January 12, 2007-Though
only entering its third edition this weekend, the Briggs Cup during its
brief but noteworthy history has already been the site of some
memorable matches, outcomes and twists of fate that have often defined,
for better or worse, the tenor of the remainder of the season in which
they occurred. The inaugural holding of this biennial championship in
early February 2003, for example, likely set the stage for the historic
breakthrough that would occur just one week later at the Canadian Pro
tourney in Toronto.
Gary Waite and Damien Mudge had been dominating the ISDA
tour to such a degree during the early 2000’s (with 23 straight
tournament wins and 73 consecutive matches since their only loss to
Anders Wahlstedt and Scott Stoneburgh in Wilmington more than two years
earlier) that Tournament Chairman and longtime Apawamis Club Director
Of Racquet Sports Peter Briggs, in whose honor the event got its name,
requested that they “split up” for this tournament and
agree to play with different partners.
Accordingly, Willie Hosey and Michael Pirnak, whom Waite
and Mudge had defeated in mid January in the North American Open final
in Greenwich, agreed to a partner swap in which Waite wound up with
Hosey and Mudge played with Pirnak. The nearly universal expectation
was that this pair of realigned duos would meet in the Monday night
final for the right to claim both the biggest winner’s share in
the history of professional doubles on this continent (as well as in
the entire world) and the status of becoming the first-ever Briggs Cup
champions.
Pirnak and Mudge meshed immediately and motored
unimpeded through the draw’s bottom half, dispatching two
qualifiers in the 16’s and quarters and getting to the final
without having to face a single seeded team. But Waite and Hosey were
never able to fully click, as they stumbled into the semis, there to be
convincingly bested by fourth seeds Josh McDonald and Viktor Berg, who
had come close to knocking off The Champs three weeks earlier in the
Boston final (where they led 11-8 in the fifth before being overtaken
at the very end) and whose sharp-shooting and early momentum on this
occasion were more than enough to carry them to a four-game victory.
It was the first loss of any kind since that
Wilmington distant setback for Waite, who had supplemented those 23
ISDA trophy runs with Mudge by capturing the two interceding Cambridge
Club Doubles with Mark Chaloner and Stewart Boswell, the 2002 U S
National Doubles with Morris Clothier, the 2001 U S Mixed and 2002
World Mixed with Jessie Chai and all four pro hardball singles events
in which he had competed during that period, as well as the 2002 U S
Nationals.
By the time McDonald and Berg had ascended to the final
round (where they became the fourth consecutive 3-0 victim of Pirnak
and Mudge), another major upset had occurred as well when first-year
partners Scott Butcher and his Australian compatriot Jeff Osborne
followed a somewhat expected first-round win over Noah Wimmer and Ben
Gould with a totally unexpected quarterfinal triumph at the expense of
third seeds Blair Horler and Clive Leach. The latter pairing had been
giving Waite and Mudge more trouble than any other team in the recent
prior events; in fact, the Greenwich semi less than a fortnight before
had seesawed all the way to a simultaneous match-ball, and only a loose
Round Hill floorboard near the left wall, causing the ball to bounce so
unpredictably that Horler whiffed on his swing, had enabled Waite and
Mudge to play for (and win) their third straight North American Open
crown.
Even though Horler and Leach were not playing at their
best during large portions of the first four evenly divided games, they
appeared to have gained control in blasting their way out to an 8-4
advantage in the fifth. But out of the blue, Butcher and Osborne
conjured up a magical 10-0 run to reach match-ball, which they
converted immediately when Leach, disgusted with the turn the match had
taken, deliberately smashed Butcher’s serve into the ceiling to
punctuate his team’s collapse.
It is worth noting, however, that, galvanized
rather than being demoralized by that defeat, Horler and Leach
responded by surging to their first-ever ISDA tournament title two
weeks later at the Canadian Pro, avenging their loss to Butcher/Osborne
in a ruthless 3-0 quarterfinal and then manhandling the reunited but
badly out-played Waite and Mudge in a four-game final in which they
held Wate and Mudge under 10 points in the fourth game. This result
would provide an important precedent when these titans met several
months later in the Kellner Cup final, in which Horler and Leach again
rose superior, rallying from a two-game deficit and answering a
last-ditch fifth-game Waite/Mudge run from 10-14 to 13-14 when Horler
hit a clear backhand reverse-corner winner to seal the outcome.
Proof of the transitory nature of ISDA tour
partnerships can be can be found in the fact that, by the time the 2005
Briggs Cup was held, and given the requested Waite/Mudge separation two
years earlier, only one of the 16 main-draw entries remained intact
from the ’03 version, namely McDonald/Berg, who again reached the
final round, where they were again defeated in straight games, this
time by Waite and Mudge, who were by that early-February juncture fully
launched towards an eventual third wire-to-wire undefeated season
(previously 1999-2000 and 2001-2002) in six years.
Waite and Mudge, as noted, had maintained their dominance
during the two-year interim between Briggs Cups, and McDonald (who
disappeared from the ISDA tour after the autumn of ’05) and Berg
(a two-time Briggs Cup pro-am champion in addition to being a two-time
Briggs Cup pro-draw finalist) had remained an elite team, but, those
exceptions aside, the competitive scenario had undergone massive
changes, as witness both the host of partner realignments and the
emergence of a whole new crop of protagonists in the top tier.
Todd Binns, Ned Edwards and Scott Dulmage,
possessors of seven late-1980’s/early 1990’s North American
Open titles between them, had retired from pro competition, as had Jeff
Stanley, Dean Brown and Taylor Fawcett, while Osborne and Shane Doherty
had returned to their native Australia. The Horler/Leach tandem that
had terrorized the tour with their trio of winter/spring ’03 ISDA
crowns had been disbanded in the wake of Horler’s severe knee
injury during the winter of ’04, and tour veterans James Hewitt,
Doug Lifford, Tyler Millard, Jamie Bentley, Steve Scharff, Alex
Pavulans and Eric Vlcek were all playing with different partners.
PSA standouts Jonathon Power, Mark Chaloner and Paul
Price, each of whom had won the Cambridge Club Doubles in the early
2000’s when the format for that event matched an ISDA player with
a PSA player in composing each of its teams, all noted the $ 100,000
purse that the Briggs Cup was offering, the highest by a good margin of
any tournament in professional doubles history, and entered the
’05 event, and David Kay, who had been sidelined throughout the
2002-03 season after rupturing his right Achilles tendon, had rejoined
his early-2000’s partner Chris Walker. Lastly, Preston Quick, who
had still been finding his footing on the ISDA tour in ’03, and
Ben Gould, a qualifier in that first Briggs Cup, formed a team at the
start of the 2004-05 campaign that by the winter of ’05 was well
on its way to becoming the biggest threat in years to the Waite/Mudge
dominance and to earning by season’s end the No. 2 team ranking
in the ISDA computer standings.
In fact, 10 of the 13 losses that the Quick/Gould pairing
sustained during the 2004-05 season (five times in the finals) came at
the hands of Waite and Mudge, and the Quick/Gould ascent to the No. 2
spot would have happened earlier than it did they had not been
lucklessly slotted in the top quadrant of the draw on several
occasions, including the ’05 Briggs Cup, in which (as had
happened a few weeks earlier in a torrid five-game semifinal) they
challenged Waite and Mudge far more severely than any of their
subsequent opponents were able to do.
The sheer numbers of the 15-6 15-11 10-15 15-6 tally
don’t begin to describe how high-paced and captivating the
all-court action was throughout the match, in the wake of which Waite
and Mudge posted far more convincing 3-0 wins over first recent North
American Open finalists Hosey and Leach (whose partnership ended with
this Briggs Cup performance) and, as noted, Berg and McDonald, whose
semifinal opponents, Walker and Kay, had attained that stage by
rallying from two games to one down to overtake Horler and Pirnak in
what was to be the swan song for the latter partnership as well. Major
tournaments like the Briggs Cup have a way of becoming tipping points,
given both their magnitude and midseason placement, and in their wake a
frenzied shifting of partner alliances among the top tier has become
fairly common in recent years.
That continuing phenomenon, as well as the emergence of a
new crop of stars, has given a whole new dimension to this ’07
Briggs Cup as well. Of the 16 main-draw teams in the ’05 Briggs
Cup, only one, Waite and Mudge, are among the top 12 teams entered in
this weekend’s main draw; indeed, only four such sets of partners
are intact from as recent an event as the ’06 Kellner Cup this
past April, namely three of the four semifinalists (Butcher/Leach,
Walker/Berg, the Kellner Cup finalists, and Waite/Mudge) and
quarterfinalists Hewitt/Millard.
Gould and Quick carried their impressive 2004-05 momentum
into the early portion of the following season, finally breaking
through against Waite and Mudge in the early-November Big Apple Open
finals, capturing the Wilmington and Boston titles in January and
reaching at least the finals of seven of the first 10 stops on the
2005-06 tour. But they endured a sour late-winter/early-spring patch
that spelled the end of their partnership after the late-April Kellner
Cup, in which for the second time that month they let
multiple-match-ball opportunities get away. Gould then latched onto his
Australian compatriot Price, who, like Gould two years earlier, had
been a first-round loser in the ’05 Briggs Cup but had exploded
into a superstar during the interim between that Briggs Cup and this
one.
Gould and Price steam-rolled Waite and Mudge twice in as
many events in capturing the season-opening Maryland Club and Big Apple
Opens this past autumn (the first time Waite and Mudge have ever lost
two consecutive matches to the same opponent), with Price also
partnering Bentley to the winner’s circle in the Cambridge Club.
Quick and new partner John Russell have reached the final round in both
Baltimore and Vancouver. Waite and Mudge rebounded from their slow
start to come away with the trophy in both Vancouver and Wilmington,
where in the final round they out-played Berg and Walker, who
previously had lost in the semis in Baltimore, New York and Vancouver.
Kay, now based in Chicago, where he runs the
youth-enrichment organization MetroSquash, has pretty much left the
ISDA tour, as have Pavulans, the former Apawamis and University Club
assistant pro, who has returned to his native Latvia, McDonald, as
noted earlier, and, at least for the time being, Horler, who underwent
a second knee operation this past summer and is still rehabilitating in
the hopes of rejoining the tour later this winter. Forty-somethings
Hosey and Bentley, the No. 2 ISDA team behind Waite and Mudge a
half-dozen years back, have reunited after productive spells with
different partners, and Butcher and Leach, who led Price/Bentley 2-1,
12-9 in the Cambridge Club final, have become fully ensconced as a
current top-five contending team entering this weekend along with
Waite/Mudge, Price/Gould, Wilmington finalists Walker/Berg and
Russell/Quick.