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.