A Thematic History Of The Kellner Cup
By Rob Dinerman
April 10, 2010 -This year’s Kellner Cup
competition will
represent the eighth edition of what has become perhaps the most
prestigious professional squash doubles championship in the world. The
previous seven Kellner Cups (from 2000-2006 before the recent switch to
a biennial format resulted in a “gap” year in 2007)
have
effectively comprised the equivalent of the postseason playoffs of one
of the four major team sports, due to the late-April time slot,
top-tier purses ($40,000 the first year which subsequently expanded to
the $ 70,000 to $90,000 range thereafter) and bright-lights mid-town
Manhattan location hosted by three of the most highly regarded private
clubs on the continent, namely the University, Union and Racquet
&
Tennis Clubs. Indeed, the absence of this tournament last spring caused
the 2006-07 season to end more or less in mid-air as opposed to with
the kind of dramatic and season-defining culmination with which this
championship has perennially imbued the ISDA schedule.
The prior septet of Kellner Cups fully
reflected the
dominance during this extended period that Gary Waite and Damien Mudge
enjoyed over their ISDA counterparts, as this record-shattering duo had
a pair of Kellner Cup three-peats (’00 through ’02
and
’04 through ’06) precisely bisected by the
memorable Blair
Horler/Clive Leach breakthrough at the expense of Waite and Mudge in
the 2003 final. Horler and Leach had never progressed past the
quarterfinal round prior to ’03 (they suffered an upset loss
to
Todd Binns and Jeff Mulligan in ’02 when Mulligan punctuated
his
career-best performance by blasting a cross-court past Horler at 14-13
in the fifth game) and would be playing with different partners by the
time the ’04 event rolled around.
But in the winter/spring of ’03, Horler
and Leach
first emphatically terminated a Waite/Mudge undefeated skein that had
consumed 24 tournaments, 76 matches and 22 months with a blow-out (15-7
in the fourth) early-February win in the Canadian pro final; then
captured the early-April Creek Challenge Cup when Mudge (partnered by
Preston Quick since Waite was back home in Canada, where he and wife
Natalie were celebrating the birth just days earlier of the
couple’s third child) incurred a match-ending
late-second-game
concussion when a deep-court collision with Horler caused him to crash
head-first into the left side wall; and then capped off their surge two
weeks later with their heroics in the Kellner Cup.
In so doing and in thereby becoming the first team
ever to
defeat Waite and Mudge twice in the same season, Horler and Leach rose
superior to their early-tournament travails (a fifth-game first-rounder
against qualifiers Chris Walker and a returning-to-action David Kay,
who had suffered a ruptured right Achilles tendon six months earlier,
followed by a patchy 3-1 quarter over James Hewitt and Tyler Millard
before a more convincing four-game semi over Willie Hosey and Michael
Pirnak), their shaky prior Kellner Cup history and the
two-games-to-love deficit that confronted them after Mudge nailed a
serve-return reverse-corner winner at simultaneous-game-ball in the
15-14 second game to provide his team with a formidable edge, both
statistically and psychologically, that Horler and Leach nevertheless
convincingly overcame. This they accomplished with meat-grinder
efficiency and a relentless attacking style that led to 15-10, 15-9
tallies and a 14-9 fifth-game lead which nearly disappeared under a
desperate last-ditch Waite/Mudge rally to 13-14 that was thwarted when
Horler, who had committed two nervous-looking tins in that frenzied
final stretch, fully redeemed himself by boldly and successfully going
for broke with a tin-defying backhand reverse-corner that neither of
his two opponents even came close to tracking down.
Almost from the moment that that untouchable
Horler salvo
bounced the second time, Waite and Mudge were setting their sights on
regaining the trophy, and everything it symbolized, that they had held
so proudly for so long. And regain it (again and again and again) they
compellingly did, first by subduing Viktor Berg and Josh McDonald 3-0
in the ’04 final, keyed by a 10-0 mid-match spree from 10-11
in
the second game to a 5-0 lead in the close-out third; then a year later
by breaking open what had been a close final with Quick and Ben Gould
with a 6-1 ending to a 15-7 third game preceding a runaway 15-5 final
fourth; and finally with a 9-0 run from 2-3 to 11-3 in the fourth and
final game of the ’06 final against Berg (who along with
Hosey
had also been on the receiving end of an 11-0 Waite/Mudge explosion in
the third and final game of the ’02 final) and Walker that
virtually clinched that match’s outcome.
Proof of how difficult it is to get to (much less
through)
ONE Kellner Cup final, much less reaching all seven and winning six of
them, lies in the fact that in the last six finals Waite and Mudge
faced six different teams and a combined nine different players, just
three short of the theoretical maximum (only Berg and Hosey, with three
each, have recorded more than one final-round appearance among the
Waite/Mudge field of challengers) and, other than the ascent of Hosey
and his early-2000’s partner Jamie Bentley to the 2000 and
2001
finals, no player other than Waite and Mudge has reached two
consecutive Kellner Cup finals (see accompanying chart). In fact,
possibly as a consequence of the demoralizing impact of those
earlier-referenced blistering and match-clinching final-round
Waite/Mudge runs, those runner-up teams have rarely emerged intact from
the defeats that they suffered.
Bentley and Hosey, finalists 19 out of 21 times in their two
seasons together but only 2-17 in those finals, went separate ways
after losing the ’01 Kellner Cup final, as did five-time
2001-02
finalists Hosey and Berg after dropping the ’02 final; a
severe
Horler right-knee injury just nine months after his and
Leach’s
triumphant ’03 effort permanently derailed his career in its
prime and caused Leach to seek out other partners; ’04
finalists
McDonald and Berg frittered away two fourth-game match-balls in the
first round of the ’05 Kellner Cup, then contributed 10 tins
to
their opponents’ (John Russell and Steve Scharff) tally in
the
15-7 fifth game of what would prove to be the final match in their
three-year partnership; and ’05 finalists Quick and Gould had
already decided to part company even before the ’06 Kellner
Cup,
in which they let two third-game match-balls get away against Walker
and Berg and barely contested the tame pair of 15-7 games that followed.
The foregoing semi was preceded by an even more
wildly
undulating top-half tilt between Waite/Mudge and Leach and his
recently-acquired partner (Leach’s fourth in the past four
Kellner Cup appearances, with yet a fifth slated for this upcoming
edition) Scott Butcher, who after trailing two games to love, took
leads of 10-1 in the third game and 13-1 in the fourth in a pair of
15-5 match-evening frames against their vaunted and top-seeded but
temporarily completely lost-at-sea foes, who, however, responding to
the crisis like the champs they are, fully reversed the situation in
capturing the 15-6 fifth game.
That was likely the most bizarre occurrence in
Kellner Cup
annals, save for what happened two years earlier on the same Union Club
court, where Bentley, who with partner Quick trailed McDonald/Berg in
an ’04 semi, two games to one, but was serving at
simultaneous-game-ball in the fourth, appealed his own serve after his
team lost the point, got a favorable “fault” ruling
from
the two judges, and then, having unfortunately lost track of the fact
that he thus had one fault against him, hit his subsequent risky serve
low to the front-wall red-line. The referee correctly called that serve
a fault but initially failed to realize that that had been a second
serve, until one of the judges alerted him to this fact, resulting in a
match-ending double-fault to the vocal dismay of the Bentley/Quick team
and its many supporters in the gallery.
An injury-plagued Bentley has long since departed the ISDA
scene, as has his fellow 40-something Canadian compatriot Waite along
with Horler, Binns, Kay, Butcher, McDonald and many more. In fact, only
three of the participants in the inaugural Kellner Cup eight years ago
--- namely Mudge, Pirnak and Hosey --- are listed in the main draw of
the current Kellner Cup tournament. A whole new generation of talented
contenders has risen to the fore just in the brief two-year period
since the last Kellner Cup was held. Given the series of
“waves” that have characterized this 2007-08
campaign ---
with Leach and his fellow British stand-out Walker winning the first
two season-opening tourneys and getting to four of the first five
finals, followed by 2006-07 No. 1’s Gould and Paul Price
capturing four of five November/December events and regaining the top
slot, only to be displaced by Mudge and his new partner Berg, who have
won six of the last seven tour stops and five in a row --- the field is
much more “open” now than at any time in the
history of
this championship. What can be stated for sure, however, is that
whichever team winds up in the winner’s circle in the
cathedral-like Racquet & Tennis arena this coming Monday night
will
have come through the most exacting competitive crucible that the sport
of doubles squash possesses and will have joined what has already in
less than a decade become a rich and resplendent tradition.
Editor's Note: This article was submitted to the 2008 Kellner Cup
committee for inclusion as the feature piece of the Tournament Program
for that event.