Clinton Leeuw And Hamed Anvari Capture Silver Racquet Doubles Crown by Rob Dinerman Dateline November 11, 2018
-- Trailing 6-2 in the third game in a match throughout much of which
they heretofore had seemed out of sync and off their game, Clinton
Leeuw and Hamed Anvari suddenly conjured up a 9-0 run which launched
them to a 13-15, 15-10, 15-9, 15-12 victory over Will Hartigan and Will
Ahmed this afternoon in the final round of the 26th annual Silver
Racquet Doubles, hosted as always by the Racquet & Tennis Club in
mid-town Manhattan. Hartigan (who won the 2015 edition of this event
with Addison West), Leeuw and Anvari are all ranked in the Nos. 22-29
range on the SDA pro doubles tour, which has no event this weekend
before resuming next week with the Bentley Cup at the Cambridge Club in
Toronto. Hartigan/Ahmed and Leeuw/Anvari had advanced to their Sunday
summit with four-game semifinal wins over Rishi Tandon/Valentin Quan
and former University of Rochester teammates Adam Perkiomaki and Will
Newnham respectively.
Leeuw and Anvari committed a combined eight tins, many of them
unforced, in losing the first game, capped off by a bad one on an
attempted Anvari forehand three-wall after they had crept to 13-14.
They responded by upping the pace in the second, which opened up the
court for Leeuw to score on soft forehand volleys into the front-right
nick, complemented by a series of tight Anvari reverse- and
roll-corners. But in the early part of the third game, they relapsed
into sloppy play, enabling Hartigan to pounce on some loose balls and
Ahmed to punch shallow winners on his forehand volley. The nine-point
streak that permanently turned the match around had a low-key start
(when Leeuw scraped a drive off the left side wall that skittered just
above the tin) but progressively gathered momentum, to the point that
by the time the score had grown to 11-6, Hartigan and Ahmed appeared to
be on their heels and wilting under the constant pressure that their
opponents were exerting as Leeuw and Anvari saw an opening and seized
it.
After closing out that game, Leeuw and Anvari moved to 12-8 in
the fourth, seemingly in control, only to have the lead almost
completely disappear when Hartigan successfully went for broke on a
difficult drop shot, followed by unforced errors by first Anvari
and then Leeuw to narrow the tally to 11-12. A pair of long points that
ended with Anvari forehand overheads that rolled out of the front-left
nick (with a mis-hit Hartigan winning drop shot in between) made the
score 14-12, leading to the final exchange of the day, on which a
momentary but costly miscommunication between Hartigan and Ahmed on an
innocent-appearing Leeuw backhand cross-court down the middle wound up
with both Wills desperately flailing at the ball in the back-right
corner and neither able to get enough of a racquet on it to steer it
back into play. The last three holdings of this tournament have now
been won by the theoretical maximum of six different players (with West
and Whitten Morris triumphing in 2016 and James Bamber and Steve
Scharff prevailing in 2017), and no pairing has made it to the winner's
circle in consecutive years in the decade that has now passed since
Morris and his current SDA partner Michael Ferreira accomplished this
feat in 2007 and 2008.
