Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg: Repelled virtually throughout the autumn portion of the 2007-08 schedule in their quest for ISDA titles, and plagued during that period by a preseason hamstring injury to Berg, an 0-3 slate against Chris Walker and Clive Leach and the six-point collapse that undid the 11-9 Big Apple final-round lead they had held over Paul Price and Ben Gould, this pair of first-year partners conjured up the most successful midseason turnaround in the history of the ISDA beginning immediately after Thanksgiving, when they reached the finals of all 10 subsequent ISDA ranking tournament, winning eight of them, thereby solidly earning the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking. Their match record from late November onwards of 33-2 included a 19-0 run encompassing five consecutive January/February/March tournaments (namely Boston, the North American Open in Greenwich, Cleveland, Brooklyn and Denver) that enabled Mudge, playing for the first time on the left wall after all those right-wall years of record-shattering success with the now-retired Gary Waite, and Berg, who looked so shaky in their debut Maryland Club Open outing a year ago (when they were soundly defeated by Walker/Leach in the semis), to rocket to the No. 1 standing that they would clinch in late April with their thrilling Kellner Cup fifth-set-tiebreaker final-round rallying win over Price and Gould.
Those eleventh-hour heroics at the Kellner Cup (where they trailed 2-1 and 12-9 in the fourth, saved a double-match-point, and overcame a 13-12 deficit in the fifth with a match-ending 4-0 spurt) represented just one of several times when Mudge and Berg came through at crunch-time, just as Price and Gould had been able to do in their No. 1 2006-07 campaign. Without Mudge’s audacious but clear-winner backhand-reverse corner (the same shot he had hit to save the first of the two consecutive match-balls-against that he and Berg faced in the Kellner Cup’s fourth-game tiebreaker, preceding a Price tin) at 17-all in a Creek Challenge Cup semi vs Preston Quick and John Russell, it is unlikely that his team would have survived that two-hour 15-12 fifth-game marathon, and Mudge/Berg trailed Matt Jenson and Leach 2-1, 11-8 in the season-ending early-May Sea Island final before they rescued that game 18-16 and sailed off with an anticlimactic 15-8 fifth.
Though Berg and Mudge, as noted, were badly out-played by Leach and Walker in this arena last year in Berg’s first appearance after having to miss the season-opening St. Louis event while recuperating from his late-September hamstring pull, they have both experienced much success in their past Baltimore forays: four of the staggering 76 Waite/Mudge ISDA crowns (no other team has won more than 10) were the 2003-05 Maryland Club Opens and the 2002 BIDS, while Berg, a finalist in the ’02 BIDS with Willie Hosey and the ’04 Maryland Club Open with Josh McDonald, teamed with Waite to capture the ’01 BIDS event while Mudge was recovering from a wrist injury incurred in a rollerblading accident on the occasionally fissure-prone sidewalks of Manhattan, where Mudge has been based for the past decade at the University Club, whose head pro position he has held for the past seven years.
Paul Price/Ben Gould: Champions this past season in the Big Apple Open (successfully defending this title with a 6-0 run from 9-11 in the fifth game of the final with Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg), Chicago, Toronto Vancouver and Long Island, this pair of contemporaneous (born only six months apart in 1976) Australian stars were also runners-up last year in Baltimore (where they led Clive Leach and Chris Walker 2-1 before ceding the subsequent two games), Greenwich (where a Price’s mid-match ankle injury doomed their attempt to defend their ’07 North American Open crown), Brooklyn (where for the second straight year they managed a late-fifth-game semifinal rally to edge John Russell and Preston Quick) and, shatteringly, the Kellner Cup, where they led 13-12 against their season-long rivals Mudge and Berg in both the fourth and fifth games only to lose both games in tiebreakers, an outcome that was especially shattering both given the late-April match’s ramifications (the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking was known to have been at stake even before the tournament began) and in view of the home-crowd advantage that Gould enjoyed as the head pro of the event’s Racquet & Tennis Club locale.
All told, Price and Gould, whose 10 ISDA titles during their two-season partnership is the second-largest in ISDA history, behind only Mudge and Gary Waite’s 76, went 3-3 against the Mudge/Berg duo last season, with all six of those clashes occurring in finals, and the Big Apple Open, Vancouver and Long Island events going to Price/Gould and balancing the Mudge/Berg triumphs in Brooklyn and at the two most important tourneys of the season, namely the North American Open and Kellner Cup. Price and Gould wound up with a 6-3 record against Walker/Leach, a 3-2 slate against Russell/Quick and an undefeated mark against everyone else. Price battled a variety of ailments all season, notably the ankle sprain, as noted, in Greenwich, a stomach virus that caused him to have to default midway through a Boston semi against Walker and Leach and a lower-leg injury when he and Mudge collided while jostling along the left wall in the Kellner Cup final that hampered him during the remainder of that match and forced him to withdraw from the Sea Island finale later that same week. Gould’s vaunted durability was on display all season, as was his lethal forehand right-wall power, which served him so well in the pair of noteworthy seasons he spent as Quick’s partner (including their advance to the ’05 Maryland Club Open final via wins over first Chris Deratnay/Alex Pavulans and then Walker/Berg) prior to joining forces with his compatriot Price in the spring of 2006.
In just their second tournament together, the ’06 Maryland Club Open, they ousted three-time defending champs Mudge and Waite in a four-game semi that swung on an audacious look-away Price forehand roll-corner at 17-all in the second that deprived their opponents of a two-games-to-love lead and preceded a Price/Gould domination of the remaining pair of single-figure games in that match as well as a next-day 3-0 triumph over Quick and Russell in the final. That result presaged the No. 1 2006-07 season that would follow, highlighted by a 4-1 record over Waite and Mudge (who never before had lost to any team more than twice in a season) and appearances in the winner’s circle in the North American Open and the Briggs Cup, in both cases due to rallying final-round wins over Waite and Mudge. After being dislodged from the No. 1 position by Mudge and Berg last season, Price and Gould now face the challenge of regaining that status in 2008-09.
Matt Jenson/Clive Leach: Both the British-born Leach, who is entering this sixth Maryland Club Open event with his sixth different partner, and his new Australian teammate Jenson enjoyed their respective career-best years in 2007-08, but the paucity of their body of work as partners, which consists of only one event (the season-ending Sea Island tourney last May), gives a real wild-card quality to their decision to join up the 2008-09 campaign. Leach and Chris Walker began last season in torrid fashion, winning both October tournaments, the St. Louis season-opener followed by the Maryland Club Open, featuring in each case a rallying win over Paul Price and Ben Gould, who saw a 2-0, 14-9 lead evaporate in a St. Louis semi and were then unable to convert a two games to one final-round advantage in Baltimore one week later. Leach and Walker then proceeded to reach the finals in Chicago, Toronto and Boston during the next few months (compiling at one point a 3-0 mark against Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg, who however wound up winning all five of their remaining match-ups last season) and to briefly occupy the No. 1 team standing before a second half in which they never surpassed the semis caused them to eventually land at No. 3, behind a pair of teams (Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould) both of whom Walker and Leach had out-played in that sequence in capturing last year’s Maryland Club Open title.
Leach’s ISDA career highlights also include his three winter/spring 2003 title runs with Blair Horler in the Kellner Cup, Creek Challenge Cup and Canadian Pro events (they also were five-time runners-up to Mudge and Gary Waite during the early-2000’s, including the ’04 North American Open), his ’04 Big Apple Open win with Willie Hosey (with whom Leach also reached the finals of the ’04 Long Island and San Francisco events and the ’05 North American Open), his pair of ’05 finals (in Chicago and San Francisco) with Michael Pirnak, his ’07 U. S. Nationals final with Scott Butcher, his consecutive-years’ (2005 and 2006) advances to the Cambridge Club Doubles final with Preston Quick and Butcher respectively and, as referenced, his advance with Jenson five months ago to the finals in Sea Island, where they rose superior first to Joe Pentland and Mark Price and then to second seeds Quick and John Russell. Leach and Jenson then earned their way to a 2-1, 11-8 lead over Mudge and Berg before dropping that game in a tiebreaker (18-16) and falling in a 15-8 fifth game most of which occurred with Jenson immobilized by cramps in both thighs.
The latter had attained only one career ISDA semifinal prior to the second half of the 2007-08 season, which makes his advances all the way to two ISDA finals (his exploits with Leach in Sea Island, where Jenson has been based as the head pro of the host club since this past December, were preceded by his wins with Quick in Cleveland over the Pirnak/Mark Chaloner and Walker/Leach tandems) all the more noteworthy. Jenson, whose older brother Dan was a teenage-years rival of his Australian compatriot Mudge and later the No. 5 PSA pro before injuries in recent years have ended his singles career, had reached the quarters of 10 of the 11 other ISDA events he entered (seven with Jeff Mulligan and three with Hosey) while also earning his first career top-10 ISDA ranking last season, which began on a propitious note with the Jenson brothers winning the inaugural edition of the U. S. National Siblings tourney, held in Sea Island shortly after Labor Day.
John Russell/Preston Quick: Last season, their second as partners, was what Quick has characterized as the “most consistent” of his ISDA career (which has included prior successful prior alliances with the likes of Jamie Bentley and Ben Gould), fittingly so in light of their advances to at least the semifinal stage of all but one of the 13 ISDA ranking tournaments they entered. That lone blot on their slate, a quarters loss in the Big Apple Open to Scott Butcher and Willie Hosey (on the same weekend during which Russell also completed the New York City Marathon!), was more than counter-balanced by final-round appearances in both Wilmington and at the Denver Athletic Club, where Quick learned the game as a youngster from John Lesko and the immortal Hashim Khan. Each of those advances to the final was keyed by semifinal victories (in a fifth-set overtime in the case of Wilmington) over Gould and Paul Price, whom Russell and Quick also led 11-7 in the fifth game of a Heights Casino semifinal before bowing to an 8-1 run.
The foregoing were by no means the only airtight matches that Russell and Quick (whose partnership highlight occurred when they won the ’07 U. S. National Doubles with a 3-0 final over Butcher and Clive Leach), the ’06 Maryland Club Open finalists by dint of their 3-0 semi vs. Chris Walker and Viktor Berg, weathered last year. In their season opener in St. Louis, they let a 14-9 fourth-game lead (five match-balls) get away against Joe Pentland and Mark Price, who then took an 11-7 fifth-game lead before a torrid 8-0 Russell/Quick charge rescued that game. Pentland and Price came even closer a few months later in Boston, where they stood at 2-1, 14-10, only to see Russell and Quick garner all five subsequent match-points against them and go on to prevail in a close fifth game. They were in trouble on other occasions last season as well — their great Wilmington performance could have ended before it began when they found themselves stuck in a fifth game with Michael Ferreira and Whitten Morris, but Russell and Quick went on to defeat that pairing both in Delaware and last spring at the Kellner Cup, where a Ferreira/Morris multiple-match-ball saving charge from 8-14 to 13-14 foundered on the perfect-length rail that Quick nailed down the right wall that barely eluded Morris’s diving attempt to get his racquet on the ball.
Notwithstanding these close calls in both directions that characterized their 2007-08 campaign, Russell and Quick can be validly described as standing equidistant between the Damien Mudge/Berg, Paul Price/Gould and Walker/Leach top three and the rest of the ISDA field, as is starkly confirmed statistically by contrasting their 1-10 mark against the Big Three with their 15-1 record against everyone else (they also dropped a Sea Island semi to Leach and Matt Jenson, which is not included in that count). Quick also teamed with Jenson in Cleveland (during which Russell was visiting his native England to help his father celebrate his 60th birthday), a first-time collaboration which brought them all the way to the finals, keyed by a win over Walker and Leach in the semis, before they fell to Mudge and Berg. In addition to that ’07 U. S. Nationals crown, Quick won three titles with Gould during the 2005-06 season, namely the Big Apple Open, the U. S. Pro and the Boston tourney.