Will Mariani And Fred Reid Jr. Capture Assante Wealth Ontario Doubles Men’s Open Championship by Rob Dinerman
photos Lynsey Yates
Dateline December 7th
--- Trailing 8-6 in the fifth game and with the play seemingly on the
verge of permanently getting away from them, second seeds Will Mariani
and Fred Reid Jr. conjured up a heroic match-closing nine-point run to
defeat Robin Clarke and Rob Nigro 15-11, 10-15, 15-7, 12-15, 15-8 this
past Sunday afternoon in the final round of the Assante Wealth Ontario
Doubles Men’s Open Championships before a capacity crowd at the
Badminton & Racquet Club in downtown Toronto. Mariani and Reid,
finalists at an SDA professional tour stop in Cleveland in 2014, had
advanced through a pair of pre-final matches without dropping a game,
including in their semifinal tilt with SDA No. 7 Scott Arnold and his
partner Jamie Nicholls, but they let a fourth-game 12-10 advantage get
away and seemed to be in retreat in the opening portion of the fifth
game before catching fire in the nick of time down the stretch.
The 12-team field might have been the strongest in many
years, though the event kicked off on a down note when Ted Fleming
ruptured his Achilles tendon in the very first match of the competition
Thursday afternoon after he and his partner Sanjeev Chada had split the
first two games against Jarvis Strachan and Mark Porter and were ahead
12-6 in the third. Strachan and Porter then lost to Arnold and
Nicholls, who subsequently dropped their three airtight games with the
eventual champs by a combined five points, 15-14, 15-12, 15-14.
Meanwhile, in the top half, No. 1 seeds and six-time Ontario’s winners
Scott Dulmage and Richard Thompson straight-gamed Joel Goulding and
Jonathan Madruga (round-of-16 winners over Tournament Chair Eric
Baldwin, the long-time head pro at the host club, and his power-hitting
partner Chris Deratnay) but were edged out in the closing points of all
three of their semifinal games with Clarke and Nigro, who earlier had
defeated Alex Carter and Jeff Lurie in the quarterfinals.
The final was hard-fought and undulating, with the teams
taking turns controlling the action. Mariani and Reid seemed positioned
to finish it off in four but tinned out at the end of that game. The
cross-roads moment of the fifth came at 8-7, with four straight
tension-building exchanges all ending in lets. On the fifth attempt,
Nigro, who had been remarkably error-free the entire weekend, committed
a bad tin, and this seemed to liberate Mariani and Reid, who by then
were also likely aware that Clarke had strained a groin muscle a few
points earlier, limiting his normally formidable mobility. Mariani
nailed one cross-court past Nigro and then fooled everyone with a
scorcher right down the middle. Reid then contributed front-left
winners on the final three points, including one daring straight-drop
from the back wall to get to match-ball, following which he hit an
angled forehand roll-corner winner with Clarke trapped behind the red
line to finish off his team’s surge to the tape.
There was also a six-team Women’s Open event, in which
Heather MacLean and Paula Jenkins surprised their favored opponents
Robbin Morrison and Michele Ramsey, 15-13 in the fourth game, before
then bowing to Marci Sier and her partner Kelly Kuru, a badminton
player who only recently has taken up squash doubles. Sier and Kuru
then trailed top seeds Seanna Keating and Caro Sambrook two games to
one in the final (semis winners over Lauren Sachvie and Rebecca Hazell)
but came up with their best squash of the weekend in the 15-9, 15-8
close-out games, most notably when they went from 5-all to 12-6 in the
defining stretch of the fifth. Sier, who has won tournaments on the
WDSA women’s pro tour, displayed her characteristic athleticism, but it
was Kuru whose winners late in the fifth game played the biggest role
in getting her team over the top.
