Giant-Killers Mathur And Badan Surge To Briggs Cup Crown
By Rob Dinerman
Dateline December 14th, 2011 --- Trailing two-love in the semifinals and facing match-ball-against in the third game (and later an 8-4 deficit in the fourth) against a team that had heretofore gone a spotless 46-0 during their 14 months as partners, Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan swatted aside that third-game 14-all crossroads moment, erupted on an 11-4 game-closing run in the fourth game and ran off with an almost anticlimactic 15-7 fifth to slay the top-seeded Damien Mudge/Ben Gould dragon, then perhaps even more impressively accentuated this landmark accomplishment with a highly competitive though ultimately convincing 15-14 11-15 15-11 15-11 final-round victory this past Monday night against second seeds Matt Jenson and Clive Leach to win the biennial Briggs Cup, hosted as always at the Apawamis Club in Rye, NY, whose $100,000 purse is the largest on the ISDA pro doubles tour.
The meteoric ascent culminating in this memorable outcome that Mathur and Badan (former mid-2000’s teammates on intercollegiate championship teams at Trinity College) have undergone is best exemplified by the fact that the last time this tournament was held, 26 months ago in October 2009, Badan lost in the opening round and Mathur lost BEFORE the opening round, i.e. in the qualifying. Now, by contrast, they are sitting, at least for the time being, on top of the hardball doubles world, having emphatically terminated the Mudge/Gould 14-for-14 tournament-winning skein, consolidating as well their two-month-old St. Louis semis win over Jenson/Leach and ending a near-incredible streak of 48 straight ISDA full-ranking events dating back to October 2007 in which either Mudge or Gould was a member of the tournament-winning team.
As noted, throughout the past 14 of those 48 tournaments, and ever since they partnered up prior to the outset of the 2010-11 season, both Mudge AND Gould have been on the winning team, and they barged into the semifinals this past weekend without dropping a game against first Graham Bassett/Tim Wyant and then Shaun Johnstone/Eric Christiansen, first-round 3-2 winners over Paul Price and James Hewitt. When they then took a pair of high-paced but somewhat routine 15-9, 15-11 games against Mathur/Badan, pre-semis four-game winners over first qualifiers Phil Barker/Steve Scharff and then Jonny Smith and Preston Quick, and drew to 14-all in the third, Mudge and Gould seemed well-positioned to record their seventh straight victory over the recent collegians (the games-won slate to that point between these two teams stood at 20-1) and earn a spot in the finals for what would have been the fifth time in as many holdings of this event for Mudge, who won this tourney in 2003 with Michael Pirnak, in 2005 with Gary Waite (with whom Mudge lost the 2007 final to Price and Gould) and in 2009 with Viktor Berg.
But the lanky lefty Mathur brusquely sabotaged these well-laid plans by spiking a front-right-nick forehand volley that stayed too low for Mudge to sweep it back into play and when the fourth seeds wiped out their mid-game deficit in the fourth, they had attained a level that they would hold throughout the remainder of the match, spurred on by an accumulation of factors in their favor --- namely the increasingly vocal “home-crowd” support they enjoyed from the upset-sensing spectators at Apawamis, where Mathur is currently based and where Badan coached for five years; the fact that Gould had finished a strenuous five-game pro-am match just minutes before this pro semifinal began; and the one-week-earlier backdrop to this match, when in a Big Apple Open semi in mid-town Manhattan, Mathur/Badan had taken their first-ever game from Mudge/Gould and barely fallen short in the third and fourth games, both of which were one-pointers --- that cumulatively came hurtling down upon The Champs in the 26-11 match-closing Mathur/Badan run from 4-8 to when they clinched the win on the last of many front-court volley winners off Badan’s racquet.
Waiting for them the following evening were Jenson and Leach, finalists in both the two-years-prior Briggs Cup and the one-week-prior Big Apple Open, and in fact finalists on nine occasions over the three and a half years leading up to this past Monday night, by which time they had to have thought that their time to win an ISDA tournament had finally arrived, especially after their comeback five-game semifinal win over John Russell (who hit a daring reverse-corner at 14-all in the third game to give his team a 2-1 lead, the same shot that he had hit on the final point of a 15-14 fourth-game quarterfinal win over Chris Walker/Mark Chaloner) and Greg Park, whom Leach and Jenson, 3-1 quarters winners over Imran Khan and Raj Nanda, had handily out-played in taking the fourth and fifth games 15-5 and 15-7. The first game was point-for-point to 14-all, with Badan ending the game on a slashing front-court salvo into the left nick. Leach and Jenson rebounded to take the second game, but by the end of the third, in which Mathur and Badan broke away with an offensive surge too powerful to be repulsed, they had clearly taken command, both statistically and territorially, neutralizing Leach (whose hot streak had accounted for much of the second-game scoring) and keeping their opponents behind them, asserting a level of control that they would never relinquish throughout the close-out fourth game.
It is such a formidable task, both mentally and physically, to follow a huge pre-final triumph with a final-round win as well --- during Sharif Khan’s dominant days in the late 1970’s/early-1980’s on the WPSA pro hardball circuit, Gordy Anderson was the only player to beat him more than three times, but on none of his five victories over Khan during that stretch was Anderson able to carry through to the winner’s circle --- that what Mathur and Badan achieved must go down as one of the truly great accomplishments in the history of hardball doubles. In remaining resolute right throughout their path through the daunting challenges that confronted them, they headed off to the five-week holiday break having left behind a transformed competitive landscape and infused an ISDA tour which had exuded an air of pre-ordination with an existential spice whose next now-compelling episodes will be played out next month first in Boston and then at the North American Open in Greenwich, just two MetroNorth stops north of the drama that permeated these past few frenetic days at the Briggs Cup.
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