Baset Chaudhry And Whitten Morris Win Thrilling Silver Racquet Final   
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline November 10th --- Pounded by a ten-point game-ending run against them in the fourth game and trailing 13-10 in the fifth, their early-match advantage reduced to a distant memory in a match-up laden with club and college bonds and rivalries, top seeds Whitten Morris and Baset Chaudhry conjured up a match-saving five-point surge to defeat second seeds Michael Ferreira and Bernardo Samper 15-11 13-15 15-12 4-15 15-13 Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 21st annual Silver Racquet Invitational, hosted as always by the Racquet & Tennis Club in mid-town Manhattan. Long known as one of the highest-end and most competitive Open/Amateur tournaments of the entire doubles season, this year's edition, and particularly the pulsating final, lived up to this reputation and then some, and it is doubtful that there has ever in the history of this championship been a match of higher pace and quality than characterized the rubber-burning, air-sucking 100-minute punch-out that took place in the cathedral-like setting of this host venue.

   Morris, whose prolonged tinning patch caused his team's collapse in the fourth game but whose late-game firepower accounted for the match-deciding sequence late in the fifth, has now won this tournament six times, the last three with three different partners, having triumphed three times with Ferreira in the mid-2000's as well as with Addison West in 2011, with Trevor McGuinness last year and now with Chaudhry.

   First-time partners Chaudhry (who also partnered Julian Illingworth to the quarterfinal round of the Big Apple Open, an SDA pro-doubles tour stop held this same weekend several blocks northwest at the New York Athletic Club, hence played eight matches between Thursday night and Sunday afternoon) and Morris had charged into the final by posting consecutive straight-set wins over first Rob Dinerman and Tony Maruca, then University Club pros Carl Baglio and Jordan Greenberg (first -round victors over Peter Cipriano and Will Hartigan), and then Chris Callis and Alex Domenick, 15-14 fourth-game quarterfinal winners over Tim Wyant and Illingworth. Meanwhile, in the bottom half, early-2000's Trinity College teammates Ferreira and Samper had earned four-game victories over, sequentially, Morris Clothier and Pat Haynes, Dylan Patterson and Peter Kelly (15-13 fifth-game round-of-16 winners over Will Newnham and Adam Bews) and West and Todd Ruth, who had followed a convincing quarters win against Yasser El-Halaby and Coly Smith by forging a 1-0, 10-6 lead over Ferreira/Samper before the latter duo overtook them in that game and fully controlled the subsequent pair of single-figure games.

  The final featured three Trinity College No. 1's (Ferreira, 2002 Individuals champ Samper and 2008 and 2009 Individuals winner Chaudhry) and three R&T members in Ferreira, Morris and Chaudhry (indeed nine of the 17 entered teams had at least one member of the host club). Each of the first two games was decided by mid-game streak, with Chaudhry/Morris going from 6-all to 12-7 to account for the first game and Ferreira/Morris breaking away to a seemingly safe 14-9 edge in the second before their opponents, fueled by Morris's hard-serving salvos, crept to 13-14. Ferreira's dead-nick backhand straight-drop enabled his team to escape with that game, but Chaudhry and Morris upped the pace in the third game and took an early lead which they never relinquished to go up, two games to one.

   The fourth was evenly contested early on until at 5-4, with Ferreira serving, Morris's racquet broke and he promptly committed three consecutive tins and five in seven points, a lapse which Ferreira and Samper, as noted, seized upon to sweep through the remainder of that game. They are capable of accumulating substantial skeins of points swiftly, as had happened in that second game of their semifinal four hours earlier, and, after struggling through the early portion of the fifth game, they rode a deadly Ferreira shooting spree (two consecutive-point backhand reverse-corner winners to take a 7-6 lead, followed by two consecutive-point drop-nick winners) to get to 12-10, following which Morris, who had tinned twice in that mid-game segment as play on the right wall became increasingly physical between himself and Samper, hit a ball back at himself, leading to a stroke call against him and a 13-10 lead for the second seeds.

   But in a match that, for all its frantic pace, amazing gets and fierce mid-court exchanges, featured a number of out-of-the-blue swings of momentum, it seemed fitting that there would be one final turn of the screw. A Morris double-boast winner, followed first by a Ferreira tin of the same fearless drop shot that he had been hitting for winners and then by a Morris cross-court blast that forced Ferreira's response to sail out of court, tying the score at 13-all. With the recently-approved no-set rule now in play (precluding the best-of-five and best-of-nine tiebreaker choices that had always previously been available), Morris overpowered Ferreira with a forehand cross-court (14-13, match-ball) and then terminated the match in emphatic fashion with a forehand mid-court volleyed three-wall that hit just low enough on the nick to barely elude Ferreira's desperate attempt to steer it back into play. It was a tremendous display of athleticism and firepower on both sides and a poetically just capstone to a remarkable Silver Racquet weekend.