Brand-New Partner Alignments Energize The 2016-17 SDA Pro Doubles Tour by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 3rd
--- For the first time in the 17-year history of the ISDA/SDA pro
doubles association, no fewer than six of the top-eight-ranked players
entering the current season were teaming up for the first time ever
with their respective partners, and one of the two exceptions, namely
Ben Gould, a six-time winner in this Boston tournament, recently
retired. Indeed, the finals of every one of the five full-ranking
tournaments that were held this past autumn prior to the
Christmas-holiday break were contested between pairings that had never
partnered up in ranking-tournament play prior to the start of this
season The first-time match-ups were record nine-time Boston champion
Damien Mudge and Manek Mathur; Yvain Badan and his former Trinity
College teammate Michael Ferreira; Viktor Berg, who won three
tournaments and reached three more finals with Mudge during the second
half of last season, and Raj Nanda; and Chris Callis, winner of the
2015 Most Improved Player Award, and Jonny Smith.
Of this quartet of brand-new alignments, the most successful to
this point has been that of the current top-ranked Mudge, the tour’s
“all-time leading scorer” with more than 150 ranking tournament wins in
his ledger, who moved back to the right wall after spending the
previous nine years on the left, and No. 2 Mathur, who earlier this
autumn received both the 2016 Player Of The Year Award and the Team Of
The Year Award that he co-won with his partner throughout most of the
past six years, the aforementioned Badan. After years of runner-up
finishes behind Mudge and Gould, Mathur and Badan finally became the
tour’s dominant team during the Calendar 2016 portion of last season in
the wake of Gould’s December 2015 retirement by winning the Boston
tournament, the North American Open in Greenwich and the Baltimore Open
during one seven-week January/February stretch. Two of these titles
were earned at the final-round expense of Mudge and Berg, whom Mathur
and a briefly-un-retiring Gould also defeated in five riveting games in
the 2015-16 season’s final full-ranking tournament in Cleveland this
past April.
After barely losing the final of this season’s first event, the
Maryland Club Open, 15-13 in the fifth, to Ferreira and Badan in
September when Mathur tinned what would have been a winning
reverse-corner on the final point, Mathur and Mudge dominated two
subsequent final-round matches with Ferreira/Badan, at the Big Apple
Open in New York and the Bentley Cup in Toronto, winning both in
straight sets, with three of those six games being single-figures.
Mudge and Mathur also swept to victory in the St. Louis Open (which
Ferreira/Badan missed), out-playing Berg and John Russell in the final,
and are therefore entering Boston this weekend riding a nine-match
winning streak, while for their part Ferreira and Badan won the PDC
Open in Atlanta (which Mathur/Mudge missed) with a final-round win over
Smith and Callis. Another first-time duo, namely Matt Jenson and Scott
Arnold, were three-time semifinalists this past autumn (in St. Louis,
Atlanta and Toronto), and still one more pairing, Clive Leach (a
champion in Boston with Paul Price in 2013) and Baset Chaudhry, will be
making their debut in Boston this weekend.
Ferreira who is one of three Trinity College
alumni (Mathur and Badan are the others) among the tour’s top-
five-ranked players (there are nine other former Bantams presently
ranked in the top 35), was involved in a host of matches last season
that came down to simultaneous-match-ball --- he and Callis lost, 15-14
in the fifth, on consecutive December weekends in Wilmington and Rye
before he and Jacques Swanepoel won by this tally in March in the
Denver Athletic Club final over Jenson and Preston Quick in the
latter’s career swan song --- and he has carried this proclivity over
to his partnership with Badan so far this season as well. They were
faced with a double-match-ball-against predicament in the fourth game
of their quarterfinal in Atlanta against Chaudhry and Bernardo Samper
before escaping with that game, winning the fifth 15-9 and then taking
a four-game semi over Jenson/Arnold and a three-game (two of them by
15-14 scores) final over Smith and Callis. Then at the Cambridge Club
in Toronto just six days later, also in the quarterfinals, after
trailing Smith and Nanda two games to one, Ferreira and Badan ran off
nine straight points to erase a substantial mid-game deficit in the
fourth game and went from 7-11 to 14-12 in the fifth, dropped the next
two points but won 15-14 on a racquet error by Smith off a well-placed
Badan lob.
Reprieved by this favorable turn of events, Ferreira
and Badan then took their semifinal in four games over Graham Bassett
and Fred Reid Jr., who had followed a strong qualifying effort by
upending Berg and Robin Clarke (ANOTHER debuting team) in the quarters.
This was one of several instances this past autumn in which a
qualifying team has then advanced in the main draw as well – in fact,
the final of the Long island Open, a Challenger event (for players
ranked out of the top 12) in Locust Valley, was played between the two
qualifying teams, with Whitten Morris and Chaudhry defeating James
Stout and Eric Bedell. In the Bentley Cup final, the rubber match to
this point of the season between the two top-ranked teams, Mathur and
Mudge eked out the first game 15-13 and then were home free as they
sprinted through the final pair 15-6, 15-7, in a display of power and
athleticism made all the more impressive by the fact that less than 24
hours later Mudge underwent arthroscopic surgery on his right knee, the
third time he has had this procedure. It was more a “cleaning up”
operation than anything structurally invasive, and there is a
seven-week window between Toronto and Boston, giving him plenty of time
to fully recover. Still, the state of the now-40-years-old Mudge’s knee
has to be at least a potential question mark entering the Calendar 2017
portion of this SDA campaign, though he has recuperated so well from
past injuries, always returning with the same level of impact and
intensity that has characterized his entire record-shattering career,
that the universal feeling among his colleagues on the tour is that,
until proven otherwise, he will be playing at the same level as always
in Boston and beyond.
___________
University Club of Boston member Rob
Dinerman served as the Official Writer for the ISDA/SDA pro doubles
tour from 2001-13 and is currently the Editor of Dailysquashreport.com,
a squash web site. He has authored several books, including two squash
anthologies, “Selected Squash Writings Volume I and Volume II”, on
Amazon.com, and his most recent work, “A History Of Squash At Deerfield
Academy”, was published in November 2016.
