By Stu Hadden
March
Madness Doubles Tournament – London, Ontario, Feb 28-29
As many
of you may be aware, Mick and I are far from doubles specialists. But, we have
recently made the decision to work on our doubles game. Last weekend Haytham Hermiz, Mick and I traveled to
the 'fake' London (Ontario) in search of glory and silverware at the hardball
doubles event appropriately named “March Madness”… even though it was in
February for some strange reason.
Friday night’s
match for us was anything but straightforward as we had only ever played one
doubles match together and were struggling at the start to get to grips with
the very different tactics of this type of squash. Our opponents on the other
hand almost exclusively play doubles and were, for want of a better turn of phrase,
crafty little scoundrels. We slowly but surely adapted our strategies
throughout round 1 and by the end of the match had hit decent form. I was
playing mainly high and deep, generating loose balls for the Australian sniper
waiting on the right wall to shoot the lights out.
Haytham, as per usual had brought his
running shoes with him and picked up far too many balls for his opposition to
be in with any reasonable shout of winning. In the bar that evening he and one
of his opponents for the semifinals – Owen - produced one of the finest
displays of Jamison drinking and smack talk that I have ever witnessed, the
kind usually reserved only for Australia vs England cricket matches. When I am
king of England, I fully intend to offer him honorary citizenship for his
efforts both in the bar and on the court where he miraculously turned up for
his at 9am contest the next morning and duly backed up the trash-talking with a
3-1 shellacking over Owen.
In our semifinal
we were up against stiff opposition in the 2 seeds who are serial winners of
the DAC Classic A doubles draw. Unfortunately for them we picked up where we
left off at the end of our last match and I had finally figured out the
technique for putting the ball away on the backhand side. Ultimately we
trounced them 3-0 in just shy of 45m, putting on a clean and crisp display of
doubles.
We then
watched the other semifinal and realized we were in big trouble. The left wall
in our match would end up looking like Harry Potter vs Hagrid as the left
hander from Toronto (Will Byrick) had
me by well over a foot. The oak hit the ball like an absolute rocket and had a
polished classic forehand technique. Surveilling his first game was pretty
amazing as he rolled out nick after nick beating
Brad Hanebury and his partner Derek
Moore almost single handedly 15-2. On the left wall, Mick was also clearly going
to be in for a bit of a night. His opponent (Chris Boden) not only hit the ball harder than both of us but had a
real set of wheels on him, regularly throwing out full length splits, dives and
pirouettes.
After
watching Haytham claim victory in the C doubles we felt inspired (pressured?!) to go and do the same. A
late start at 9pm, but the time came around quickly and suddenly we were up. As
expected our opponents got off to a good start, slotting winners and trying to
hit the ball through the front wall. I hadn’t found my range on the cross court
nick yet and gave away a bit of a lead which we would eventually peg back. We
made it to 14-14 before Mick’s opponent jumped about 3 feet in the air and
rolled out a nick to give them the first. Bugger.
The
second was one of the worst games of squash I personally remember playing, with
yours truly missing the ball on three
serve returns in a row. Mick was probably getting ready to bury me in the hill
out back – or make me walk back to Detroit in my squash shorts in the 25 degree
weather. Needless to say with my
“scintillating” form we were quickly 2-0 down.
We were
far from done though. Coming out guns
blazing in the third, we caught them off guard with a far more aggressive style
of play. Comfortably taking the third. The fourth game was solid but at the
back end of it, Chris suddenly caught fire and had a patch of about 5 mins
where he simply couldn’t and wouldn’t miss – which made him shoot even more -
and was completely unplayable. Even Mick’s last ditch dive (old-man stumble?) wouldn’t
be enough to keep us in the match and our Canadian contemporaries ran out a 3-1
victory in over an hour.
Cheers
to London squash club for having us down and to Rob Doherty for organizing the event. We are really looking forward
to going back next year, hopefully with a large contingent of DAC doubles
players.
