James Stout and Scott Arnold Capture SDA Pro Doubles David C. Johnson Memorial In Brooklyn Heights
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline March 6, 2022 --- Hammered both statistically and territorially throughout a one-sided opening game against the hottest team on the SDA pro doubles tour, and later trailing 12-10 in the fourth, top seeds James Stout and Scott Arnold conjured up a 5-1 match-closing run to defeat Michael Ferreira and James Bamber 6-15, 15-12, 15-10, 15-13 in the final round of the David C. Johnson Memorial at the venerable Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn Heights this past Sunday afternoon. Their comeback victory enabled Arnold to consolidate his recently acquired No. 1 SDA ranking, constituted a successful Johnson title defense for Stout, who won this tournament the last time it was held in 2020 with Yvain Badan (preceding a Covid-caused complete cancellation of the 2020-21 SDA schedule), and decisively signaled a resumption of the 2021-22 tour after an Omicron-caused hiatus that had lasted three and a half months, dating back to the most recent SDA tour stop at Sleepy Hollow in mid-November.

   That latter tournament had been won by Ferreira and Bamber by virtue of their five-game final-round triumph over Zac Alexander and Greg McArthur. Still feeling the momentum of that achievement, Ferreira and Bamber motored into the finals without coming close to dropping a single game. They held their semifinal opponents, Chris Callis and Josh Hollings (pinch-hitting for Manek Mathur, who had tested positive for Covid a few days before play began), to single-figures in the first game, but fell behind 7-5 in the second, at which juncture the match was abruptly and disheartening truncated when Hollings collapsed to the ground as he tried to accelerate to the front court in pursuit of a Ferreira drop shot, having suffered a severe tear in his lower left leg that left him unable to continue.

 By contrast, the top-half semi between Stout/Arnold and the swiftly-improving Aussie pair of recently- retired PSA top-15 players Ryan Cuskelly and Cam Pilley (quarters winners over Clive Leach and Adam Bews) was a brutal, lengthy and exhausting five-game battle-of-attrition marathon in which Cuskelly and Pilley won the first two games by a combined three points (15-13, 15-14) only to be tortuously overtaken by 15-11,13 and 9 tallies, with the top seeds, who had been pressed to the limit throughout their rally, finally asserting themselves with an 8-2 closing run from 7-all in the fifth, largely due to a shot-making spree by Arnold that accounted for five of those points.

  The question coming into the final was how much, if any, influence the widely differing course of the respective semis would have. Ferreira and Bamber appeared to have provided an emphatic answer when (as had happened throughout the tournament) they burst from the gate, burying Stout and Arnold under a blizzard of winners, most of them sharply-angled backhand reverse-corners or front-side cross-court nicks off Ferreira’s blazingly-hot racquet. It marked the fifth time in the eight combined completed games that Ferreira and Bamber had played to that point in which they had held their opponents under 10 points, and their series of spectacular shots elicited ringing applause from the crowded gallery, most of whose members were vocally supporting Bamber, who just a few months earlier had been named the Head Adult and Doubles pro at the host club.

  Although Stout and Arnold had seemed a step slower than their road-runner fast opponents during that first game, they wisely slowed the pace at the outset of the second, focusing not on power but rather on height and depth, lengthening the exchanges and thereby both establishing better rhythm for themselves and inducing some impatience-caused tins from Ferreira and Bamber. Each of the match’s final three games was hard-fought and marked by riveting all-court exchanges, several mid-game tactical adjustments and some extraordinary shot-making and retrieving. This was especially true of the close-out fourth game, throughout which no team ever held more than a two-point lead. Ferreira and Bamber forged their way to 12-10, a fifth game clearly beckoning --- but a Stout forehand overhead into the front-left nick launched a 4-0 spurt to 14-12. Ferreira blasted a ball down the middle past Arnold to close the gap to 14-13, but the ensuing point ended when Ferreira’s backhand volley, which had accounted for so many winners during this match, this time ricocheted off the tin. All four players performed at a tremendously high level, which should bode well for the upcoming several months, during which a number of key tournaments, several of which had originally occupied slots in January before they were repositioned to the spring due to the pandemic, are scheduled to be contested.