Damien Mudge, SDA All-Time Greatest Doubles Player, Retires by Rob Dinerman Dateline August 14th, 2019
--- Damien Mudge, the most accomplished doubles player in the history
of the sport and the Squash Doubles Association’s (SDA) “all-time
leading scorer” by a wide margin, has decided to retire from the tour
after 19 years of record-shattering achievement. Mudge, 43, underwent a
major allograft procedure on his right knee (his seventh knee surgery
overall, the fourth on his right leg) in August 2018 and was sidelined
throughout the subsequent 2018-19 SDA season. With his leg currently
still at least several months away from being ready to return to
SDA-level competition, and in deference to the cumulative effect of a
number of other injuries and depleting maladies that have befallen him
over the course of nearly two decades of grueling play --- among them
shoulder and wrist injuries, one of which required the insertion of a
pin for several months to stabilize the joint; a painful neuroma and a
plantar fascia tear on his right foot; a two-and-a-half-year bout with
chronic-fatigue-syndrome; and multiple concussions --- Mudge, who has
been based at the University Club of New York for more than two
decades, the last 18 as its head squash pro, recently concluded that
the time has come for him to end his doubles career.
And what an extraordinary career it has been! Mudge has
been ranked No. 1 virtually uninterrupted since the outset of the
1999-2000 season, when he and Gary Waite had the first of their three
wire-to-wire undefeated seasons (also 2001-02 and 2004-05). After seven
years (and 75 tournament wins, the most all-time of any combination)
with Waite, Mudge switched to the left wall and led the tour in wins
first from 2007-10 with Viktor Berg and then from 2010-15 with Ben
Gould before joining forces with Manek Mathur prior to the 2016-17
season. After losing to Michael Ferreira and Yvain Badan, 15-13 in the
fifth, in their debut as partners at the Maryland Club Open final in
September 2016, Mudge and Mathur went undefeated throughout the
remainder of both that season and the 2017-18 season that followed,
covering 16 straight tournaments and 54 consecutive matches, while
receiving the SDA Team of the Year Award both years. Mudge with his
various partners has won nearly 175 pro doubles tournaments, more than
double the number amassed by any other player, and he holds the
most-times-won record for every established tournament on the SDA
schedule, highlighted by 15 North American Opens, 10 Kellner Cups, six
Briggs Cups and 17 David Johnson Invitational titles (all in a row from
2002-18) at the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn. His Player of The Year
and Doubles Team of the Year Awards totals far exceed anyone else’s and
in all five seasons during the nearly two decades that the SDA and its
forerunner, the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) have
existed in which one team has gone undefeated, Mudge has been on that
team: as noted, three times with Waite as well as in 2010-11 with Gould
and 2017-18 with Mathur.
In their eighth and final appearance of the 2017-18
season, the Tavern Club Invitational in Cleveland, Mathur and Mudge
capped off their 24-0 slate with a four-game final-round win over John
Russell and Scott Arnold that swung on the forehand drive that Mathur
lashed down the left wall for a clear winner at 14-all in the third
game that put his team ahead to stay. Earlier in that game, Mudge,
playing in his first tournament since undergoing a right-knee
arthroscopic procedure to repair torn cartilage slightly more than a
month earlier, planted to reverse direction and felt a searing pain in
that joint, greatly reducing his mobility for the rest of that match. A
subsequent examination immediately upon his return to New York revealed
that he had blown a hole through the cartilage around the medial part
of the knee, necessitating the allograft procedure, a far more
complicated and invasive operation than any if its predecessors and one
that involves transplanting the cartilage of a cadaver to fill the
hole. Mathur’s 2018-19 season ended prematurely as well when he
ruptured his left Achilles tendon in the late-October 2018 Big Apple
Open at the New York Athletic Club. Mudge was in attendance that night,
sitting in the bench just behind the glass back wall of the host club’s
doubles court and, ironically in light of how full of energy and health
both he and Mathur had been during their undefeated 2017-18 season, it
was Mudge’s crutch that Mathur had to lean on in order to exit the
court after incurring his own serious season-ending injury.
Mudge’s retirement punctuates a Spring/Summer
2019 period during which some of the all-time best players in squash’s
various professional Associations have stepped away from the sport.
Five-time British Open champion Nicol David, who enjoyed nearly a
decade atop the women’s pro singles tour, retired this past spring as
did three-time World Open Champion Ramy Ashour, two-time British Open
champion Laura Massaro and former World No. 2 Jenny Duncalf. In recent
years Mudge had been the only SDA player whose playing career dated
back to the formation of the ISDA in February 2000, making him the
bridge that spanned the early-2000’s top-tier group consisting of
Waite, Berg, Clive Leach, Blair Horler, Willie Hosey, Michael Pirnak,
David Kay, Scott Dulmage, Jamie Bentley, Scott Stoneburgh and Anders
Wahlstedt, and extended through the Gould/Russell/Paul Price/Preston
Quick/Greg Park set of stars later that decade and into the next, all
the way to the Mathur/Callis/Yvain Badan/Michael Ferreira/Bernardo
Samper/James Stout/Greg McArthur contingent of players headlining the
current era. Throughout that lengthy time frame encapsulating several
player generations, the only relentless constant has been Damien
Mudge’s standing as the dominant player in professional doubles squash
in North America, and his retirement symbolizes the passing of a
glorious era in the history of squash on this continent.
