Osama Khalifa And Kyle Martino Capture SDA Big Apple Open
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline October 29, 2024 --- Leading two games to one, but trailing 7-4 in the fourth, second seeds Osama Khalifa and Kyle Martino responded with a 9-0 burst, then held off (however barely) a frantic eleventh-hour rally to defeat Zac Alexander and James Bamber by a score of 15-11, 9-15, 15-11, 15-13 Monday evening in the final round of the Will Hartigan Memorial Big Apple Open, hosted as always by the New York Athletic Club in midtown Manhattan. Khalifa and Martino thereby built upon the momentum they had established with their 15-6 fifth-game semifinal win over Josh Hughes and Tor Christoffersen, overcoming early-game deficits in both the third (6-1) and fourth (5-1) games of the final and adding this prestigious championship to their previous tournament-winning effort in the 2023 St. Louis Open.

Alexander and Bamber, Big Apple Open finalists one year earlier (where they lost in five games to James Stout and Scott Arnold), had been so impressive in their four-game semifinal win (with all three of the games they won being by a 15-7 count) over Arnold and Ryan Cuskelly that they were widely regarded as at least slight favorites coming into the final. But Khalifa and Martino were virtually error-free during the first game, frustrating Bamber and Alexander with their team defense and scoring enough winners of their own to lead throughout that game. A rash of mid-game tins off Martino’s bat accounted for the second game’s outcome, and when Bamber knocked off three forehand reverse-corner winners to key a 6-1 lead in the third, his team appeared to possibly have asserted control.

But Martino and Khalifa successfully erased these aforementioned substantial deficits with extended mid-game rallies in both that game and the fourth. Martino, pinch-hitting for Khalifa’s usual partner Chris Callis --- who spent the weekend attending his former doubles partner Manek Mathur’s wedding in Florida --- received the brunt of the Alexander/Bamber attack, and he proved fully up to the challenge (especially in his cross-court exchanges with Alexander), while Khalifa’s ability to alternate parabolic lobs (the highest and best-angled of the foursome) with cleverly-disguised and judiciously chosen cross- and straight-drops kept both his formidable opponents on edge and occasionally off-balance.

Almost all of the points were so action-packed and all-court that, even during the ultimately match-determining nine-point run, it never felt like Khalifa and Martino were dominating the action. It was more an accumulation of small advantages, culminating in several out-of-the-blue winners (including a pair of spiked Martino volleys into the front-left nick), that caused the score to balloon to 12-7, then to 13-7 when Alexander dumped a drop shot into the tin. At that juncture, both he and Bamber seemed deflated and resigned to their impending defeat, now just two points away.

But an Alexander backhand cross-drop winner, followed almost immediately by a rare Khalifa tin, changed the entire on-court dynamic, and when Bamber then blazed a forehand cross-court past Khalifa (punctuated by a loud bellow of triumph at having cut their previously-daunting deficit in half), he and his partner were back in contention. The atmosphere throughout the five points that remained, both on court and in the increasingly vocal gallery, was enormously energized, as every inch of court became fiercely contested in a competition that had become infused with adrenaline. Bamber and Alexander crept to 12-13, then (after a daring Khalifa inside-out forehand roll-corner winner from the back wall that Alexander saw just a millisecond too late) to 13-14. A fifth game, which had seemed out of the question just a few minutes earlier, suddenly loomed as a very real possibility, with all the intrigue that it would have contained.

But instead the final exchange of the night ended fairly soon after it began when Khalifa, while still back-pedaling behind Alexander on the left wall, buried a straight-drop shot winner. Khalifa’s nervy salvo marked the second consecutive tournament --- albeit six months apart --- in which he had conjured up a winner in a final-round close-out fourth game after an opponent had crept to 13-14 after trailing big late in the game: in the late-April Kellner Cup, after Stout and Arnold had rallied from 8-13 to 13-14, Khalifa had hit an unreturned forehand reverse-corner winner (also from deep in the court) to thwart that attempted comeback as well. That latter shot this past spring had slowly and mesmerizingly drifted into no-man’s-land, creating just enough momentary confusion between his opponents as to who should retrieve it for neither of them to react in time to prevent the ball from taking a second bounce, whereas this time he struck the ball with such verve and tin-defying accuracy that it semi-nicked on the left wall and died before Alexander had any chance to retrieve it. It was an emphatic conclusion to a memorable match, and one that sets the stage for what should be an exciting stretch of SDA tournaments this autumn and beyond.