Fifteenth Straight David Johnson Memorial Title For Damien Mudge As He And Viktor Berg Surge To Victory   
by Rob Dinerman

Viktor Berg and Damien Mudge (champions), Chris Callis and Michael Ferreira (finalists), photo Bob Burns

Dateline February 21st --- Trailing 5-1 in the second game and having lost eight of the previous 10 points, top seeds Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg exploded on a 13-0 run, then engineered an equally devastating 9-0 burst in the following game to seal their eventual 15-13, 15-6, 15-6 victory over Michael Ferreira and Chris Callis Sunday afternoon in the final round of the David C. Johnson Memorial, hosted as always by the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn. Mudge thereby won this tournament for a record-shattering 15th straight time --- no other player has ever won a sanctioned ranking event on the pro doubles tour even half as often consecutively --- from 2002-07 with Gary Waite, from 2008-10 with Berg, from 2011-15 with Ben Gould and now again in 2016 with Berg in the wake of Gould’s retirement this past December.

   This outcome also marked the fifth career Johnson crown for Berg, who teamed with Michael Pirnak to annex the 2001 edition and therefore this afternoon became the first player in ISDA/SDA pro doubles history to post tournament victories at a tour site 15 years apart. In both 2009 (when they trailed Preston Quick and John Russell 2-1, 13-12 before winning that game in a tiebreaker and then taking the fifth 15-9) and 2010 (when they edged Gould and Paul Price 15-13 in the fifth), Berg and Mudge were on the very brink of losing. But today they played throughout at an extraordinary level and rolled to a thoroughly convincing victory in front of a packed and appreciative gallery.

   Both teams qualified for the final with identical 15-14-in-the-fourth semifinal wins Saturday evening. Mudge and Berg were pushed hard by Clive Leach and Raj Nanda, while Ferreira and Callis barely fended off Matt Jenson and Preston Quick, authors of a quarterfinal15-14 fifth-game masterpiece at the expense of second seeds and newly-crowned North American Open champions Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, who let a 12-3 lead get away and fell victim to a perfect Quick forehand three-wall nick at simultaneous-match-ball. Those similar backdrops aside, there were only two brief interruptions in the otherwise match-long dominance that the Mudge/Berg pairing displayed in the final. The first occurred late in the first game continuing into early second when they let most of a 14-10 first-game edge slip away before Berg caught a front-left nick to clinch that game, then, as noted, briefly fell behind at the outset of the second. The other temporary down patch took place early in the third game, when they were tied at 5-all after initially leading 5-1.

   But in both cases their responses to these short slumps were relentless and prolonged stretches of sustained brilliance that carried them to 14-5 in each game en route to the eventual 15-6 tallies. Mudge, pouncing on the ball and firing off his piercing salvos off both flanks, was his usual formidable self. But it was Berg’s imaginative play and tremendously creative shot selection and execution that emphatically doomed whatever hopes Callis and Ferreira may have had of pulling off an upset. Callis, a 2012 Princeton graduate and as such the only player in the foursome below age 34 (Mudge, the oldest player on court, turns 40 in mid-May), became enmeshed in a fierce but losing cross-court battle with Mudge, while Ferreira, hurried and out of sync, started cutting his shots too fine, resulting in costly tins that added to the Mudge/Berg momentum.

   During those long runs against them in the last two games, both Ferreira and Callis were competing hard and making exceptional defensive retrievals to keep the points going. However they were under so much pressure, both offensive and defensive, that the constant barrage hurled at them increasingly resembled a two-man power play in hockey. Berg’s daring roll-corner volleys to the front-left accounted for a half-dozen winners, with a like number of points being registered in the Mudge/Berg column when they blasted the ball through the undefended middle. Had there been any let-up in the quality of their play, the games might have been contested on much more even terms --- but on this occasion, with milestone marks looming for each of them, Mudge and Berg never took their foot off the pedal and they sprinted unstoppably to and through the finish line.