When Blair Horler and Clive Leach, the hottest team on the ISDA circuit the prior winter/spring with their Canadian Pro and Kellner Cup final-round wins over the previously invincible Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, were unceremoniously ousted, in straight games no less, in the first round of the inaugural 2003 Maryland Club Open by qualifiers Alex Pavulans and Chris Deratnay, they never fully recovered from this unexpected setback and their partnership ended just a few months later when Horler badly injured his right knee that winter. Similarly, when Willie Hosey and Michael Pirnak defeated Pavulans and Deratnay the following day to reach that ’03 final (losing to Waite and Mudge, who would go on to win the next two editions of this tourney as well), they took the first big step in a season that would see them reach four subsequent finals as well.
When Ben Gould and Preston Quick, first-round Maryland Club Open losers one year earlier, roared into the final round of the ’05 edition of that event, out-playing Chris Walker and Viktor Berg in the semis, they set the stage for their breakthrough first-ever tournament win (via a 15-14 fourth over Waite/Mudge against whom Quick and Gould had been zero for 11 coming into that match), the Big Apple Open, just a few weeks later, jump-starting an 11-week stretch in which Quick and Gould would also capture the Wilmington and Boston titles and come within one point (18-17 in the fifth) of taking a rematch with Waite and Mudge in the Toronto final.
Similarly, when Gould and his new partner Paul Price shocked three-time defending Maryland Club Open champs Waite and Mudge one year later in a four-game semi (keyed by a look-away Price forehand roll-corner in a 17-16 second game they prevented The Champs from taking a two-games-to-love lead), that outcome, followed as it was by a 3-0 final over Quick and John Russell, foretold the ascendancy of the Price/Gould pairing to the North American Open and Briggs Cup titles and No. 1 season-end team ranking that would ensue, while marking the first sign that the seven-year Waite/Mudge dynasty was finally coming to an end, largely due to their inability to win tiebreakers in their matches with Price and Gould, who augmented that Baltimore second game with successful overtime sessions vs. Waite and Mudge in the third and fourth games of the North American Open final and the second game of the Briggs Cup final.
But in distinct contrast to the foregoing, when Mudge and his new partner Berg in their debut appearance were convincingly defeated by eventual champs Leach and HIS new partner Walker in the semifinal round of last year’s ’07 Maryland Club Open, that result would be swept into irrelevancy by the remarkable season that awaited Mudge, who last autumn was switching both partners (from the retired Waite to Berg) AND walls (to the left, after all those record-shattering years on the right), and Berg. Once this pair started to mesh right around Thanksgiving, they took off on an unstoppable tear that brought them eight ISDA ranking titles, five of them in a winter-long row, and to the final round of the last 10 events on the 2007-08 schedule. Included in this extended run, which featured a 19-match winning streak, by far the largest of any team not only all season but ever since a Waite/Mudge 62-match skein was snapped nearly three years ago, were rallying wins in both the North American Open and Kellner Cup finals over Price and Gould, the first of which enabled Mudge and Berg to take over the No. 1 ranking and the second of which, coming in the face of a 1-2, 9-12 fourth-game hole and requiring tiebreaker conclusions to both the fourth and fifth games, enabled them to clinch it.
Starting with that Pavulans/Deratnay upset win over Horler/Leach — which occurred on a wild Halloween evening that was preceded that morning by a pair of unexpected final-round qualifying results (in which both seeded teams fell, Doug Lifford/James Hewitt to Pavulans/Deratnay and Gould/Eric Vlcek to Walker/Dave Kay) and followed by Quick and Jamie Bentley beating No. 4 seeds Berg and Josh McDonald 15-4 in the fifth and by Walker and Kay almost beating second seeds and eventual finalists Hosey and Pirnak before an exhausted Kay muscled a forehand rail at 13-14 that would have cleanly passed on out-of-position Hosey had it not first ticked the top of the tin — the Maryland Club Open, now entering its sixth year, has frequently been the scene of early-season drama that has almost always had a significant impact on the remainder of the October to May schedule. The tour has undergone enormous personnel changes during the five years that have passed since this tournament first burst upon the ISDA scene — only eight of the 16 main-draw players back then are still active on the present tour, and both Gould and Matt Jenson, currently ranked in the top 10, lost in the qualifying rounds of that ’03 event — but the influence of this tourney on the ISDA stops that follow appears likely to continue to be strong, both due to the psychological impact of early-season results and as a consequence of the many new alignments that frequently form over the intervening months between the end of one tour and the beginning of the next.
That latter phenomenon likely hit its peak during the summer of 2007, when Waite’s just-announced retirement set off a “domino effect” among the top-tier players (it left Mudge needing a new partner, which became Berg, leaving Berg’s partner Walker needing a new partner, which became Leach, and so on) by the end of which the Price/Gould and Russell/Quick pairs, both of whom had played only one event together prior to the start of the 2006-07 season, were nevertheless the longest-tenured tandems of any team on the circuit! This past summer, by contrast, has been expected to be far “quieter,” lacking the impetus of any player move approaching the magnitude of Waite’s retirement and in the wake of the overwhelming 60-1 slate that the top-four ranked teams (i.e. Mudge/Berg, Price/Gould, Walker/Leach and Russell/Quick), semifinalists virtually every ISDA tournament weekend last year (including the Maryland Club Open), compiled in 2007-08 against the rest of the ISDA field. The lone exception to that essentially upset-free slate occurred in a Big Apple Open quarterfinal, when Russell and Quick, who frequently lived dangerously in pre-semi competition (especially in their pair of route-going quarters against Joe Pentland and Mark Price, who actually led 2-1, 14-10 in Boston before that quintuple-match-point opportunity slipped away), fell to Scott Butcher (in his ISDA swan song before relocating to his native Australia shortly thereafter) and Hosey in four well-played games.
Three of the four tandems comprising last year’s aristocracy are indeed intact from this past spring, but Leach, instead of defending the crown that he and Walker annexed last October with their rally from 1-2 down against Price and Gould, will be entering this season partnering Jenson after their advance to (and nearly through) the season-ending Sea Island tournament in Georgia last May, when they had led Mudge and Berg by a score of 2-1, 11-8 before finally losing that game 18-16 and dropping an anticlimactic 15-8 fifth-game tally. Jenson will be Leach’s sixth different Maryland Club Open partner (preceded by Horler in ’03, Hosey in ’04, Pirnak in ’05, Butcher in ’06 and Walker in ’07) in six editions of the tournament (never before in ISDA history as a player had a different partner in a given ISDA tour stop that many consecutive years), and this will also be the first time that a winning team in this tournament has not returned to Eager Street the following year to defend their title. This move represents a major step up for Jenson, who had attained only one career semifinal (Denver ’07, when he and Jeff Mulligan led Price/Gould two games to one and led early in the fourth before Price defaulted due to injury) prior to his two final-round finishes (with Quick in Cleveland and Leach, as noted, in Sea Island, in Jenson’s only forays with either of those two top-six-ranked respective players) in the second half of the 2007-08 campaign.
Whether Berg (whose only career Maryland title came with Waite in the ’01 BIDS, whose final round was played at the Maryland Club) and Mudge can match the torrid post-Thanksgiving standard they set last season, figures to be a major storyline for both the ’08 Maryland Club Open and the tour calendar (the most event-filled and lucrative in ISDA history) that will follow — so will the ability of Price and Gould to recapture the form that carried them through a No. 1 2006-07 season and to a four-titles-in-five-events stretch in November/December last season; of Russell and Quick to again demonstrate the extraordinarily consistent level they maintained all last season; of Leach to successfully retain the Maryland Club Open trophy with his new partner; and of the many talented ISDA performers ranked just out of the top nine to form productive partnerships (Pentland and Mark Price, as one example, semifinalists in Vancouver, were on the cusp of the semis several other times last winter) that go deep into ISDA draws. A furious battle to establish a top-tier pecking order occurs in the early stages of every ISDA tour, and the Maryland Club Open, now fully established as one of the most prominent stops on the schedule and skillfully positioned in its mid-October time slot, has always provided a key forum for the resolution of those season-defining autumn confrontations.