Clinton Leeuw And Hamed Anvari Capture Silver Racquet Doubles Crown 
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline November 11, 2018 -- Trailing 6-2 in the third game in a match throughout much of which they heretofore had seemed out of sync and off their game, Clinton Leeuw and Hamed Anvari suddenly conjured up a 9-0 run which launched them to a 13-15, 15-10, 15-9, 15-12 victory over Will Hartigan and Will Ahmed this afternoon in the final round of the 26th annual Silver Racquet Doubles, hosted as always by the Racquet & Tennis Club in mid-town Manhattan. Hartigan (who won the 2015 edition of this event with Addison West), Leeuw and Anvari are all ranked in the Nos. 22-29 range on the SDA pro doubles tour, which has no event this weekend before resuming next week with the Bentley Cup at the Cambridge Club in Toronto. Hartigan/Ahmed and Leeuw/Anvari had advanced to their Sunday summit with four-game semifinal wins over Rishi Tandon/Valentin Quan and former University of Rochester teammates Adam Perkiomaki and Will Newnham respectively.

  Leeuw and Anvari committed a combined eight tins, many of them unforced, in losing the first game, capped off by a bad one on an attempted Anvari forehand three-wall after they had crept to 13-14. They responded by upping the pace in the second, which opened up the court for Leeuw to score on soft forehand volleys into the front-right nick, complemented by a series of tight Anvari reverse- and roll-corners. But in the early part of the third game, they relapsed into sloppy play, enabling Hartigan to pounce on some loose balls and Ahmed to punch shallow winners on his forehand volley. The nine-point streak that permanently turned the match around had a low-key start (when Leeuw scraped a drive off the left side wall that skittered just above the tin) but progressively gathered momentum, to the point that by the time the score had grown to 11-6, Hartigan and Ahmed appeared to be on their heels and wilting under the constant pressure that their opponents were exerting as Leeuw and Anvari saw an opening and seized it.

  After closing out that game, Leeuw and Anvari moved to 12-8 in the fourth, seemingly in control, only to have the lead almost completely disappear when Hartigan successfully went for broke on a difficult drop shot, followed by  unforced errors by first Anvari and then Leeuw to narrow the tally to 11-12. A pair of long points that ended with Anvari forehand overheads that rolled out of the front-left nick (with a mis-hit Hartigan winning drop shot in between) made the score 14-12, leading to the final exchange of the day, on which a momentary but costly miscommunication between Hartigan and Ahmed on an innocent-appearing Leeuw backhand cross-court down the middle wound up with both Wills desperately flailing at the ball in the back-right corner and neither able to get enough of a racquet on it to steer it back into play. The last three holdings of this tournament have now been won by the theoretical maximum of six different players (with West and Whitten Morris triumphing in 2016 and James Bamber and Steve Scharff prevailing in 2017), and no pairing has made it to the winner's circle in consecutive years in the decade that has now passed since Morris and his current SDA partner Michael Ferreira accomplished this feat in 2007 and 2008.