First-Time Partners Manek Mathur And Ben Gould Capture Tavern Club Invitational Crown In Dramatic Finish  
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline April 17th --- Immobilized by an eleventh-hour onset of debilitating leg cramps that threatened to sabotage what had been shaping up as a storybook return to SDA competition, Ben Gould nevertheless conjured up an emphatic forehand smash into the front-left nick on match-ball that delivered a 15-8, 9-15, 15-9, 12-15, 15-11 victory for himself and his first-time partner Manek Mathur over Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg before a packed and riveted gallery at the 11th annual Tavern Club Invitational in Cleveland this past Saturday evening. This tournament in general, and the final’s closing three points in particular (which Mathur/Gould swept, with Gould hitting two of the three winners, after Mudge/Berg had crept back to 11-12 after trailing by five points earlier in the game), constituted a memorable calling-card close-out to the full-ranking portion of the 2015-16 SDA season, which has only a Challenger event in New York this coming weekend still remaining on the schedule.

   For Gould, a six-time defending champion in this event (which he won in 2010 with Paul Price and from 2011-15 with Mudge) whose appearance was especially surprising for coming just 124 days after he had announced his retirement from the tour in mid-December, the outcome represented a welcome mirror image of what had happened at the final SDA full-ranking tournament a year ago, at the biennial World Doubles in suburban Chicago. There, in a tableau eerily similar to this past weekend in Ohio, he and Mudge rallied from 4-9 to 11-12 against John Russell and a severely-cramping Clive Leach, only to then be stymied when Leach, hopping on one foot to the ball, hit a spectacular reverse-corner winner, following which Gould tinned a drive and Leach hit another winner to seal a 15-11 tally for his team.

   The Tavern Club Invitational has a unique character --- ranging from the excellence of the arena itself (the doubles court is possibly the best of any on the North American doubles circuit) to the vocal and passionate involvement of the membership to the singular organizational effort put forth by the club’s Tournament Chairman and14-year head professional Ian Sly --- that frequently enhances the dynamics of the matches, and this year was no exception. Two of the four Thursday-evening round-of-16 matches were extended to a fifth game, in each case with the eventual winners having to rally from two games to one down. Qualifiers and first-time partners James Bamber and Bobby Burns saved a fourth-game match-ball against them en route to out-lasting Freddie Reid Jr. and Justin Todd, while Carl Baglio and Travis Judson, semifinalists in this tourney two years ago, escaped with a 15-12 fifth-game win over Aaron Luque and Ian Power. Baglio and Judson then battled fiercely against Mudge and Berg, who, however, persevered at the end-stage of each game, as did Russell (a last-minute substitute for an injured Greg Park) and Jonny Smith in their match with Bamber and Burns.

   In the draw’s top half, Mathur and Gould debuted Friday night with a straight-set quarterfinal score over Will Mariani and Dylan Patterson, and Jacques Swanepoel and his former Trinity College teammate Shaun Johnstone barely averted a fifth game against Dan Roberts and Greg McArthur when at 14-all in the fourth a ferocious and lengthy series of exchanges ended when Roberts bashed a cross-court that sailed just over the boundary line of the back wall. The caliber of the Mudge/Berg vs. Russell/Smith and the Mathur/Gould vs. Johnstone/Swanepoel semis mid-day Saturday was very high, with the winning team in each case asserting itself , setting the stage for a final whose intensity level, abetted by the historical backdrop of Mudge and Gould opposing each other for the first time after their five and a half seasons of pro-doubles domination, the cozy confines of the venue and raucous engagement of an enraptured gallery and the event’s positioning as the last full-ranking tour stop on the schedule, all added up to what well may have been one of the greatest matches in the history of the doubles squash.

    Virtually every point even in the single-figure games was fervently contested, with each player leaving a major hand-print on the undulating action. Mathur and Gould were intent on holding front-court position and inflicting relentless pace to open up the court, while Mudge and Berg in the games they won did a great job of slowing the pace down and creating up-and-back movement for their opponents, especially Gould, who in his return after a four-month hiatus was having to deal with both this event’s compressed playing schedule (three matches in 24 hours) and a level of tightness in his calves and hamstring muscles, especially when he moved backwards to field lobs after he had previously been maneuvered to the front of the court, that steadily increased as the fifth game moved along and as Mudge and Berg relentlessly cut into the sizable mid-game deficit that had confronted them.

   At 11-10, Mathur hit a winner for 12-10 but Gould came up lame and holding his right calf, leading to a brief and tension-building stoppage. When play resumed, Mathur made several forays to the front-right to keep the point going (just as Russell had done to rescue Leach a year ago in Chicago) but Berg hit a shallow forehand rail that died before Gould could scoop it up. At that juncture, having surged from 4-9 and 8-11 to 11-12, Berg and Mudge seemed to be well positioned to run the game out in light of how constrained Gould had become. By this time the largest crowd ever to watch a squash match in Cleveland, had occupied every inch of available space, both behind the glass back wall and upstairs in the gallery, and were roaring after every torrid exchange.

   Amazingly, it was Gould and Mathur who came up with the winners at this match-defining moment, with Gould nailing a reverse three-wall that nicked in front of Berg, following which Mathur, at 28 by far the youngest player of the foursome (Mudge and Gould will both mark their 40th birthday before calendar 2016 comes to an end and Berg turns 39 in October), slashed a backhand rail down the right wall to get his team to match-ball, which Gould, as noted, converted with his forehand blast directly into the front-left nick, leading to a series of embraces among all four players and a lengthy standing ovation. Everyone present that night exited the building fully aware that they had witnessed a display of skills, athleticism and competitive courage that made for something that was truly special.