Walker And Chaloner Capture U. S. Pro Title On Winner-Take-All Point
By Rob Dinerman
Dateline December 7, 2009 ---
History was made at the Wilmington Country Club this past Saturday
evening, where the ISDA (founded in early January 2000) completed the
first full decade of its existence and did so in dramatic fashion, with
its first-ever simultaneous-championship-point. Chris Walker and his
British compatriot and fellow former PSA top-seven Mark Chaloner
battled back from a two-games-to-love deficit in a two-hour final with
former mid-2000’s Trinity College teammates Jonny Smith and Yvain
Badan to force a best-of-five fifth-set tiebreaker conclusion to this
2009 U. S. Pro Championship that ding-donged hair-raisingly through
four evenly divided points, at which crisis moment Walker unleashed a
tin-defying forehand reverse-corner winner that decided the 10-15 8-15
15-9 15-12 16-15 outcome.
The match was characterized by lengthy, all-court exchanges, extremely
high pace and an intensity level that may have been attributable to the
absence of the top-eight-ranked players in this $10,000 Challenger
event, which presented an opportunity for these contestants to vie for
an ISDA crown. Of the final-round foursome, only Walker had ever
competed in the final round of a full-ranking ISDA tourney –
indeed, he and Clive Leach had been the last team other than the Damien
Mudge/Viktor Berg and Paul Price/Ben Gould tandems to win a ranking
ISDA event over the past 26 months (and 28 tournaments) that have
passed since Walker and Leach won the first two stops (in St. Louis and
Baltimore) on the 2007-08 tour.
The quarterfinals were all very distinct: first Badan and Smith,
first-time partners whose collegiate careers overlapped during the
2002-03 season, overwhelmed Rob Dinerman and Rob Whitehouse with their
athleticism; then Tom Harrity and former PSA No. 1 John White,
pinch-hitting for an injured Dave Rosen, won in four over Mark Price
and his tin-plagued partner Raj Nanda (who just three weeks ago had
straight-gamed Harrity and Imran Khan in the St. Louis Challenger
final), which preceded a close (two overtimes) albeit 3-0 win by Tim
Porter (who learned the game as a youngster at the host club) and Greg
Park over Carl Baglio and Eric Christiansen. The latter pairing
consistently geared their attack towards Porter’s side of the
court and rallied from 10-13 to force a best-of-five tiebreaker, only
to have their comeback bid extinguished when Park, serving at 2-1,
set-three, hit a lob serve that a momentarily distracted Baglio
foul-tipped and stared for several seconds at the ceiling in disbelief
and dismay.
The fourth and final match was the best of the entire evening, as heavy
underdogs Ed Chilton (just a few weeks shy of the start of his 20th
year as the host club head pro and the tournament-chairman of this
event throughout its 16-year existence) and Penn women’s head
coach Jack Wyant sharp-shot their way through an opening-game
tiebreaker against top seeds Walker and Chaloner to the roaring
approval of the home crowd. Chilton and Wyant forced the third game
into overtime as well and played beautifully throughout the
entertaining four-game match. Chilton would go on to partner Dinerman
to victory in the highly competitive pro-am tournament with a quartet
of hard-fought four-game wins, the last of which, over Baglio and Scott
Simonton, must have carried special meaning for Chilton in light of the
event being named the Tim Chilton Cup in memory of his father, who
passed away four years ago.
In the Saturday mid-day semis, Smith and Badan again had too much
firepower for the Harrity/White team to withstand, following which
Walker and Chaloner again dropped their first game before inexorably
asserting themselves over Porter (who faded badly in the final two
games, committing a host of errors) and Park, three games to one. As
noted, Smith and Badan powered their way to a two games to love
advantage in the final and seemed to have a stranglehold on the match
when at 6-all in the fourth, Walker committed a terrible mental blunder
by stopping play after a questionable Smith retrieval and declaring
that the ball had bounced twice. He was over-ruled, then his teammate
Chaloner tinned a drive, then each of their opponents hit a winner ---
suddenly the score was 10-6.
That Walker and Chaloner were able to overcome their self-inflicted
wound and the imposing deficit that swiftly followed with a 15-4 run to
6-2 in the fifth is attribute to their grit and determination.
Ultimately, Walker would redeem not only that potentially ruinous lapse
but also the forehand reverse-corner tin he had hit two years ago on
the same court at 13-14 against Mudge and Berg after he and Leach,
trailing 14-9 in the fifth, had saved four match-balls-against. At
two-all, set-three in the fifth-game tiebreaker, Walker again had a
forehand reverse-corner on his racquet, and this time he hit it with
full conviction, producing a deadly dart that eluded even Smith’s
full-bodied diving attempt to get his racquet on it.
The ISDA tour will now take a month-long holiday break before resuming in January with important stops in Boston and Greenwich.