Damien Mudge/Ben Gould: Partners for the past two dominant seasons, this pair of contemporaneous (born just six months apart in 1976) Manhattan-based Australian superstars have gone 19 for 20, compiling a 61-1mark in a collaborative effort which debuted in the 2010 Maryland Club Open. There, after falling behind Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker 1-0, 7-4, they then racked up nine straight games (at the expense of, sequentially, Walker/Chaloner, James Hewitt/Greg Park and John Russell/Preston Quick) to emphatically kick-start an undefeated (38-0) run through the 12-tournament 2010-11 campaign. It was the fourth time that Mudge had won this championship, preceded by his three-year skein with Gary Waite from 2003-05, the inaugural editions of the Maryland Club Open, and the third for Gould, who had teamed with Paul Price to prevail in 2006 and 2008.
Mudge’s 114 pro-doubles titles are well more than double the total of any other active player, as are his 11 years (seven with Waite, two with Victor Berg and the last two with Gould) as a member of the No. 1 team. His exploits on Eager Street include partnering Waite to the 2002 BIDS title (when they also squared off in the concomitant hardball singles final, won by Waite) and teaming with Gould to win last year’s three-team doubles invitational. Gould’s career pro-doubles title count now stands at 45, including 22 over a four-year (from 2006-2010) span with Price, three with Quick during the 2005-06 season and the 2009 Cambridge Club Doubles event that he won with Michael Pirnak. He has reached five Maryland Club Open finals, winning (as noted) with Price in 2006 and 2008 and with Mudge in 2010, and losing with Quick to Mudge/Waite in 2005 and with Price to Walker and Clive Leach in 2007.
Manek Mathur/Yvain Badan: This pair of mid-2000’s Trinity College teammates have a 13-tournament body of work consisting of a pair of truly compelling performances — advancing to the 2010 St. Louis final in their debut and defeating first Damien Mudge/Ben Gould and then Matt Jenson/Clive Leach to win the 2011 Briggs Cup in their most recent team appearances — that bookended semifinal advances in Greenwich and Brooklyn in the winter of 2011, a runner-up finish in St. Louis 2011 and a pair of Challenger tournament victories during the 2010-11 season in Buffalo and Philadelphia. After saving match-ball-against in the third game of their breakthrough win against Mudge/Gould (the only loss this latter pair has ever sustained) and following this signal achievement up with a convincing four-game final-round win the next night, Mathur and Badan were forced into a midseason suspension of their partnership when Badan accepted a head pro position at the Country Club Of New Canaan right around New Year’s Day last winter, a move that limited his play during the calendar 2012 portion of the season. Mathur spent that enforced hiatus (which has now ended, freeing Badan to rejoin the tour this autumn) teaming up with Leach, with whom he reached three finals (in Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn) in four attempts, the sole exception being when Badan and Jenson upended them in a North American Open semi that reversed the outcome one week earlier when the same pairings had met in the identical round at the University Club Of Boston.
Badan, the former Switzerland national junior champion, had teamed with yet another former Trinity College teammate, Jonny Smith, throughout the productive 2009-10 season that began with them coming within a simultaneous-championship-point (on which a tin-defying Chris Walker forehand reverse-corner winner gave himself and Mark Chaloner the winning margin) of capturing the U. S. Pro title in Wilmington, following which the Smith/Badan duo, quarterfinalists in Greenwich and Brooklyn, highlighted their year by edging John Russell and Preston Quick, 15-13 in the fourth, to attain the semis of the Kellner Cup. Mathur, after playing a heroic role in Trinity’s 5-4 2009 Potter Cup final-round win over Princeton, spent his first post-collegiate season learning his way around the tour, then had the start of his 2010-11 season briefly delayed by a serious and deep cut when his hand accidentally plunged through a pane of glass. But as soon as the wound healed, he and Badan shocked the world with their consecutive upset wins over Jenson/Leach and Paul Price/Raj Nanda in St. Louis and have never looked back.
Matt Jenson/Preston Quick: Finalists in both of their prior team forays (namely Cleveland ’08, where they defeated Michael Pirnak/Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker/Clive Leach, and the Cambridge Club Doubles in 2010, where after trailing Viktor Berg and Russell 2-0, 8-3, they eventually led 6-2 in the fifth before being overtaken), each member of this pairing is coming off a long and successful mid- to late-2000’s partnership and a past series of highly productive performances at the Maryland Club. Quick, now entering his second year as Director Of Doubles for U. S. Squash, is coming off a 2011-12 season in which he became the first player in more than 35 years to win the Hardball Nationals and the U. S. National Doubles in the same season, having soloed through a highly competitive draw at the Harvard Club Of New York in mid-February before partnering Greg Park to the doubles title six weeks later in Rye. There they out-lasted Bernardo Samper and Mark Price in a five-game quarterfinal and eked out a trio of one-point games in their straight-set final with Trevor McGuinness and Whitten Morris. It was the fourth U. S. National Doubles title for Quick, the third of which came in 2007, when it was a ranking pro tour stop and he was in the first year of an outstanding five-year stint with Russell during which they reached 15 finals (including the Maryland Club Open in 2006, 2008 and 2010) and got to at least the semis in 33 of their last 38 appearances.
Jenson recently completed a fruitful extended partnership of his own when he and Leach amicably parted ways midway through last season, ending a three and a half year run highlighted by 10 final-round advances, including in five of the last seven events they entered in calendar 2011, namely Boston, the North American Open, the Players Championship, the Big Apple Open and the Briggs Cup, all among the most important tournaments the sport of doubles squash has to offer. In addition to those exploits with Leach (with whom he also placed second last fall in the Maryland Club’s three-team round-robin invitational) and the pair of finals with Quick, Jenson was also a finalist in Cleveland 2011 with Willie Hosey and at last winter’s North American Open with Yvain Badan. In one of the few Jenson/Leach vs. Russell/Quick meetings, occurring in the semis of the 2010 Maryland Club Open, Jenson hit winners on simultaneous-game-ball in each of the first two games (a three-wall that bounced erratically past Quick, then a right backhand reverse-corner) but hyper-extended his right knee late in a close third game (which his team lost 15-13), that severely limited his mobility thereafter and eventually forced him to retire early in the fifth game. Currently based in Charleston, South Carolina, where he coaches at the Kiawah Island Club as well as the Charleston Squash Club, Jenson was elected as one of the two player reps by his professional colleagues, a clear tribute to the popularity and respect that he deservedly enjoys among his peers.
Paul Price/Clive Leach: Finalists 22 months ago in the only time prior to this weekend that they had ever teamed up (the 2010 Philadelphia Open), this pair of deadly and creative shot-makers have won well over 30 professional doubles tournaments between them during the past decade and have engaged in fierce cross-court battles against each other dozens of times throughout much of that span. Including in this latter count was the final round of the 2007 Maryland Club Open, in which defending champions and later 2009 World Doubles titlists Price and partner Ben Gould (who would also win this tourney in 2008), leading Leach and Chris Walker two games to one and well ahead in the fourth game as well, were overtaken 15-12, 15-11 by the two British stars. Though Price, a 2000 British Open finalist and noted musician (see www.paulpricemusic.com), and his Australian compatriot Gould let that match get away, they did notch 22 pro doubles titles during their four years (2006-2010) as partners, and Price has also come away with the Cambridge Club Doubles crown in 2004 and 2005 with Damien Mudge, in 2006 with Jamie Bentley and just this past autumn with Mark Chaloner, when after barely surviving a route-going Pools match against Walker and Gould, they won in surprisingly swift 15-7, 10 and 11 fashion over Mudge and Willie Hosey.
Leach, a former PSA top-30 who along with Mudge are the only players to have reached at least two ranking-tournament finals in each of the past nine years, has deservedly gained a reputation for stopping extended streaks of top-ranked opponents, part of the reason that he and Price are viewed as the loose-cannon wild-card team on this tour. Leach and Blair Horler were the duo that finally put an end to the Mudge/Gary Waite 22-month, 24-tournament, 76-match undefeated skein when they toppled the reigning champs in a 2003 Canadian Pro final that wasn’t even as close as the not-close 15-7 in the fourth tally. Leach and Jenson were the only team to defeat both Mudge/Viktor Berg and Price/Gould during a 2009-10 campaign in which one or the other of those tandems won every event that entire season. And when Leach and Matt Jenson battled eventual champs Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan in the 2011 Briggs Cup final this past December, it marked the first time that neither Mudge nor Gould was on the tournament-winning team in the four-plus years and 48 sanctioned pro events since the Walker/Leach 2007 Maryland Club Open triumph.