Baset Chaudhry And Whitten Morris Win Thrilling Silver Racquet Final by Rob Dinerman Dateline November 10th
--- Pounded by a ten-point game-ending run against them in the fourth
game and trailing 13-10 in the fifth, their early-match advantage
reduced to a distant memory in a match-up laden with club and college
bonds and rivalries, top seeds Whitten Morris and Baset Chaudhry
conjured up a match-saving five-point surge to defeat second seeds
Michael Ferreira and Bernardo Samper 15-11 13-15 15-12 4-15 15-13
Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 21st annual Silver Racquet
Invitational, hosted as always by the Racquet & Tennis Club in
mid-town Manhattan. Long known as one of the highest-end and most
competitive Open/Amateur tournaments of the entire doubles season, this
year's edition, and particularly the pulsating final, lived up to this
reputation and then some, and it is doubtful that there has ever in the
history of this championship been a match of higher pace and quality
than characterized the rubber-burning, air-sucking 100-minute punch-out
that took place in the cathedral-like setting of this host venue.
Morris,
whose prolonged tinning patch caused his team's collapse in the fourth
game but whose late-game firepower accounted for the match-deciding
sequence late in the fifth, has now won this tournament six times, the
last three with three different partners, having triumphed three times
with Ferreira in the mid-2000's as well as with Addison West in 2011,
with Trevor McGuinness last year and now with Chaudhry.
First-time partners Chaudhry (who also partnered Julian Illingworth to
the quarterfinal round of the Big Apple Open, an SDA pro-doubles tour
stop held this same weekend several blocks northwest at the New York
Athletic Club, hence played eight matches between Thursday night and
Sunday afternoon) and Morris had charged into the final by posting
consecutive straight-set wins over first Rob Dinerman and Tony Maruca,
then University Club pros Carl Baglio and Jordan Greenberg (first
-round victors over Peter Cipriano and Will Hartigan), and then Chris
Callis and Alex Domenick, 15-14 fourth-game quarterfinal winners over
Tim Wyant and Illingworth. Meanwhile, in the bottom half, early-2000's
Trinity College teammates Ferreira and Samper had earned four-game
victories over, sequentially, Morris Clothier and Pat Haynes, Dylan
Patterson and Peter Kelly (15-13 fifth-game round-of-16 winners over
Will Newnham and Adam Bews) and West and Todd Ruth, who had followed a
convincing quarters win against Yasser El-Halaby and Coly Smith by
forging a 1-0, 10-6 lead over Ferreira/Samper before the latter duo
overtook them in that game and fully controlled the subsequent pair of
single-figure games.
The final
featured three Trinity College No. 1's (Ferreira, 2002 Individuals
champ Samper and 2008 and 2009 Individuals winner Chaudhry) and three
R&T members in Ferreira, Morris and Chaudhry (indeed nine of the 17
entered teams had at least one member of the host club). Each of the
first two games was decided by mid-game streak, with Chaudhry/Morris
going from 6-all to 12-7 to account for the first game and
Ferreira/Morris breaking away to a seemingly safe 14-9 edge in the
second before their opponents, fueled by Morris's hard-serving salvos,
crept to 13-14. Ferreira's dead-nick backhand straight-drop enabled his
team to escape with that game, but Chaudhry and Morris upped the pace
in the third game and took an early lead which they never relinquished
to go up, two games to one.
The
fourth was evenly contested early on until at 5-4, with Ferreira
serving, Morris's racquet broke and he promptly committed three
consecutive tins and five in seven points, a lapse which Ferreira and
Samper, as noted, seized upon to sweep through the remainder of that
game. They are capable of accumulating substantial skeins of points
swiftly, as had happened in that second game of their semifinal four
hours earlier, and, after struggling through the early portion of the
fifth game, they rode a deadly Ferreira shooting spree (two
consecutive-point backhand reverse-corner winners to take a 7-6 lead,
followed by two consecutive-point drop-nick winners) to get to 12-10,
following which Morris, who had tinned twice in that mid-game segment
as play on the right wall became increasingly physical between himself
and Samper, hit a ball back at himself, leading to a stroke call
against him and a 13-10 lead for the second seeds.
But in a
match that, for all its frantic pace, amazing gets and fierce mid-court
exchanges, featured a number of out-of-the-blue swings of momentum, it
seemed fitting that there would be one final turn of the screw. A
Morris double-boast winner, followed first by a Ferreira tin of the
same fearless drop shot that he had been hitting for winners and then
by a Morris cross-court blast that forced Ferreira's response to sail
out of court, tying the score at 13-all. With the recently-approved
no-set rule now in play (precluding the best-of-five and best-of-nine
tiebreaker choices that had always previously been available), Morris
overpowered Ferreira with a forehand cross-court (14-13, match-ball)
and then terminated the match in emphatic fashion with a forehand
mid-court volleyed three-wall that hit just low enough on the nick to
barely elude Ferreira's desperate attempt to steer it back into play.
It was a tremendous display of athleticism and firepower on both sides
and a poetically just capstone to a remarkable Silver Racquet weekend.