By Rob Dinerman
In a compelling display of athleticism and acumen, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg rose superior to the remainder of the 20-team field and won the 25th annual North American Open, sponsored by North Sound Capital, held on January’s final weekend at the Field, Country and Round Hill Clubs in Greenwich, CT, and offering a $ 40,000 purse, the second-largest of the entire 2007-08 International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) schedule. Second-seeded behind defending champions Paul Price and Ben Gould, the Mudge/Berg pairing, who joined up only at the beginning of this season following the retirement last summer of Mudge’s long-time partner Gary Waite, progressed confidently with a trio of straight-set wins (over qualifiers Alex Langerhorst and Raj Nanda, Ayman Karim and Steve Scharff and reigning U. S. National Doubles champs John Russell and Preston Quick, who bowed 15-11, 11 and 7) to the final, where they then out-played Price and Gould with a 15-11 16-14 11-15 15-7 tally that will result in their replacing Price/Gould as the No. 1 team when the end-of-January ISDA rankings are published.
The course of the final may have been affected by the contrast between the respective semis (Price and Gould engaged in a murderously competitive 15-13 17-15 14-17 15-7 clash, the rubber match of the seven they have played already this season against Chris Walker and Clive Leach, winners of the season-opening pair of events in October in St. Louis and Baltimore) and definitely was affected by the ankle sprain Price incurred when with his team leading 10-7 in the first game he came down at an awkward angle on Mudge’s foot while trying to track down a winning drop shot. When play resumed after a tension-building 15-minute stoppage during which Price had his ankle taped, he moved gingerly during the ensuing 7-1 game-closing Mudge/Berg run, but regained most of his mobility during the pair of hard-fought, dynamic-exchange-filled and evenly divided games that followed prior to Mudge and Berg finally wresting control of the play during the close-out fourth game.
Other than the final and top-half semi, only one main-draw match (all of which prior to the final were won by the higher-seeded team) exceeded the three-game minimum, namely the quarterfinal between the Russell/Quick duo and their season-long near-nemesis Joe Pentland and Mark Price. The latter pair, frequent quarterfinalists this season (as they were in this event as well) who for the first time in either of their careers reached the semis when they beat Waite and Jeff Mulligan in the early-December Vancouver tour stop, let a five-point fifth-game lead (12-7) in St. Louis get away when Russell and Quick pulled off an 8-0 match-ending run; had a five-MATCH-POINT chance get away in mid-January in Boston get away when Russell and Quick rallied from 2-1, 14-10 down; and saw a two games to one advantage get away in Greenwich as well. Drained by that comeback effort, Russell and Quick, as noted, had little left when they faced Mudge and Berg one round later.
The former, who had partnered Waite to the winner’s circle of the North American Open seven straight years from 2000-2006 before they barely fell short (after leading two games to love and 13-12 in both the third and fourth) against Price/Gould in last year’s final, has made a double-switch this season, to Berg and to the left-wall. The experiment had had some mixed results during the autumn, hampered both by an early-October right-hamstring pull to Berg that lingered for several months, and by a winless (0-3) record against Walker and Leach. But right after Thanksgiving the team suddenly hit its stride, capturing the early-December U. S. Pro Championships in Wilmington (edging out Walker/Leach 15-13 in the fifth in the semis in the process), attaining the Vancouver final a week later, and winning in Boston as well to set the stage for Greenwich, where Mudge became the only player other than Waite (who won the ’94 title on the right wall as Scott Dulmage’s partner) to win this prestigious title on both walls and where Berg, a runner-up in this event with Willie Hosey in ’02 and with Walker in ’06, recorded what must be considered his career highlight.
The quarterfinalists other than Karim/Scharff and Pentland/M. Price were the first-year pairing of Michael Pirnak and Mark Chaloner, who have gotten to, but never through, this stage in every event all season so far, and the first-time pairing of Matt Jensen and Hosey. The latter, still going amazingly strong at age 46, has been remarkably versatile both in this event (a five-time finalist with four different partners, namely Jamie Bentley in ’00 and ’01, Berg, as noted, in ’02, Pirnak in ’03 and Leach in ’05) and over the past 12 months, during which relatively short span he has played, and played well (including advancing to the St. Louis final with Mudge in October while Berg was out with his leg injury), with ELEVEN different partners in 12 ISDA tournaments, nine of which he had never teamed up with before that time frame. Hosey had planned to play this entire season with Bentley, but when recurring knee and elbow woes forced this veteran warrior permanently to the sidelines, Hosey has been resourcefully flitting from one partner to another, winning main-draw matches with all of them and moving effortlessly from one wall to the other.
While Hosey is clearly playing as well as ever, a number of the core players from the ISDA’s formative years in the early-2000’s have moved on, including not only 11-time North American Open winner Waite (whose seven-year run with Mudge was preceded by the 1997-99 trophies that he and Mark Talbott annexed) and Bentley, but also Scott Butcher (who along with Leach lost 17-16 in the fifth to Price/Gould in the ’07 semis and who recently moved permanently back to his native Australia) and Blair Horler, a finalist in the ’04 edition of this event with Leach, with whom he won the ’03 Canadian Pro, Long Island and Kellner Cup championships. But there are excellent players and teams emerging as well (among them qualifiers Michael Ferreira/Whitten Morris, who drew Walker/Leach in the round of 16 and are the current Silver Racquet, Gold Racquet and U. S. Nationals A’s champs), and there is no question that the top-tier field of doubles players/teams is both more plentiful and more talented than at any time in the history of doubles squash.
