Top Two Seeds Ryan Cuskelly And Campbell Grayson To Contest Inaugural Blue Devil Challenge In Brooklyn by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 6th ---
Trailing 10-9 and one point away from having to deal with what would
have been a perilous fifth game against an aroused opponent hungry for
a big win, second-seeded Campbell Grayson conjured up three consecutive
winners and emerged with a hard-fought 9-11, 11-4, 11-6, 12-10 victory
over Chris Hanson Saturday evening in the semifinal round of the $5,000
Blue Devil Challenge, held on the dynamic and brand-new facility at
Poly Prep in Brooklyn. Grayson, currently ranked 45th on the PSA pro
tour, will now face top seed and PSA No. 16 Ryan Cuskelly, an 11-3,
11-8, 6-11, 11-5 winner over Clinton Leeuw, in Sunday’s early-afternoon
final. Both Leeuw, the only unseeded player to reach the final four in
the wake of his straight-set quarterfinal victory over fourth seed
Arthur Gaskin, and a visibly improved Hanson gave their favored
opponents all they could handle but eventually the higher seeds
asserted themselves in the defining stretches of their respective
close-out fourth games, Cuskelly with a 7-1 match-ending skein from
4-all in the fourth game to 9-4, 11-5, and Grayson, as noted, by
repulsing the game-ball against him and asserting himself in the
match’s final few exchanges.
In the first semi,
Cuskelly was largely in control through the first game and most of the
second, relentlessly executing his penetrating ground game and keeping
Leeuw off-balance and consistently having to extemporize in unfavorable
circumstances. But late in the second game, Leeuw saved three
game-balls against him and crept to 8-10 by mixing in some well-placed
lobs that gave him time to regain the tee while simultaneously
disturbing the rhythmic pace that Cuskelly had heretofore established.
Although the left-handed Cuskelly wound up winning that game on a
forehand drive that clung too close to the left wall for Leeuw to
return, the latter carried his strong play into and through the third
game, scoring on late-swing wrist flicks and drawing some errors from
Cuskelly’s racquet as well. The fourth was evenly contested, both
territorially and on the scoreboard, to 4-all, whereupon Cuskelly
opportunistically exploited a series of small but costly Leeuw lapses
in a five-point burst to 9-4 that effectively determined the outcome.
Leeuw committed a pair of consecutive backhand tins on the final two
points. Ultimately Cuskelly was able to convert his openings more
efficiently than Leeuw, but this was a tough all-court battle all the
way through.
So was the ensuing battle between
Grayson and Hanson, who seemed the more eager player at the match’s
outset, especially during a mid-game run from 5-all to 10-6 in which
Grayson hit several errors that appeared to stem more from frustration
than any technical deficiency in his swing. Grayson grimly drew to 9-10
but Hanson, a southpaw like his Westchester training partner Cuskelly,
responded by lashing a forehand with perfect width down the left wall
to finish off that game. However, he was unable to sustain the high
level at which he played the first game, contributing three tins, two
of them on the first two points, to Grayson’s 6-0 lead in the second
game, and yielding a five-point run at 4-all in the third, just as
Leeuw had done at exactly the same juncture of his fourth game against
Cuskelly 45 minutes earlier. After Grayson had finished off that game,
the fourth became a dogfight, with increasingly physical jockeying for
position at mid-court, an unending sequence of tortuous all-court
exchanges and several questionable referee’s decisions, including a
no-let call against Grayson that knotted the issue at 9-all.
Angered by that ruling, Grayson tinned a forehand cross-drop to give
Hanson (who had trailed 7-4 and 9-7 just minutes earlier) his 10-9
advantage. But Grayson then rose to the occasion with a backhand
straight-drop winner, then benefited from a fortuitous bounce when the
ball hit the left side wall and dropped straight down at so unusual an
angle that Hanson was unable to react to it in time. At match-ball,
Grayson carved a front-court winner down the right wall, but Hanson
clearly has come a long way and currently plays with a spark and an
energy level that his game lacked as recently as last season.
Perhaps the biggest winner of the night was the actual venue itself, an
extremely impressive six-court facility (including two stadium
four-glass-wall courts) that, combined with the three
previously-existing courts, gives Poly Prep an imposing nine courts,
all this in a city that has been steadily hemorrhaging squash
courts (including the four that were lost just last month when the
Uptown Racquet Club closed its doors after 40 years) in recent years.
Former PSA No. 1 Peter Nicol, who was present in the gallery all night,
is in residence at the school, and CitySquash is using the facility as
well for a Brooklyn-based addition to the youth-enrichment program it
has run in the Bronx for nearly 20 years. In a winter that has had its
share of ups and downs in the squash world, this is one noteworthy
instance of the sport taking a significant step in a positive direction.
Semis Results:
Ryan Cuskelly d. Clinton Leeuw, 11-3, 11-8, 6-11, 11-5.
Campbell Grayson d. Chris Hanson, 9-11, 11-4, 11-6, 12-10.
