James Stout And Will Newnham Capture New York Athletic Club Invitational by Rob Dinerman NYAC Invitational Champs James Stout, left, and Will Newnham
Dateline January 31st
--- Trailing two games to one against a fearsome top-seeded pair of
opponents who have been racking up almost all the major amateur doubles
tournaments over the past 13 months, second seeds James Stout and his
fellow Racquet & Tennis pro Will Newnham rallied to overtake
Addison West and Will Hartigan by a 15-14, 12-15, 5-15, 15-9, 15-9
tally early Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 2016 New York
Athletic Club Invitational. West and Hartigan, winners in calendar 2015
of the William White, the Silver Racquets and the Gold Racquets, had
surmounted a two games to one deficit in their 15-12 fifth-game
semifinal win over Tim Wyant and Steve Scharff, and they seemed to have
commandeered the momentum when they mounted a 6-1 surge from 3-8 to
9-all in the fifth game of the final. But at this juncture Newnham, who
had borne the brunt of the West/Hartigan attack throughout the match,
contributed four untouchable winners to his team’s 6-0 sprint to the
tape.
The 16-team draw was undoubtedly the
strongest and deepest in the seven-year history of this tournament, and
there were upsets and close matches all the way through. Defending
champions Josh Schwartz and Peter Kelly, after winning the first two
games of their round-of-16 tilt with Rob Dinerman and Will Morris,
dropped the third and trailed 14-13 in the fourth before rescuing that
game 15-14. They then lost their quarterfinal to Patrick Haynes and
Andres Vargas, the first setback in this tournament in five years for
Schwartz, who had won this event three-straight times with Hamed Anvari
from 2012-14 before successfully teaming up with Kelly a year ago.
Haynes and Vargas were then out-played by the eventual champs Stout and
Newnham, who themselves were nearly pressed to a fifth game in their
quarterfinal with Eric Christiansen and current Dickenson College (PA)
coach Chris Sachvie, but were able to salvage the close-out fourth
15-14.
While this series of hectic battles were
being fought in the draw’s bottom half, Hartigan and West triumphed
over first former Brunswick Academy teammates Parker Hurst and Sam Haig
and then Brad Hathaway and Terence Li to qualify for their route-going
semi against Scharff/Wyant, quarterfinal victors over Eric Bedell and
Dylan Patterson in a rugged four-game contest. During most of the first
game of the final pitting two Racquet & Tennis members against two
Racquet & Tennis pros, Hartigan and West frequently seemed on the
verge of decisively asserting themselves without ever actually doing
so. Stout and Newnham kept staving them off and staying within range on
the scoreboard all the way to 13-14, at which stage they benefited from
two consecutive fortuitous winners --- the first on a Stout inside-out
backhand that took a strange bounce that caused it to veer sharply down
the right wall before Hartigan could react, and the second when a
reflex Newnham volley off a blast by West trickled tantalizingly over
the tin --- that enabled them to come away with a one-game-to-love lead.
Chastened and to some degree galvanized by the way a game that had
seemed to be theirs to win had slipped away from them in this fickle
fashion, West and Hartigan both elevated their level, controlling the
second game and routing their opponents in the one-sided third, during
the last half of which Newnham appeared to be wilting beneath the
constant barrage. West was crushing his backhand cross-courts at him,
and Hartigan was scoring on sharp forehand reverse-corners to the
front-right and throwing in frequent Philadelphia angles to the
back-right as well. But in the fourth game, Stout, the reigning world
rackets champion, became a more formidable factor and Newnham found a
second wind, catching West hovering behind the red line and holding his
own in their cross-court battles.
After
evening the match at two games apiece with a late four-point burst,
Newnham and Stout, as mentioned, took a significant early lead in the
fifth as well, aided by some aggressive winners and a quartet of
West/Hartigan errors. But when Hartigan (who began his team’s comeback
bid with a nervy drop shot from deep in the court) and West then amped
up the pace in a blistering comeback that resulted in three stroke
calls against Newnham and tied the score at 9-all, it definitely looked
like they were on their way to yet another addition to their
already-sizable list of impressive tournament wins. It is therefore a
tribute to Stout , who throughout the match was everywhere he needed to
be with his court coverage and timely, imaginative winners, and
especially to Newnham, who bent but never broke and who came up with
perhaps the best extended stretch of his career during the final six
points, that they were able to repulse the tide against them in a
flurry of all-court exchanges, every one of which ended with one of
them conjuring up the final defining salvo. Newnham’s slew of
crunch-time winners included two inside-out three-wall nicks, a
floor-hugging reverse corner and a match-ending cross-drop that caught
West off guard and behind the red line.
In the other NYAC Invitational draws, the men’s singles was won by
Clinton Leeuw, who rose superior to Sachvie in the semis and to former
Trinity College all-American Michael Ferreira (semis winner over junior
sensation Sam Scherl) in a high-quality though straight-game final. In
the women’s events, Julie Cerullo first defeated Annie Madeira in the
singles final and then teamed up with Elise O’Connell to win the
doubles final in four games over Kelly Whipple and Laura Pyne.
