Jackman Edges Owens In Thrilling Five-Game Weymuller U. S. Open Final
By Rob Dinerman
Dateline October 17, 2003---Just
two points from defeat against the No. 1 player in the world and
defending champion in the fourth game of the Weymuller U. S. Open
final, England’s Cassie Jackman rallied to a 9-5 5-9 4-9 9-7 9-5
victory over Carol Owens in a wonderfully-played 90-minute thriller
that, however, unfortunately ended on a distinctly sour note when
referee Mike Riley, his better judgment momentarily yielding to anger
and wounded pride, bypassed the warning that is usually issued first
and nailed Owens with a conduct stroke that pretty much doomed her
gritty attempt at an eleventh-hour comeback from the deficit she faced
late in the fifth and deciding game.
Riley has distinguished himself as a superior
referee over the years, but his performance this time was sub-par all
evening, including nearly a half-dozen questionable decisions, nearly
all of which seemed to go against Owens. The last of these occurred
with Owens serving at 5-7 when he denied her request for a let on a
ball near the left wall that seemed well within her reach.
Riley’s ruling drew loud murmurs of disapproval from the packed
Heights Casino gallery, as well as the expected and understandable
outraged disbelief from Owens, whereupon Riley compounded his error by
issuing his conduct stroke edict. This meant that, instead of Owens
serving at 5-7, as would have been the case had the let been properly
awarded, Jackman was now serving at 8-5, match-ball!
Even Jackman, the statistical beneficiary of this
turn of events, was clearly unhappy with the situation, her “you
can’t be serious” look through the glass back wall at Riley
betraying both her discomfort with being advanced to championship-point
in this fashion and her justifiable concern that her impending victory
over Owens (who was staring blue-eyed daggers at Riley’s chest)
would be somewhat tainted by Riley’s ruling.
Eventually play resumed, but only for one more
point, which ended on a Jackman forehand cross court that died at the
back wall despite Owens’s desperate and anger-fueled attempt to
extricate it back into play. In the trophy presentation that followed,
the tournament honoree Carol Weymuller (who along with her husband Fred
did so much for the host club while establishing such a storied junior
program there in the 1970’s before the couple decamped for
Rochester two decades ago) bravely delivered her speech, and the
players and tournament officials said all the right things. But a pall
unmistakably hung over the proceedings due to what had transpired on
the match’s penultimate point.
The controversial conclusion aside, it is a
sign of how far Jackman has come since undergoing a pair of back
operations in recent years that she hadn’t even been able to play
in the 2002 Weymuller event, the first of its 28 editions that was also
accorded “U. S. Open” status by vote of the USSRA Board Of
Directors, since she was sidelined all last autumn while recovering
from her second procedure the previous summer. Even as recently as the
Tournament Of Champions last February, Jackman’s second
tournament back on tour after an enforced seven-month hiatus, her back
stiffened up to a degree that virtually immobilized her in a semi-final
blow-out loss to Natalie Grainger.
But in the interceding months the former (1992) World
Junior champion has won four tournaments, and her win over Grainger in
the semi-finals of the British Open earlier this month demonstrated the
degree to which she has returned to the elite form that brought her to
the World Open championship in Seattle in 1999 after a pair of
runner-up finishes in the same event in the mid-1990’s. This week
her play had been superb, especially in quarter- and semi-final wins
over Rachael Grinham (her conqueror in their one-week-old British Open
final) and fifth seed Vanessa Atkinson.
Notwithstanding all that, she entered last night’s
final as a definite underdog to the top-seeded Owens, who had won last
year’s inaugural Weymuller U. S. Open without losing a single
game and had dropped just 17 combined points in her trio of
straight-set pre-final wins over Jenny Trainfield, Rebecca Chiu and
eighth seed Natalie Grinham. Ironically the very ease of Owens
early-week progression may have worked to the New Zealander’s
disadvantage last night by leaving her less than fully prepared for the
resistance she would encounter from Jackman in the final.
This latter element presented itself right in the opening
game, when Jackman surged out of an early 0-3 hole and started to take
command of the court with the severity of her backhand drives and cross
courts. The left wall usually is Owens’s domain, but for much of
this match she was spraying her backhand rails, which normally cling so
tight to the wall, and giving Jackman plenty of open balls to attack.
The British star was also wrong-footing Owens (something no prior
opponent had been able to do), especially from the front right portion
of the court, where she alternated straight drops with ground-hugging
cross courts or roll corners that Owens was frequently mis-reading.
After capturing that opening game 9-5, Jackman diminished
her intensity just a tad, and Owens seized the opening and controlled
the middle pair of games. She was getting better feel for her volley
drop shots, which she has the happy faculty of being able to guide
accurately even when her footwork is a little off or when the ball is
drifting across her body, and her fleetness afoot enables her to get to
balls that practically none of her WISPA counterparts are able to track
down. By the end of the third game, Jackman seemed a little frustrated
by her opponent’s ubiquity, and she contributed several tins to
Owens’s cause, seemingly more out of impatience than from any
technical imperfection in her stroke.
By mid-game in the fourth, Owens seemed well on her way to
a successful defense of her Weymuller U. S. Open crown. Jackman
appeared to be tiring, especially after a series of long, attritional
exchanges that landed in the Owens ledger and brought her to a 7-5 lead
over an opponent against whom she had gone undefeated in their six
matches since a five-game quarter-final win for Jackman en route to her
1999 U. S. Open crown. It was at this stage that Jackman dug down and
relentlessly salvaged that game with a four-point run in two hands. Her
anticipation, even when Owens putatively had control of the point, was
such that on several occasions both in this game and the subsequent
fifth she reflex-volleyed winners that went whizzing past a nonplussed
Owens or darting into nicks almost before the latter had completed her
swing.
This late-game reversal of fortunes brought a
palpable tentativeness into Owens’s game that was exacerbated by
the aggressiveness that by this time characterized Jackman’s
fearless salvos and a scoreboard that eventually read 7-3 in
Jackman’s favor. Determined not to go down without a fight, and
perhaps mindful of her immediately prior New York appearance, when from
two games to love down in the Tournament Of Champions final she had
boot-strapped her way to an emotional victory over Grainger, Owens
grimly cut into Jackman’s lead, point by tortuous, all-court
point, until at 5-7, with the prospect of a successful comeback now a
legitimate possibility, she was denied her let request and then
assessed the conduct stroke that brought Jackman to match-ball and
preceded her winning cross court.
Jackman’s 25th career WISPA World Tour title
culminated a display on both her and Owens’s part of athleticism,
courage and shot making acumen that “captured the
imagination,” to quote USSRA CEO Palmer Page, who also noted the
inspirational role that the current level of international
women’s squash has played in the team gold medal the United
States won in the Pan American Games this past summer. The
entertainment value of this undulating battle of wills and skills by
the two remarkable finalists was extraordinary as well, which is why it
is such a shame that many of the spectators exited the Casino still
shaking their heads at the conduct stroke call that, like a misspelled
word in the last line of a cherished book, reared its head right near
the very end.
FINAL RECAP
Cassie Jackman (6) d Carol Owens (1), 9-5 5-9 4-9 9-7 9-5.