Manek Mathur Tops SDA Pro Doubles Rankings For The Fourth Time by Rob Dinerman
Dateline June 5, 2022
---The SDA season-end rankings were released on June 1st, and Manek
Mathur, who recorded a tour-leading six tournament wins, wound up
ranked No. 1 for the fourth time (also in 2017, 2018 and 2020) in the
last five seasons (the 2020-21 season was completely canceled due to
the Covid-19 pandemic). Chris Callis, Mathur’s partner in five of those
championship marches --- namely St. Louis in the season-opening event
in October, which preceded by six months a springtime surge in which
this dynamic duo swept the last four tournaments they entered with
their march through the draws in Boston, Cleveland, New York (the
Kellner Cup) and Greenwich (the North American Open) --- is ranked
second, followed in the top five by Scott Arnold (Mathur’s partner when
they won the Big Apple Open after a foot injury forced Callis to
withdraw just before the event began), James Stout and James Bamber.
Three-time finalists (in St. Louis, Sleepy Hollow and Boston) Zac
Alexander and Greg McArthur are co-ranked sixth, with Michael Ferreira
(who teamed with Bamber in a title run at Sleepy Hollow and an advance
to the final in Brooklyn, where they barely fell short against Stout
and Arnold), Adam Bews (who triumphed in the U. S. National Doubles
with Bamber and in Buffalo with Arnold) and Ryan Cuskelly (who
partnered his recently-former PSA colleague Cameron Pilley to the
winner’s circle at Oxridge) rounding out the top 10.
The only season since 2015-16 in which someone other than Mathur topped
the season-end rankings was 2018-19, which Mathur began like a comet by
partnering first Callis and then Alexander to victory in the
season-opening Maryland Club Open and the Denver Club Open respectively
without dropping a game in either event, and then teaming with Callis
in another no-games-lost run to the final of the Big Apple Open, where
they steamrolled Bernardo Samper and Yvain Badan 15-5 in the first
game. To that point Mathur, the reigning three-time SDA Player of the
Year, had opened the season by winning 28 straight games, and on that
particular night in midtown Manhattan (his consecutive-wins numbers by
then having expanded to 18 tournaments and 63 matches) he was playing
at his absolute peak, pouncing cat-like on every ball, scorching his
drives and catching numerous nicks with his front-court salvos, a
superstar in all his glory, with his parents visiting from India
proudly watching from the gallery of the host New York Athletic Club.
The pace and level of play were extraordinary, and there was tremendous
energy coursing both on the court and through the crowd --- until it
all came to a screeching halt midway through the second game when
Mathur pulled up lame, having ruptured his left Achilles tendon as he
accelerated forward in pursuit of a shallow Samper cross-court.
Damien Mudge, Mathur’s partner through their wire-to-wire undefeated
2017-18 season in the last match of which Mudge had incurred a serious
right-knee injury that ended his career, was in attendance that night,
sitting on a bench just outside the host venue’s glass back wall and,
in a cruelly ironic symbol of how much had befallen both members of the
tour’s dominant team through the previous two seasons, it was Mudge’s
crutch that Mathur had to lean on in order to exit the court after
incurring his season-ending injury.
With both Mathur and Mudge out of action for the rest of that 2018-19
season, and with Callis joining them on the sidelines shortly
thereafter with a left-knee injury that prevented him from playing any
of the last three events of the Fall 2018 portion of the schedule and
required him to undergo an operation that summer, the tour became a
kaleidoscope of constantly changing top-tier partnerships, with a
correspondingly undulating set of faces in the late stages of the draw,
from which John Russell, in large part due to having teamed up with
Scott Arnold to win the last two tournaments of that season, emerged
with the No. 1 ranking and as the recipient of the 2019 SDA Player of
the Year Award.
Although both Callis and Mathur demonstrated how fully they had
recovered from their respective surgeries when they won the 2019-20
season-opening Maryland Club Open, one of a tour-leading four
tournament wins for this duo that season, nevertheless they were beset
by a sequence of maladies --- including a right-ankle sprain by Mathur
in a Westchester Country Club semi that forced him and Callis to have
to default the next-day final to Alexander and Robin Clarke, a bad case
of the flu that kayoed Callis just before the North American Open (too
late for Mathur to find a replacement) and a hamstring pull that
sidelined Mathur for the Johnson Memorial tournament in Brooklyn ---
that caused them to play only five of the eight tournaments they
entered to completion that season. A left-foot sprain to Callis this
past October (keeping him out of the Big Apple Open), a semifinal
mid-match default at Sleepy Hollow when Mathur was hit in the head by
an errant follow-through and a positive Covid test that forced Mathur
to quarantine during the early-March Johnson Memorial seemed to be more
of the same. But when Mathur and Callis finally fully shed their sundry
ailments, they embarked on an undefeated run during which they won all
14 of the matches they played and wrested the Nos. 1 and 2 rankings
away from Arnold and Stout.
It is worth noting, however, that, even during this impressive closing
stretch, they were one point from losing in the semis in Boston
(defeating Ferreira/Bamber on a winning Callis backhand reverse-corner
on simultaneous-match-point), two points from losing in the finals in
New York (with Stout/Arnold leading 2-1, 13-all) and had a
quintuple-game-point against them (also against Stout and Arnold) that
would have put them two games to one down in Greenwich. There is very
little that separates the top teams on the SDA pro tour, which should
make for an exciting campaign in 2022-23.
