James Stout And Morris Clothier Capture Silver Racquet Squash Doubles Crown by Rob Dinerman
Champions James Stout and Morris Clothier, Tournament Chairman
Liam Culman, Games Committee Chairman Christopher Scott, Finalists
Brian Leonard and Elroy Leong (photo Barney Tanfield)
Dateline November 10, 2024
--- Trailing two games to love in their first-round match, James Stout
and Morris Clothier won three straight games and three straight
subsequent matches, capping off their run with a back-and-forth 15-12,
1-15, 15-11, 5-15, 15-12 win Sunday afternoon over Elroy Leong and
Brian Leonard in the final round of the Silver Racquet Squash Doubles
tournament, held as always at the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown
Manhattan. After barely losing (by three combined points) the first two
games of their round-of-16 match-up against former Princeton teammates
Henry Parkhurst and Duncan Joyce, the Stout/Clothier duo made a
positional adjustment --- moving Clothier further up on the right wall
and having Stout cover behind him when necessary --- that paid off
handsomely both in that match and in the trio that followed by
maximizing Stout’s extraordinary retrieving ability and allowing
Clothier to implement his remarkable creativity and shot-making skills
to telling effect.
For Clothier, 18 years (and two total-hip-replacement operations)
removed from the record sixth Silver Racquets Doubles title he had won
with Michael Ferreira in 2006, his weekend-long performance, coming
barely more than a month after his milestone 60th birthday,
demonstrated the completeness of his recovery from a right-hamstring
tear this past April (forcing him and partner Val Quan to default their
Union Club member/guest final-round match against Adham Madi and Carter
Robitaille) that was so severe that he wasn’t able to return to the
court until well after Labor Day. Stout similarly had his season-ending
tournament last spring end in disappointing fashion when he and his
partner Scott Arnold barely (15-13 in the fourth) lost the Kellner Cup
final to Osama Khalifa and Chris Callis in the match that determined
the 2023-24 season-ending No. 1 team ranking on the SDA pro doubles
tour.
Both Clothier and Stout --- respectively the President and Head Squash
and Rackets Professional of the host club --- emphatically put those
seven-month-old setbacks fully behind them with their sequential
victories over Parkhurst/Joyce, second seeds Jonny Smith and Robby
Berner (also a five-gamer), former Princeton No. 1 Daelum Mawji and
2013 Intercollegiate Individual champion Amr Khalifa, and Leonard and
Leong. The pivotal moment of the Stout/Clothier vs. Smith/Berner match
came in the third game when, with Smith/Berner ahead 14-13, their hard
serves on each of the next two points were answered with serve-return
winners, a Clothier forehand straight-drop shot followed by a blazing
and tin-defying reverse-corner off Stout’s racquet.
The Leong/Leonard pairing had advanced to the final by stringing
together a pair of pre-semis five-game wins of their own (over former
Harvard captains Reed Endresen/Zeke Scherl and No. 1 seeds Osama
Khalifa and Will Ahmed) before then out-lasting Dylan Patterson (who
won this event with Steve Scharff in 2010) and Kyle Martino, three
games to one. In the finals, they raced away with the one-sided second
and fourth games but were victimized by extensive mid-game
Stout/Clothier scoring streaks in the first, third and fifth that in
each case put Leong and Leonard in too deep a hole to climb completely
out of. In the fifth game, Stout and Clothier, after losing the first
two points, surged to leads of 11-6 and 14-9. Leong and Leonard
valiantly earned the next three points, but the ensuing exchange ended
on a Leong volley that sailed over the back-wall boundary line.
Throughout the fifth game, and really throughout the tournament, the
intense defensive pressure that Stout by his very presence exerts on
his opponents --- who are constantly aware of the need to either change
their shots or cut them too fine due to their awareness that he is
lurking behind them and ready to pounce on whatever they hit, even when
he is wrong-footed or caught way out of position --- played a huge role
in the eventual outcome, as did Clothier’s imaginative shot selection
and execution. Ultimately the combination was more than any of their
four extremely worthy opponents were able to successfully handle,
although the 19 games that Stout and Clothier had to play speaks
volumes about how exciting and competitive this edition of the Silver
Racquets Squash Doubles tournament was for everyone involved.
