Will Mariani And Fred Reid Jr. Capture Assante Wealth Ontario Doubles Men’s Open Championship 
by Rob Dinerman





photos Lynsey Yates

Dateline December 7th --- Trailing 8-6 in the fifth game and with the play seemingly on the verge of permanently getting away from them, second seeds Will Mariani and Fred Reid Jr. conjured up a heroic match-closing nine-point run to defeat Robin Clarke and Rob Nigro 15-11, 10-15, 15-7, 12-15, 15-8 this past Sunday afternoon in the final round of the Assante Wealth Ontario Doubles Men’s Open Championships before a capacity crowd at the Badminton & Racquet Club in downtown Toronto. Mariani and Reid, finalists at an SDA professional tour stop in Cleveland in 2014, had advanced through a pair of pre-final matches without dropping a game, including in their semifinal tilt with SDA No. 7 Scott Arnold and his partner Jamie Nicholls, but they let a fourth-game 12-10 advantage get away and seemed to be in retreat in the opening portion of the fifth game before catching fire in the nick of time down the stretch.

   The 12-team field might have been the strongest in many years, though the event kicked off on a down note when Ted Fleming ruptured his Achilles tendon in the very first match of the competition Thursday afternoon after he and his partner Sanjeev Chada had split the first two games against Jarvis Strachan and Mark Porter and were ahead 12-6 in the third. Strachan and Porter then lost to Arnold and Nicholls, who subsequently dropped their three airtight games with the eventual champs by a combined five points, 15-14, 15-12, 15-14. Meanwhile, in the top half, No. 1 seeds and six-time Ontario’s winners Scott Dulmage and Richard Thompson straight-gamed Joel Goulding and Jonathan Madruga (round-of-16 winners over Tournament Chair Eric Baldwin, the long-time head pro at the host club, and his power-hitting partner Chris Deratnay) but were edged out in the closing points of all three of their semifinal games with Clarke and Nigro, who earlier had defeated Alex Carter and Jeff Lurie in the quarterfinals.

   The final was hard-fought and undulating, with the teams taking turns controlling the action. Mariani and Reid seemed positioned to finish it off in four but tinned out at the end of that game. The cross-roads moment of the fifth came at 8-7, with four straight tension-building exchanges all ending in lets. On the fifth attempt, Nigro, who had been remarkably error-free the entire weekend, committed a bad tin, and this seemed to liberate Mariani and Reid, who by then were also likely aware that Clarke had strained a groin muscle a few points earlier, limiting his normally formidable mobility. Mariani nailed one cross-court past Nigro and then fooled everyone with a scorcher right down the middle. Reid then contributed front-left winners on the final three points, including one daring straight-drop from the back wall to get to match-ball, following which he hit an angled forehand roll-corner winner with Clarke trapped behind the red line to finish off his team’s surge to the tape.

   There was also a six-team Women’s Open event, in which Heather MacLean and Paula Jenkins surprised their favored opponents Robbin Morrison and Michele Ramsey, 15-13 in the fourth game, before then bowing to Marci Sier and her partner Kelly Kuru, a badminton player who only recently has taken up squash doubles. Sier and Kuru then trailed top seeds Seanna Keating and Caro Sambrook two games to one in the final (semis winners over Lauren Sachvie and Rebecca Hazell) but came up with their best squash of the weekend in the 15-9, 15-8 close-out games, most notably when they went from 5-all to 12-6 in the defining stretch of the fifth. Sier, who has won tournaments on the WDSA women’s pro tour, displayed her characteristic athleticism, but it was Kuru whose winners late in the fifth game played the biggest role in getting her team over the top.