By Rob Dinerman
Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg topped Paul Price and Ben Gould to capture the 2008 Kellner Cup, held in New York City. U.S. SQUASH helped facilitate the Kellner Cup for the first time this year, with proceeds benefitting the U.S. SQUASH Junior Development Endowment Fund. Along with the North American Open and the Lapham Grant Matches, over $100,000 has been generated for the fund. Distributions from the fund are used to help seed new middle and high school programs, fund urban squash and assist with junior national team efforts.
Perilously positioned at 1-2, 9-12, just three points from what would have been a season-tarnishing four-game defeat at the hands of their arch-rivals in what clearly had become, both statistically and aesthetically, the defining match of the entire 2007-08 ISDA tour season, with the season’s No. 1 ranking, its top winner’s purse and its most coveted title all hanging in the balance, Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg responded to this crossroads moment like the champions they are, forcing and winning a best-of-five tiebreaker (saving double-match-point-against in the process) and rallying from 12-13 in the fifth game to a stirring 10-15, 15-9, 10-15, 16-15, 16-13, victory over Paul Price and Ben Gould at the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown Manhattan.
Mudge thereby became the first seven-time Kellner Cup champion (he and the now-retired Gary Waite had won six of the prior seven editions of this tourney), while Berg, a three-time runner-up in this event (with WIllie Hosey in ‘02, Josh McDonald in ‘04 and Chris Walker in ‘06) who saved his best squash for the end-portions of those taut fourth and fifth games, fully deserved his breakthrough moment. Price and Gould, the No. 1 team in 2006-07, had defeated Mudge and Berg just two weeks earlier in the Creek Challenge Cup final (the only loss the Mudge/Berg pairing sustained in calendar ‘08), but were unable to convert the late-game leads they held in the fourth and fifth games, and faded in the best-of-five fifth-game tiebreaker, tinning away all three points of that overtime session.
Mudge and Berg had out-played John Russell and Preston Quick in three tight games in the semis, while Gould and Price did the same in four to Clive Leach and Walker, who took the only two ISDA events this season not won by either the Mudge/Berg or the Price/Gould tandems when they grabbed the two season-opening October events in St. Louis and Baltimore. Only once all season were any of these four semifinalist teams ousted prior to the semis, that lone miscue occurring when Hosey and Scott Butcher surprised Russell and Quick in an early-November Big Apple Open quarterfinal.
