A WELCOME RETURN
This weekend will mark the welcome return of the Maryland Club Open (MCO) to the professional doubles schedule after a five-year hiatus largely due to the Covid pandemic and the hosting of the Can-Am Cup one year ago. Virtually every one of this tournament’s preceding 15 editions — the fifth-most of any tour stop, exceeded by only the Johnson Memorial, the North American Open, the Big Apple Open and the Boston Pro-Am — has been characterized by a major upset, the emergence of a contending team and/or a result that changes the dynamics of the tour — sometimes all three!
This phenomenon began with the very first main-draw match of the inaugural 2003 event on Halloween night when Chris Deratnay and Alex Pavulans pulled off a shocking upset victory over the fearsome Blair Horler/Clive Leach duo. Horler and Leach had been the tour’s hottest team during the last half of the 2002-03 season, winning the Canadian Pro (ending a Gary Waite/Damien Mudge 24-tournament, 76-match undefeated streak), the Creek Challenge Cup and, most importantly the Kellner Cup, where they again beat Waite and Mudge, 15-13 in the fifth, after trailing two games to love. They therefore barged into Baltimore for the season-opening MCO as a clear threat to displace Waite and Mudge from the No. 1 ranking and a prohibitive favorite to beat Deratnay and Pavulans, who had to win two tough qualifying matches just to make it into the main draw.
But once that match began (on a tin-defying forehand reverse-corner by Pavulans that caught Leach flat-footed on the very first point), Deratnay and Pavulans raced off to an excellent start and never looked back. Horler and Leach had a lead late in the third game, which came down to a simultaneous-game-ball that ended abruptly when Horler, the tour’s hardest hitter, blazed a backhand drive that would have been a clear winner (since Deratnay was out of position) had the ball not hit the top of the tin with such force that it ricocheted all the way into the gallery. Stunned by this unforeseen reversal, Horler and Leach stumbled through the autumn tournaments that followed and had their partnership end just a few months later when Horler sustained a serious injury to his right knee from which he never fully recovered.
THREE-PEAT
Pavulans and Deratnay then lost in the semis to second seeds Willie Hosey and Michael Pirnak — who themselves barely averted a first-round ouster of their own when they survived a 15-13 fifth game against qualifiers Chris Walker and David Kay — and who lost the final to Waite and Mudge. The latter pair continued their dominance throughout the remainder of that season and emphatically the next, throughout which they went undefeated throughout the entire 2004-05 schedule for the third and final time. They then won the October 2005 edition as well to make it an MCO three-peat, in each case over a different final-round opponent. Viktor Berg and Josh McDonald, first-round losers against Jamie Bentley and Preston Quick in 2003, rebounded to reach the 2004 final and in 2005 Quick and Ben Gould, finalists five times as first-year partners one year earlier, fulfilled their No. 2 seeding by subduing debuting partners Walker and Viktor Berg in one semifinal while Mudge and Waite were doing the same to Leach and Pirnak in the other.
Although Quick and Gould lost the 2005 MCO final, they finally beat The Champs (in their 12th attempt, seven of them in finals, over a 13-month period) in the very next SDA tournament three weeks later — the Big Apple Open final — when Gould scorched a shallow forehand cross-court serve-return winner at 14-all in the close-out fourth game. Buoyed by this breakthrough, Gould and Quick came within a simultaneous-championship-point (a tinned Quick overhead volley) of duplicating that result one week later in Toronto and triumphed at tour stops in both Wilmington and Boston in January 2006. But these victories were followed by a springtime slump — in which they were unable to convert multiple-match-balls in pre-final losses at both the Creek Challenge Cup and the Kellner Cup — after which they mutually agreed to seek different partners for the 2006-07 season.
AN AURA OF UNPREDICTABILITY
Indeed they wound up opposing each other six months later in the final round of the 2006 MCO, following an intervening summer during which so many other members of the other top SDA teams switched partners that, entering the 2006-07 campaign, the two longest-tenured partnerships — other than Waite and Mudge, starting their eighth and last season together — were Walker and Berg (for whom, as noted, the 2005-06 season was their first as partners) and Leach and Pirnak, who had teamed up only five times in the Winter/Spring of 2005. This scenario imbued the 2006 MCO with an aura of unpredictability even before the first ball was hit that was fully borne out when Gould and his new partner Paul Price gave Mudge and Waite their first-ever MCO loss, a four-gamer keyed by a look-away Price forehand roll-corner winner at 14-all in the second game after Waite and Mudge had won the first. By then out-playing similarly first-time partners Quick and John Russell (upset semis winners over second seeds Berg and Walker) in the ensuing final, Price and Gould launched a 2006-07 season in which they won a tour-leading five ranking tournaments (including the Briggs Cup and North American Open, in each case with comeback final-round wins over Mudge and Waite after falling behind early), attained the No. 1 team ranking and embarked upon a four-year partnership in which they won 22 tournaments, one of which was the 2008 MCO, in which Price and Gould defeated Leach and Matt Jenson in a five-game semi that preceded a 3-1 final-round win over their 2006 final-round opponents Quick and Russell. That year as well, responding to the success that inner-city urban-education/squash organizations were having across the country, the MCO partnered with Baltimore SquashWise, providing further incentive for member support of the tournament and leading to a several-thousand-dollar donation to the organization.
In the 2007 MCO tournament in between the pair of 2006 and 2008 Price/Gould triumphs, Price and Gould saw a two games to one final-round lead over new partners Leach and Walker dissolve into a five-game loss by the end of which Price and Gould took their frustration out on their respective racquets: Gould hurled his 40 feet to the front wall after his tin at 9-13 in the fifth game effectively sealed the outcome, while Price smashed his in the small alcove just outside the entrance to the exhibition doubles court — an action that was clearly audible in the gallery since the door at the back wall was still open — where it lay in shards for several hours before finally being swept up by a janitor. Although Mudge and his new partner Berg lost in the semifinal of that tournament to Walker and Leach, they would go on to have an extraordinary 2007-08 season, whose second half they would dominate by winning seven ISDA events in a run that culminated in a thrilling late-April Kellner Cup final against Price/Gould in which the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking was at stake, and in which Mudge and Berg, trailing two games to one, 12-9 in the fourth game and 13-12 in the fifth, won both games in overtime. Indeed, the 2007 MCO was the last time that neither Mudge/Berg nor Price/Gould won an ISDA full-ranking tournament for the remainder of that season and the two seasons that followed! That three-year span encompassed 34 such events, which were evenly split 17 apiece, with Price/Gould holding a narrow 9-8 edge in the 17 finals that were contested between those juggernauts during that time frame.
A SEISMIC SHIFT
There was no MCO in Autumn 2009 in deference to Charm City being named to host the 2010 U. S. National Doubles that spring (with the Maryland Club serving as Tournament Headquarters), and by the time the 2010-11 season began, the tour would undergo a seismic shift in the wake of the decision of Mudge and Gould to partner up for the first of what would turn out to be five and a half dominant seasons. Their debut performance occurred in the 2010 MCO and it got off to a slow start when they fell behind Walker and former PSA top-10 Mark Chaloner 1-0, 7-4. However they erased that second-game deficit and didn’t drop a single game for the remainder of that tournament (in which they beat Russell/Quick in the final), or a single match for the remainder of that season. Six of their 12 final-round wins that season were against either the Jenson/Leach or Walker/Chaloner pairings, both of whom, along with Mudge and Gould, competed in the 2011 MCO, which was held as a three-team round-robin, which Mudge and Gould won.
The 2010 and 2011 MCO events also had a Legends of Squash pro singles tournament featuring recently-retired PSA stars Peter Nicol, John White, Jonathan Power and Martin Heath. That latter group found themselves so drawn to the doubles matches that one of them almost missed his flight back to Europe when he tarried in the doubles gallery longer than he should have. Their participation in both the singles and in a 16-team Pro-Am flight was in keeping with a willingness on the part of the Tournament Committee, led by its long-time (since 2000) head professional Andrew Cordova, to maximize the MCO’s value to the membership by “changing things up” and offering a variety of innovations from one year to the next, as was the case with the alliance with SquashWise as well. These creative elements have resulted in different draw-size (as in 2011) and prize-money formats — including a decision to pay teams that lost in the last round of the qualifying brackets, something no other tour site has done — as well as altering the way the highly-subscribed Pro-Am portion of the tournament was played, and, starting with this 2024 event, the addition of a pro women’s draw (perhaps due in part to women becoming Maryland Club members in January 2020) that offers equal prize money to the men’s event.
A SUBSTANTIAL REORGANIZATION
During the summer of 2012, the structure of the pro doubles tour, which since its 2000 inception had been the International Squash Doubles Association (or ISDA), underwent a substantial reorganization — which included the appointment of Cordova to a two-year term as Director of Development — and the Association itself was renamed the Squash Doubles Association (SDA). Its first event in its new incarnation was the 2012 MCO, which was memorable for the sheer depth of the competition at all levels of the draw — all but one of the seven main-draw matches either went to at least a fourth game or had one or more 15-14 tallies, as was also the case in five of the seven qualifying-round matches. Former Trinity College teammates Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, who had issued Mudge/Gould the only loss of their to-that-point two-year partnership 10 months earlier in a Briggs Cup semifinal (before then winning the final over Leach and Jenson), wound up meeting Mudge and Gould in the final, in which each of the first four evenly-divided games were decided by three points or less before Mudge/Gould raced out to a 7-1 fifth-game lead en route to 15-7.
As that season developed, however, Mudge and Gould increasingly had to deal with both Mathur/Badan and the newly-formed Price/Leach pair, which had a torrid tear during the winter of 2013 in which they won both the North American Open and the tour stop in Boston. They were seeded second in the 2013 MCO and were viewed as extremely likely to reach the final, especially since Mudge/Gould and Mathur/Badan were both in the draw’s top half. However, Chaloner and Imran Khan beat both Price/Leach and their semifinal opponents Walker and Raj Nanda in what was by all odds the single most unexpected final-round advance in the history of the MCO. Chaloner and Khan thereby became the fourth totally different team (i.e. eight different players) to finish as MCO runners-up to Mudge and Gould, preceded as noted by Russell/Quick in 2010, Jenson/Leach in 2011 and Mathur/Badan in 2012. That latter duo reached the finals of the 2014 MCO — narrowly surviving a close (15-14 in the fourth) semifinal over two-time (in 2009 and 2011) World Doubles finalists Leach and Russell while eventual champs Mudge and Gould were out-playing Greg Park and Jonny Smith in the top-half semi.
Mudge and Gould would win the tournament for a (record) sixth-straight and final time in the 2015 edition, in which Gould attained his (record by far) 10th consecutive MCO final and prior to which the Maryland Club, in recognition of its lengthy prominence on the pro-doubles scene, was selected as the site where the 2014-15 postseason awards were handed out to the recipients — namely Mudge/Gould (Team of the Year), Russell (Player of the Year), Chris Callis (Most Improved Player), Rookie of the Year (co-winners and Toronto-based partners Robin Clarke and Scott Arnold), as well as a Sportsmanship Award (Smith) — on Saturday evening during a break between the two semifinal matches.
SDA TOURNAMENT OF THE YEAR AWARD
One year later, when the Maryland Club again hosted the presentation of the SDA Annual Awards ceremony, its own tournament became one of the honorees when the SDA players voted the MCO as the Tournament of the Year! This was one of four times that the club has been selected for this distinction (including the two most recent holdings in 2018 and 2019), a figure that exceeds that of any other SDA tour stop. Mudge and Gould’s final-round win over Leach and Russell avenged their loss to the British pair on the World Doubles final five months earlier. Mudge and Gould then swept the remaining tournaments in the autumn portion of the 2015-16 season, which turned out to be the only part of the season in which they played together as a consequence of Gould’s early-November announcement that he planned to retire after the mid-December Briggs Cup. Although Mathur and Badan lost that Briggs Cup final, they spent the rest of that season taking advantage of the departure of their longtime Mudge/Gould nemesis by conjuring up an extended performance during the ensuing winter and spring months that saw them win three tournaments (Boston, Greenwich and the Baltimore Cup) while compiling a Calendar 2016 record of 10-1 that resulted in their being voted the 2015-16 SDA Team of the Year at season’s end.
A MARKEDLY CHANGED LANDSCAPE
Ironically, Mathur and Badan received this prestigious trophy the following autumn less than 24 hours prior to the start of the final round of the 2016 MCO — a match in which they played against (rather than with) each other! During the intervening summer, Mathur decided to team up with Mudge, who, after spending nine years on the left wall, returned to the right wall position that he had occupied as Waite’s partner until the latter’s retirement at the end of the 2006-07 season. In fact, the 2016-17 SDA tour promised a markedly changed landscape even before it began due to the fact that no less than six of the top eight ranked players from the previous campaign arrived in Baltimore with first-time-ever partners, and the now-retired Gould was one of the two exceptions. A certain amount of interpersonal tension understandably animated the final between the debuting Mathur/Mudge pairing and their opponents (who were also teaming up for the very first time), Badan and Michael Ferreira, who wound up winning the match, albeit barely, by a 15-13 fifth-game tally when Mathur tinned a forehand reverse-corner on the final exchange, thereby ending a match in which four of the five games were decided by two points or less.
No one could have known at the time that this 2016 MCO final represented the only match that Mudge and Mathur would lose during the remainder of that season and the 2017-18 season that followed as well — 16 straight tournaments and 54 consecutive match wins. They would have been prohibitive favorites to win the 2017 MCO were it not for the fact that that edition had to be canceled as a consequence of a massive year-long reconstruction of the club’s entire athletic facility from which the Maryland Club emerged as the only club in the U.S. that featured three doubles courts, having added a third to the pair that had already existed.
ALL-TIME LEADING SCORER
The 2018 MCO was the first in which Mudge did not participate, since he had undergone a major allograft procedure on his right knee several months earlier. The hope at the time was that he would be able to return for the last half of the 2018-19 season, but the injury ultimately proved career-ending to the SDA’s “all-time leading scorer,” who holds the record for most-tournament-wins in every significant event on the SDA schedule, including the nine MCO’s he won (2003-05 with Waite and 2010-15 with Gould). In the aftermath of his retirement, Mathur decided to team up with Callis for only the second time (preceded by their advance a few years earlier to the 2015 Big Apple Open final) in what proved to be a successful run to the winner’s circle that culminated with a 3-0 final-round win over James Stout, the reigning World Rackets champion at the time, and Greg McArthur.
Mathur and Callis would win the next tour stop in Denver as well, and were in full command of their Big Apple Open final against Badan and Bernardo Samper — until Mathur ruptured his left Achilles tendon partway through the second game, sidelining him for the remainder of the 2018-19 season. By the end of that campaign, Callis had sustained a left-knee injury as well, requiring a surgical procedure during the summer months. This pair of surgeries lent an intriguing backdrop coming into the 2019 MCO — the milestone 15th MCO and the season-opening SDA event, hence marking the return of both players to the competitive fray — with everyone curious as to how physically capable they would be, both individually and as a team, and how close they would be able to come to duplicating their masterful performance in Baltimore one year earlier.
Ironically, they turned out to be one of the few late-round teams that remained healthy throughout a weekend in which both semifinal matches ended prematurely in their respective second games. McArthur (playing again with Stout) entered the match against Callis and Mathur having already strained his wrist in an earlier match, and by early in the second game it was clear that he could not swing effectively and that trying to do so would only make it worse. In the bottom-half semi between Russell/Arnold (Kellner Cup champions six months earlier) and Samper/Badan, Samper pulled a hamstring muscle so severely while sprinting to the front wall that he was unable to continue. In the final, Mathur and Callis completed their successful double-return with a four-game victory over Russell and Arnold, thereby launching a season in which they triumphed at the Briggs Cup and Boston as well before illness (when Callis suffered a severe case of the flu) and injury (Mathur’s hamstring pull) kept them out of the North American Open and Heights Casino respectively, almost immediately after which the pandemic completely shut the SDA tour down for the rest of the 2019-20 season and all of 2020-21.
A CHARACTER AND DYNAMIC ALL ITS OWN
Over the years, enough tour-defining trends have either been stopped, marked, extended or jump-started on Eager Street to give the MCO a character and dynamic all its own. To date $1.65 million has been raised for the MCO, and more than $60,000 in capital improvements have benefited the club’s squash facilities directly related to the MCO. The tournament has rich and decorated past and, with the magnificence of the Maryland Club’s doubles squash facility and the omnipresent enthusiasm of its squash-playing membership — as evinced every year in its financial support, participation in the pro-am and vocal presence in the gallery — there is every reason to believe that an even brighter future is at hand.
Rob Dinerman has been the Official Writer for the MCO Tournament Program in every year of the tournament’s existence, beginning with the inaugural edition in 2003. He has written 16 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the robdinerman.com home page. His most recent book, A Century Of Champions: A History Of College Squash, 1923-2023, was released in March 2024.