[Singles WISPA draw]

North American Open Doubles Recap: Price and Gould Over Mudge and Berg

On Sunday afternoon before a standing-room-only crowd that packed the gallery in the Greenwich Field Club, top seeds Paul Price and Ben Gould dethroned defending champs Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg 15-7 15-9 16-15 in the final round of the 25th annual North American Open Doubles championship, a $25,000 event that comprises one of the highlight stops of the season. In the 11th edition of the concomitant Harrow Greenwich Open, top seed Natalie Grainger saved three match-balls against her to defeat Omneya Abdel Kawy 11-4 8-11 12-10 9-11 13-11 in the final, which was held shortly after the conclusion of the doubles final so that spectators could watch both finals.

The Price/Gould vs. Mudge/Berg clash, a rematch of last year’s Greenwich final at the nearby Round Hill Club, represented the 10th time in the 21 ISDA-sanctioned tournaments dating back to early-November ’07 that these two teams have met in the final round; all 21 tourneys have had at least one of those teams reaching (and winning) the final, and the last time a team OTHER than this pair has made its way to the winner’s circle occurred in Baltimore in October ’07 when Clive Leach and Chris Walker rallied past Price and Gould in five games. Leach and current partner Matt Jenson entered the Saturday-afternoon semis hoping for a repeat of their thrilling 16-15 fifth-game victory two weeks ago over Price and Gould in a riveting Boston semi, but Price and Gould, showing the same level of sharpness and focus that had been so present in their three-for-three (in Baltimore, New York and Toronto) start this past autumn, out-played them in four hard-fought games, while Mudge and Berg were doing the same in their balancing 3-1 semifinal win over Preston Quick and John Russell.

The latter tandem, finalists already this season in Baltimore and Wilmington, were the only one of the top-four-seeded teams whose quarterfinal match exceeded three games --- while Price/Gould, Mudge/Berg and Leach/Jenson were asserting themselves over Mark Price/Joe Pentland, Eric Vlcek/Yvain Badan and James Hewitt/Steve Scharff respectively, Russell and Quick, after dropping what could have been a devastating second-game 18-16 tiebreaker, were faced with having to extricate themselves from a two-games-to-love hole against Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey, regarded as the best of the teams in the Nos. 5-8 range and recent semifinalists in St. Louis when they defeated Leach and Jenson to usher Chaloner into his first-ever ISDA-career ranking semifinal. However, a second such advance was not to be for Chaloner, as he and the five-time (with Jamie Bentley in ’00 and ’01, with Berg in ’02, with Michael Pirnak in ’03 and with Leach in ’05) North American Open finalist Hosey were emphatically closed out by Russell and Quick in peremptory 15-8, 9 and 9 fashion in the only five-game match of the entire doubles portion of the weekend.

The first two games of the final had a much closer and more competitive “feel” to them than the single-digit scores would indicate. Inside those games, as well as the one-point third, were some astonishingly athletic and lengthy all-court points, and one often got the sense that Mudge and Berg were on the verge of one of the patented runs that have made them such a special team. But in each game Price and Gould were able to generate a quick several-point spurt that enabled them to prevail. The third seesawed dangerously along all the way to and through the best-of-five tiebreaker, which itself consisted of four evenly-divided points coming down to a final exchange, in which Mudge attempted a backhand drop shot in front of Price, whose match-long exceptional movement and deadly counter-punching may have played a role in how close Mudge felt he had to cut his shot, which rang noisily off the top of the tin. Price and Gould thereby won their second North American Open title in the past three years, elevated their head-to-head record this season to 3-1 against Berg and Mudge, who was playing in his 10th consecutive North American Open final and seeking his ninth crown.

GRAINGER SQUEEZES PAST ABDEL KAWY
In the women’s singles final, Grainger, who had won this event in ’98 and ’99 and been a finalist in ’03 and ’07, played her third five-game match in as many days, and unlike her 11-2 fifth-game quarter with Raneem El-Weleily or her 11-1 fifth-game semi with an exhausted Vanessa Atkinson, the fifth-game of her final with El-Weleily’s Egyptian compatriot Kawy went all the way to a tiebreaker. Indeed, Kawy led 10-7 in both the third and fifth games, only to have Grainger overtake her in each case, helped twice in the fifth game by serve-return winners, the first with Kawy serving at 10-7 and the second giving Grainger the match-ball opportunity she converted (by rifling  a forehand cross-court well out of Kawy’s reach) to finish off a wildly entertaining afternoon at the host club.

FINALS RECAP
ISDA North American Open Doubles: Paul Price/Ben Gould d. Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg, 15-7 15-9 16-15.
WISPA Harrow Greenwich Open: Natalie Grainger d. Omneya Abdel Kawy, 11-4 8-11 12-10 9-11 13-11.

 

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