Quick, Wyant, McNeely Still Chasing Ever-young Walker

2002 Finalist Preston Quick

When top seed British-born Greenwich Field Club head pro Damian Walker defeated Preston Quick 9-4, 3 and 7 on Yale's four-glass-wall exhibition court in the final of the S. L. Green championship, he not only successfully defended the crown he had won via a five-game final in Seattle over Richard Chin in 2001, but also capped off one of the remarkable 12-month stretches in the admittedly fairly short history of American softball squash.

Since losing the fourth game of last year's final with Chin, Walker, a losing finalist to Marty Clark in the 2000 S. L. Green, won the decisive fifth game 9-2, following which he swept through the U. S. Team Trials in August and the American-players-only Trinity Open in January, Westchester Classic in February and now this mid-March S. L. Green, 14 straight matches, all without losing a single game, 43 consecutive games in all against the best players American squash has to offer! Walker's accuracy and polish have caused the much-younger players in the vaunted college class of 2000, three of whose leading members filled the remaining semi-final slots, to label him "The Surgeon," and his performance both in these aforementioned events and last October as the No. 1 player in the World Team Championships in Melbourne, Australia have caused Team USA Head Coach Paul Assaiante to praise him as an enormous asset to the competitive growth of elite-level squash in this country.

Current USA Men's Rankings

1. Damian Walker 2. Dave McNeely 3. Preston Quick 4. Tim Wyant 5. Richard Chin 6. Julian Illingworth 7. Jason Jewell 8. John Musto 9. Beau River 10. Dylan Patterson 11. Steve Polli 12. Jack Wyant 13. Josh Miller 14. Paul Brogna 15. Ryan Donegan 16. James White 17. Christopher Gordon 18. Duncan Pearson 19. Stephen Gregg

Though he will turn 33 this spring, Walker hopes and plans to play competitively at least until the 2003 Pan American Games and World Team Championships, which won't occur until well into the autumn of next year, and there is no doubt that the current crop of young American stars, such as Quick, Dave McNeely and Tim Wyant, the second-, third- and fourth-place finishers respectively in the 19-man S. L. Green tourney, can only improve by their continuing exposure to a player of Walker's precision and wisdom.

Though his quartet of straight-set triumphs over current Dartmouth No. 1 Ryan Donegan, Yale '91 captain John Musto, Trinity Open finalist Tim Wyant and Quick established Walker as clearly the class of the field, even more so in view of the troublesome wrist tendon he dealt with the entire weekend and the active nature of the Yale show court, which to some degree nullifies the sharpness that constitutes the cornerstone of his formidable game, there were several occasions during which he looked vulnerable enough to give his vanquished opponents cause to look forward to the next time they get to play him.

While it is a tribute to Walker's experience and savoir-faire that he was able to go through the draw featuring the best American squash has to offer without dropping a game, even on a weekend when he was physically sub-par and, by his later assessment, playing slightly below his usual standard, it is also noteworthy that some of the top-echelon players came out of the weekend far less awed by him than they had felt before the tournament began. Musto, who had gotten shut out 9-0 in the first game, served a half-dozen times at game-ball in the second, and led 4-1 in the third as well, while Quick had Walker looking tired and shaky in the third game of their final, in which he led 5-1 and frequently had his eight-years-older adversary on the run for most of a point, only to err on what would have been a winning swing, as happened at match-point in that game, where his tinned forehand volley allowed an admittedly "relieved" Walker to escape with a 9-7 win.

Some of the Americans' confidence regarding their future matches with Walker may be a function of his steady and rock-solid but unspectacular game, a situation that seems reminiscent of Mark Talbott's decade-long supremacy on the WPSA hardball tour of the 1980's and early 1990's, throughout which his opponents were able to play their games against him, though practically no one was able to actually defeat him. Talbott never steamrolled his opponents the way his immediate predecessors as the top North American hardball player, Sharif Khan and Michael Desaulniers, had done during their eras of dominance. One often finished a match with Talbott frustrated rather than demoralized, and believing, however wrongly, that a slightly higher level of consistency, conditioning and/or execution might have resulted in a different outcome. The ledger of Talbott's victims is filled with players who were looking forward to rather than dreading the next time they would play him, and this characteristic, for better or worse, seems to have emerged from this S. L. Green tourney regarding Walker as well.

Perhaps a more important theme is the manner in which the Class of 2000, for which so much had been predicted during their undergraduate years, really stepped up during the weekend and established the extent to which they have arrived. The two elite foreign members of this class, Vancouver's Peter Yik and England's Marcus Cowie, each two-time recipients of the Pool Trophy after winning the Individual Intercollegiate championship, are in London and California respectively and not playing serious tournament squash, at least for now. Americans Wyant, Quick and Dave McNeely, who as an Amherst junior rode a good draw and a hot streak to the '99 S. L. Green crown, have all have during the past year made notable improvements in their very distinct games. This progress found full expression both in the advance each made to at least the semis of this year's Championship and in the finalist status earned by Wyant at the Trinity Open and by McNeely in the Westchester Classic, in each case via a 3-0 semi-final win over Chin, whom all three of these recent college graduates seemed to surpass during the course of the 2001-2002 campaign.

Quick, who has also been thriving on the ISDA professional doubles tour, is blessed with great all-around athleticism, while Wyant has shown an extraordinary ability to absorb and sustain punishment and McNeely has noticeably tightened up his stroke production and ball control, especially on the backhand flank, where he now can consistently hit a tight rail and straight drop shot.

Interestingly, although both Wyant and McNeely spent approximately a year in England training with top-flight British players and coaches shortly after graduation, they each seemed to make their biggest improvements in the half-dozen or so months since returning to America and setting up permanent bases, Wyant in his native Ohio and McNeely in Westchester, where they have benefited from more personalized coaching than they were getting overseas, and where the more familiar environment has doubtless been a boon as well. What all three, plus anyone else hoping to really challenge Walker, need to do is get him out of his comfort zone, which entails taking the risk implicit in expanding THEIR comfort zones, upping the tempo and forcing Walker to do more retrieving under pressure than has heretofore been required of him. This means being able to effectively volley even balls that have the width Walker's reliable ground strokes always possess and being able to disrupt the rhythm with which he plays without coughing up loose balls or committing tins.

Wyant attempted to move Walker up front in their semi-final, but his balls were hanging and Walker's responses were so devastating that Wyant by match's end was overwhelmed and so spent that he had nothing left for his ensuing third/fourth match with McNeely, who romped to a 9-0, 0 and 6 (from 0-6) victory. Quick, who had been counseled before the final on the necessity of forcing the action, waited until te third game to really try to do so, and, as noted, he definitely controlled many of the points, as well as the scoreboard through much of that third and final game. When he acquires more finishers, he might pose the greatest threat to Walker, though it should be noted that this stratagem of tiring Walker out took its toll as well on Quick, who hit a bit of a mid-game wall, during which Walker completely overcame his substantial early-game deficit en route to his eventual though tight 9-7 win.

Notwithstanding the necessary improvements that still hopefully await them, Quick, McNeely and Wyant all took a big step forward this season, as did the freshmen Donegan and Richard Repetto of Penn, the 33-year-old Musto, a two-time S. L. Green semi-finalist in the mid-1990's who made a highly successful return to competition this season after a five-year hiatus, and the east-coast bound high school senior Julian Illingworth, who reached the quarters one week after winning the U. S. Under-19 title on the same Brady Squash Center courts at the host Payne Whitney Gynmnasium.

On the other side, Mark Lewis, the '98 S. L. Green finalist who opted not to play in this event for the first time in many years, may have decided that his playing days are behind him; he fared poorly in this season's earlier events and was recently named to replace Talbott as Chairman of Team USA's Men's Committee. The competitive future for the three-time ('94, '97, '01) S. L. Green finalist Chin, who placed second in last August's Team Trials but who has now lost his last three matches with Wyant and been defeated by both Quick and McNeely in his most recent matches with this pair as well, remains to be seen.

Walker for one, who has formed a bond with his contemporary in the wake of the assault from the younger generation they have simultaneously been weathering, hopes and believes that this much-decorated warrior and many-times U. S. team member and leader has another stretch of high-quality performances in him, and Chin himself, despite what had to be a disappointing three-game defeat to Wyant in the quarters of this Championship, rebounded in the Feed-In Consolation to defeat Beau River, Musto and Jason Jewell and finish fifth overall; though his defiant comment after the unfortunate 19th-place team finish in Australia that his career was "just getting started" is obviously unrealistic, his confidence that another upsurge awaits him seems genuine and appropriate.

Nevertheless, it seems very clear that it is the underclassmen and recent college alumni, the first generation of U. S. squash players to begin with the softball rather than have to convert to it, that will have to carry American squash forward. All 10 finalists in the 25- through 45-and-over age group flights were natives of foreign countries, as was virtually the entire nine-man starting line-up of Trinity College's undefeated NISRA championship team, and it will be in the ability of this very talented current crop of young American stars that squash in this country will grow and flourish in the years ahead.

	2002 Champion Damian Walker