of Mudge's best doubles traits is his ability to position himself well up on the court, dare his opponents to pass him and use his impressive wing span and exceptional hand-eye coordination and reflexes to cut off and pulverize whatever is hit in his direction. The transference of this skill to his final with Wellings was a defining aspect of their match, especially in the substantial and demoralizing runs (from 3-all to 15-4 in the second, from 5-all to 13-6 in the third and from 3-all to 13-5, 15-6 in the final fourth) Mudge generated in each of the last three games after letting a first-game 13-9 lead get away, a misstep that only galvanized him to an intensity level that Wellings, perhaps partly softened up by his pair of testing pre-final battles with Quick and Leach, couldn't come close to matching. In each of his trio of extensive scoring droughts, Wellings several times had an open ball in the front of the court to work with and every option at his disposal, faked short and hit hard, only to have the ball instantly whiz past him for winners, exactly the kind of reversal that exacts both a statistical and psychological toll. That and Mudge's oft-displayed extraordinary ability to explode to even a well-placed ball, even when his initial move is in the wrong direction, eventually got Wellings to a point where he lost confidence in his shot selection and began to go for high-risk winners, with predictably tinny results.
By the end, Mudge was
emulating his fellow champion Patrick in his exuberant sprint to the tape
and an exhausted and thoroughly deflated Wellings had joined a host of
doubles protagonists in Mudge's crowded roster of victims this season.
Summary of the final round: <complete draw>
Men's: Damien Mudge(3)
d Julian Wellings(1) 13-15 15-4 15-10 15-6
Women's: Katie Patrick (1) d Julia Beaver 9-6 4-9 4-9 9-4 9-1
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