Smith And Nanda Capture Inaugural UVA Challenger Tourney As SDA Season Gets Underway
by Rob Dinerman

photo courtesy Mary Johnson

Dateline September 22nd --- Sternly tested at every step of their three-match path to victory, third seeds Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda resolutely pounded their way through a series of four-game triumphs to capture the inaugural $15,000 UVA Challenger tournament, thereby both beginning the 2013-14 SDA Tour and baptizing the brand-new McArthur Center at the University Of Virginia in memorable fashion. Smith and Nanda defeated first Graham Bassett and Ian Power, then first-time partners Chris Walker and Hamed Anvari and finally top seeds James Stout and Greg McArthur, who had raced into the final without dropping a game prior to falling to Smith and Nanda by a score of 15-8 14-15 15-11 15-11.

  Both final-round opponents had won Challenger tournaments in recent years, with Smith and Nanda taking the 2010 Pittsburgh Cup and Stout and McArthur doing the same at the Graham Cup in Germantown six months ago at the final-round expense of John Russell and John White. A rematch of that taut final last spring (three of whose four games had been knotted at 13-all) had been expected this weekend, which Russell and White had entered as second seeds, but they let a two games to one advantage get away in their opening-round match with Anvari and Walker, who then took the first game of their semifinal with Nanda and Smith before the eventual champs then prevailed, albeit barely (15-14 in the fourth), through the ensuing three games.

   While Smith (a World Doubles finalist with Clive Leach last April) and Nanda were wending their way through the bottom half of the eight-team draw, Stout and McArthur were earning straight-set wins over, sequentially, Matt Domenick and Chris Callis, who had qualified into the main draw by out-playing the favored Canadian duo of Will Mariani and Jeff Lurie, and former Trinity College teammates Shaun Johnstone and Jacques Swanepoel, who had reached that semifinal stage by out-lasting Canadians Thomas Brinkman and Fred Reid Jr. in five. After dropping the first game of today’s final, McArthur and Stout then eked out the 15-14 second but Smith and Nanda reasserted themselves throughout the pair of 15-11 tallies that closed out the weekend’s action. The first full-ranking stop of the SDA season, the tenth annual Maryland Club Open, will take place in downtown Baltimore three weeks hence.