Fifteenth Straight David Johnson Memorial Title For Damien Mudge As He And Viktor Berg Surge To Victory by Rob Dinerman Viktor Berg and Damien Mudge (champions), Chris Callis and Michael Ferreira (finalists), photo Bob Burns
Dateline February 21st ---
Trailing 5-1 in the second game and having lost eight of the previous
10 points, top seeds Damien Mudge and Viktor Berg exploded on a 13-0
run, then engineered an equally devastating 9-0 burst in the following
game to seal their eventual 15-13, 15-6, 15-6 victory over Michael
Ferreira and Chris Callis Sunday afternoon in the final round of the
David C. Johnson Memorial, hosted as always by the Heights Casino Club
in Brooklyn. Mudge thereby won this tournament for a record-shattering
15th straight time --- no other player has ever won a sanctioned
ranking event on the pro doubles tour even half as often consecutively
--- from 2002-07 with Gary Waite, from 2008-10 with Berg, from 2011-15
with Ben Gould and now again in 2016 with Berg in the wake of Gould’s
retirement this past December.
This outcome
also marked the fifth career Johnson crown for Berg, who teamed with
Michael Pirnak to annex the 2001 edition and therefore this afternoon
became the first player in ISDA/SDA pro doubles history to post
tournament victories at a tour site 15 years apart. In both 2009 (when
they trailed Preston Quick and John Russell 2-1, 13-12 before winning
that game in a tiebreaker and then taking the fifth 15-9) and 2010
(when they edged Gould and Paul Price 15-13 in the fifth), Berg and
Mudge were on the very brink of losing. But today they played
throughout at an extraordinary level and rolled to a thoroughly
convincing victory in front of a packed and appreciative gallery.
Both teams qualified for the final with identical 15-14-in-the-fourth
semifinal wins Saturday evening. Mudge and Berg were pushed hard by
Clive Leach and Raj Nanda, while Ferreira and Callis barely fended off
Matt Jenson and Preston Quick, authors of a quarterfinal15-14
fifth-game masterpiece at the expense of second seeds and newly-crowned
North American Open champions Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, who let a
12-3 lead get away and fell victim to a perfect Quick forehand
three-wall nick at simultaneous-match-ball. Those similar backdrops
aside, there were only two brief interruptions in the otherwise
match-long dominance that the Mudge/Berg pairing displayed in the
final. The first occurred late in the first game continuing into early
second when they let most of a 14-10 first-game edge slip away before
Berg caught a front-left nick to clinch that game, then, as noted,
briefly fell behind at the outset of the second. The other temporary
down patch took place early in the third game, when they were tied at
5-all after initially leading 5-1.
But in both
cases their responses to these short slumps were relentless and
prolonged stretches of sustained brilliance that carried them to 14-5
in each game en route to the eventual 15-6 tallies. Mudge, pouncing on
the ball and firing off his piercing salvos off both flanks, was his
usual formidable self. But it was Berg’s imaginative play and
tremendously creative shot selection and execution that emphatically
doomed whatever hopes Callis and Ferreira may have had of pulling off
an upset. Callis, a 2012 Princeton graduate and as such the only player
in the foursome below age 34 (Mudge, the oldest player on court, turns
40 in mid-May), became enmeshed in a fierce but losing cross-court
battle with Mudge, while Ferreira, hurried and out of sync, started
cutting his shots too fine, resulting in costly tins that added to the
Mudge/Berg momentum.
During those long runs
against them in the last two games, both Ferreira and Callis were
competing hard and making exceptional defensive retrievals to keep the
points going. However they were under so much pressure, both offensive
and defensive, that the constant barrage hurled at them increasingly
resembled a two-man power play in hockey. Berg’s daring roll-corner
volleys to the front-left accounted for a half-dozen winners, with a
like number of points being registered in the Mudge/Berg column when
they blasted the ball through the undefended middle. Had there been any
let-up in the quality of their play, the games might have been
contested on much more even terms --- but on this occasion, with
milestone marks looming for each of them, Mudge and Berg never took
their foot off the pedal and they sprinted unstoppably to and through
the finish line.
