James Stout and Scott Arnold Capture SDA Pro Doubles David C. Johnson Memorial In Brooklyn Heights by Rob Dinerman Dateline March 6, 2022
--- Hammered both statistically and territorially throughout a
one-sided opening game against the hottest team on the SDA pro doubles
tour, and later trailing 12-10 in the fourth, top seeds James Stout and
Scott Arnold conjured up a 5-1 match-closing run to defeat Michael
Ferreira and James Bamber 6-15, 15-12, 15-10, 15-13 in the final round
of the David C. Johnson Memorial at the venerable Heights Casino Club
in Brooklyn Heights this past Sunday afternoon. Their comeback victory
enabled Arnold to consolidate his recently acquired No. 1 SDA ranking,
constituted a successful Johnson title defense for Stout, who won this
tournament the last time it was held in 2020 with Yvain Badan
(preceding a Covid-caused complete cancellation of the 2020-21 SDA
schedule), and decisively signaled a resumption of the 2021-22 tour
after an Omicron-caused hiatus that had lasted three and a half months,
dating back to the most recent SDA tour stop at Sleepy Hollow in
mid-November.
That latter tournament had been won by Ferreira and Bamber
by virtue of their five-game final-round triumph over Zac Alexander and
Greg McArthur. Still feeling the momentum of that achievement, Ferreira
and Bamber motored into the finals without coming close to dropping a
single game. They held their semifinal opponents, Chris Callis and Josh
Hollings (pinch-hitting for Manek Mathur, who had tested positive for
Covid a few days before play began), to single-figures in the first
game, but fell behind 7-5 in the second, at which juncture the match
was abruptly and disheartening truncated when Hollings collapsed to the
ground as he tried to accelerate to the front court in pursuit of a
Ferreira drop shot, having suffered a severe tear in his lower left leg
that left him unable to continue.
By contrast, the top-half semi between Stout/Arnold and the
swiftly-improving Aussie pair of recently- retired PSA top-15 players
Ryan Cuskelly and Cam Pilley (quarters winners over Clive Leach and
Adam Bews) was a brutal, lengthy and exhausting five-game
battle-of-attrition marathon in which Cuskelly and Pilley won the first
two games by a combined three points (15-13, 15-14) only to be
tortuously overtaken by 15-11,13 and 9 tallies, with the top seeds, who
had been pressed to the limit throughout their rally, finally asserting
themselves with an 8-2 closing run from 7-all in the fifth, largely due
to a shot-making spree by Arnold that accounted for five of those
points.
The question coming into the final was how much, if any,
influence the widely differing course of the respective semis would
have. Ferreira and Bamber appeared to have provided an emphatic answer
when (as had happened throughout the tournament) they burst from the
gate, burying Stout and Arnold under a blizzard of winners, most of
them sharply-angled backhand reverse-corners or front-side cross-court
nicks off Ferreira’s blazingly-hot racquet. It marked the fifth time in
the eight combined completed games that Ferreira and Bamber had played
to that point in which they had held their opponents under 10 points,
and their series of spectacular shots elicited ringing applause from
the crowded gallery, most of whose members were vocally supporting
Bamber, who just a few months earlier had been named the Head Adult and
Doubles pro at the host club.
Although Stout and Arnold had seemed a step slower than their
road-runner fast opponents during that first game, they wisely slowed
the pace at the outset of the second, focusing not on power but rather
on height and depth, lengthening the exchanges and thereby both
establishing better rhythm for themselves and inducing some
impatience-caused tins from Ferreira and Bamber. Each of the match’s
final three games was hard-fought and marked by riveting all-court
exchanges, several mid-game tactical adjustments and some extraordinary
shot-making and retrieving. This was especially true of the close-out
fourth game, throughout which no team ever held more than a two-point
lead. Ferreira and Bamber forged their way to 12-10, a fifth game
clearly beckoning --- but a Stout forehand overhead into the front-left
nick launched a 4-0 spurt to 14-12. Ferreira blasted a ball down the
middle past Arnold to close the gap to 14-13, but the ensuing point
ended when Ferreira’s backhand volley, which had accounted for so many
winners during this match, this time ricocheted off the tin. All four
players performed at a tremendously high level, which should bode well
for the upcoming several months, during which a number of key
tournaments, several of which had originally occupied slots in January
before they were repositioned to the spring due to the pandemic, are
scheduled to be contested.
