A History of the North American Open Doubles Championship
By Rob Dinerman
December 15, 2009
-This weekend will mark the 26th edition of the North American Open
Doubles Championship, which debuted in 1984 and has been held every
year since then (including twice in 1986, first in the winter of that
year and then again the following autumn) except 1992 and 2002. The
Greenwich Country Club, which spearheaded the early years of the
tournament (one of its squash-playing members, Michael Kirby, was an
executive with Xerox, the event’s initial title sponsor, which
was based in nearby Stamford), was later joined by Round Hill in
‘93 and the Field Club of Greenwich in 2003, resulting in the
present-day tri-club partnership that extends to the associated
festivities, the exceptionally well-subscribed pro-am competition and
the underwriting of the purse. It is due to the generosity and
enthusiasm of the membership at these three clubs, as well as the
active participation of many other squash doubles aficionados in the
Greenwich metropolitan area, that this most prized of doubles titles
under the U. S. SQUASH aegis continues to maintain its standing as one
of the truly significant events on the American squash calendar.
In examining the Champions Roster located in the Greenwich Country
Club’s squash clubhouse (known as the Squash House prior to the
major 2005 renovation, after which it was re-named the Converse House
to honor Edmund Cogswell Converse, one of the club’s Founding
Fathers back in 1892), one is immediately struck by the fact that it
contains the names of only 19 individual players (far fewer than half
the theoretically possible total of 50), as well as just 12 separate
teams, several of whom have at least one player who was also part of
another title-winning pairing. This points up the degree to which the
history of this event has been filled with repeat winners and a series
of mini- (and in one emphatic case, not at all mini-) -dynasties, the
most notable of which, of course, was the Gary Waite/Damien Mudge
juggernaut that captured this crown six consecutive times beginning in
2000 before they barely surrendered it in the ’07 final against
Paul Price and Ben Gould, who had to survive third- and fourth-set
tiebreakers before earning the fifth in somewhat more routine 15-10
fashion.
The domination that this all-time-best tandem evinced during that
lengthy skein can be found (1) in the fact that those seven finals were
against six different teams (Willie Hosey/Jamie Bentley in ’00,
Hosey/Viktor Berg in ’01, Hosey/Michael Pirnak in ’03,
Blair Horler/Clive Leach in ’04, Hosey/Leach in ’05, Chris
Walker/Berg in ’06 and Price/Gould in ‘07); (2) in Waite
actually having won NINE straight North American Opens, his sextet with
Mudge having been directly preceded by a three-straight run from
1997-99 with Mark Talbott; and (3) in Mudge having reached the last
nine North American Open finals, seven straight, as noted, with
Waite and the last two years as Berg’s left-wall partner, with
whom Mudge dethroned Price and Gould in ’08 only to have
that same pair take back the title last year, 18-15 in the third. Mudge
and Waite are the only players to have won this championship on each
wall, as Waite was playing the right when he won his initial North
American Open in ’94 in partnership with Scott Dulmage.
The Waite/Talbott duo is the third to have won this tourney three years
in a row --- Todd Binns and the late Tom Page accomplished this feat
from 1986-88 (the ’86 win occurring in their first-ever foray as
teammates), as did Alan Grant and Ned Edwards from 1989-91. Binns (who
spent several early-1980’s years fearful of playing doubles after
incurring a severe ankle injury on a doubles court early in his career)
and Page mostly overpowered their opponents (though Binns also was a
lethal shot-maker) during this late-1980’s era when the ball was
especially lively; during their best season in 1987-88, they came
within a single match of posting an undefeated season-long slate before
finally dropping a four-game final to Grant and Jamie Bentley in the
Elite Doubles in Philadelphia, the last event on the schedule. (Waite
and Mudge went undefeated wire-to-wire three times, in 1999-2000,
2001-02 and 2004-05.)
For both Grant and his Canadian compatriot Bentley, that reversal
foreshadowed impressive doubles success --- Grant, as mentioned, would
begin his Greenwich trilogy with Edwards the very next season before
their reign was ended when Bentley and Kenton Jernigan took their title
away in ’93 and began several dominant seasons of their own.
Theirs was a more “textbook” doubles team (with Bentley
supplying enough right-wall forehand power to provide shot-making
opportunities and open balls for his aggressive left-wall partner
Jernigan to exploit) than the power-hitting Binns/Page tandem or that
of the Desaulniers brothers, Michael (a former WPSA No. 1 and winner of
the ’82 Greenwich hardball-singles pro tournament) and Brad, who
overwhelmed their opponents en route to two consecutive
mid-1980’s North American Open titles not with power but by
relentlessly forcing the action, volleying everything, hitting the ball
before their opponents had completed their follow-throughs or caught
their breath, and generally creating a suffocating energy zone that
melted the strength and spirit of their adversaries.
The 1985-86 season in which the second of those triumphs occurred was
the last of Michael Desaulniers’s career. After being ranked No.
1 on the singles tour for the 1981-82 season (during which he also won
the North American Open singles title, finally wresting it away from
its six-year captivity with Sharif Khan) and slumping during several
injury-plagued subsequent years, he completed a hugely successful
comeback 1985-86 singles campaign, including reaching the finals of
both the WPSA Championship and the Xerox Canadian Open (where he
defeated Talbott before losing to Jahangir Khan), then promptly retired
at age 29, having thereby attained the redemption to which he had
committed himself. Michael Desaulniers is one of only four players ---
Talbott, Edwards and Waite are the others --- who have won North
American Open crowns in both singles and doubles, and Talbott, with
four titles in Doubles and five in singles, is the only player to have
won each on multiple occasions.
Talbott’s only title prior to his late-1990’s collaboration
with Waite came in the inaugural event in February 1984, when he and
Field Club of Greenwich “alumnus” Peter Briggs (who learned
squash well enough there as a youngster to become both a New England
Interscholastic titlist at Middlesex and later a two-time
Intercollegiate Individual champ at Harvard) prevailed over Michael
Desaulniers and Maurice Heckscher in the final. Briggs displayed both
his partner versatility that 1983-84 season (also winning the
Philadelphia Elite and Metropolitan Open with Dave Johnson, the Heights
Casino event with Gul Khan, the Racquet & Tennis Invitational with
Larry Hilbert and the U. S. National Mixed Doubles with Joyce
Davenport) and his longevity some years later when at age 45 he teamed
with Jeff Stanley to annex the ’95 North American Open title, 11
years after his exploits with Talbott!
Briggs’s standing in the Greenwich squash community may have
played a role in the mid-1980’s landmark decision to expand the
major annual Greenwich Country Club squash doubles tournament from the
highly popular amateur “Greenwich Invitation Squash Doubles
Tournament” it had been for more than a half-century (45
editions’ worth, debuting the weekend before Thanksgiving in 1931
and continuing all the way through 1982, excepting only 1933-34 and a
four-year World War II-caused hiatus from 1943-46) to the prize-money
top-tier professional tournament that the North American Open,
bolstered for its first half-dozen years by Xerox, would swiftly
become. The fact that the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) tour had
made such impressive strides under Sharif Khan and the Association
President Clive Caldwell throughout the early-1980’s doubtless
had an impact as well. The North American Open Doubles event, which in
its early years opened with a Friday-night exhibition match featuring
two WPSA pros along with Greenwich Country Club members and former New
York Mets pitching stars Tom Seaver and Craig Swan, has been an
important fixture on the pro squash doubles calendar through the WPSA
years, throughout the 1990’s when the WPSA was incorporated into
the international Professional Squash Association (PSA) and during the
decade that has ensued since the formation of the International Squash
Doubles Association (ISDA) in January 2000 up to the present time.
There have been some amazingly entertaining matches deep in the draws
of the North American Open Doubles, including the margin by which
’96 champions Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt were stopped
just one simultaneous-championship-point short of a successful defense
on a Waite backhand cross-court blast past Wahlstedt that jump-started
the three-year Waite/Talbott run that would follow. That was the second
time that an attempted title defense foundered on a
simultaneous-match-point defeat: ’93 title-holders Bentley and
Jernigan lost a one-point semi the following year to Briggs and
Talbott, who then fell to the Canadian dynamos Waite and Dulmage,
though Briggs, partnered by Stanley, would win a three-hour 15-13
fifth-game final one year later against Talbott and Stoneburgh.
Two-time and current defending champions Price and Gould would never
have had the chance to stage their comeback from two-love down in the
’07 final against seven-time defenders Waite and Mudge had they
not first survived a 17-16 fifth-game semi the day before against Scott
Butcher and Leach, who four years earlier (i.e. in 2003) had also lost
a one-point-in-the-fifth semi against an eventual champ as he and
Horler came up barely short vs. Waite/Mudge when on the last point an
erratic ball-bounce caused Horler to whiff on his swing. Whatever
happens this weekend is bound to both add to the rich tradition of this
coveted championship (whose winning 2010 members will have their names
hand-lettered in gold leaf on The Board in the Greenwich Country
Club’s Converse House just beyond the left side-wall of the
glass-back-wall doubles court, joining a list that extends back to the
inaugural amateur tourney in 1931) and serve as a probable tipping
point that defines the course and character of the 2009-2010 ISDA
campaign.
Editor’s Note: The author would
like to extend his appreciation to Morris Clothier, Steve Scharff and
Jack Farley for their phone interviews and the extensive assistance
they provided in researching this article.