Julian Illingworth Surges To US Hardball Nationals Crown by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 16th
--- Trailing 11-9 in the second game and 13-11 in the third, eight-time
S. L. Green champion Julian Illingworth inexorably rallied in the
end-portion of both games and defeated defending champion Chris Walker
15-10 15-12 16-13 Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 2014 U. S.
National Hardball Championships, hosted by the Harvard Club Of New
York. Unseeded and playing in his first hardball tournament ever at the
Open level, Illingworth has been displaying praiseworthy squash
versatility in recent months, with several strong performances on the
professional doubles tour, solid play on the PSA softball tour and now
this national championship in hardball as well.
After a
four-game opening-round win over a surprisingly resistant Will Gaynor,
Illingworth seemed to absorb more hardball knowledge with every
succeeding game as he brusquely eliminated 2013 Nationals finalist and
second seed Hamed Anvari in a straight-game quarterfinal. There he met
SDA pro doubles top-five Clive Leach (who had barely squeaked past Eric
Christiansen, 15-14 in the fourth) in what turned out to be a riveting
semi, with Leach, perhaps the most creative shot-maker on the SDA
circuit, pulling off some daring winners to take the second set. At
this point Illingworth, realizing that Leach had been hitting
three-wall winners off his rails, started playing more cross-courts to
break that pattern (one of a number of well-conceived mid-match
adjustments he made in that round and the next), and this adjustment,
combined with a retrieving level that forced Leach to cut his
front-court attempts too fine, enabled Illingworth to close out the
last two games of this entertaining match 15-6, 15-10. Leach, Walker
and Illingworth took advantage of this being an open weekend in the SDA
schedule to vie for the winner’s share of the $4,000 purse provided by
the Hardball Committee. A fourth top doubles star, Damien Mudge, also
signed up for the tournament, but he withdrew shortly before play was
scheduled to begin.
The
draw’s top half saw a top-four seed exit in the quarterfinals as well,
in this case when fourth seed Eric Pearson, who won this title
three-straight years from 2008-10, badly wrenched his back at 2-0,
4-all against Matt Domenick. Pearson tried to play through the pain but
failed to win a point for the remainder of that game and was unable to
continue. Domenick, a semifinalist in this event for the second year in
a row, then fell to Walker, whose quarterfinal opponent Tom Harrity, a
five-time winner of this tourney in the early- and mid-2000’s, not only
easily defended his 50-plus title but also held Dylan Patterson to five
points or fewer per game in the round-of-16 before facing Walker.
There
were several crossroads junctures in the final and it is both to
Walker’s credit that he never stopped trying different ways to reverse
the match’s course and to Illingworth’s credit that, every time his
control of the action was placed in jeopardy, he was able to come up
with the required response. The pace of the play was extremely high,
abetted by the need to make INSTANT adjustments to severe angles and
inconsistent (indeed often fluky) bounces, a consequence of the
capricious actions of the fuchsia singles hardball, which stays
incredibly low, forcing the players not only to get to the ball but
often to excavate it from its virtually flat-on-the-ground location.
This ball, combined with the current high-technology racquets, makes it
a little too easy for a top-level player to hit what could be
considered “cheap” winners and puts too great a burden on the
retriever, though it must be said that each finalist adjusted
remarkably well to the playing conditions, making amazing last-gasp
gets and demonstrating as well an ability when victimized by a fluky
winner to put that setback behind them and move on to the next point,
rather than becoming disillusioned by the bad break that had just
befallen him.
There was
definitely a softball aspect to the exchanges, understandably in light
of the players’ backgrounds (Walker is a former PSA top-four and
reached the final of the British Open in 2001), as there were almost no
attempted reverse-corners and very few three-walls. Ultimately
Illingworth, 29, was a little quicker to the front wall than the
46-year-old Walker, a little freer from the tin (especially in the 5-1
and 5-0 runs that ended the second and third games respectively), a
little better at extemporizing when the opportunity (and/or the need)
to do so arose and, perhaps, a little more blessed by a few fortuitous
bounces of the ball. He pounced on a Walker three-wall and slashed a
backhand winner that jumpstarted his rally in the second game, which
was aided by two costly Walker tins, the second of which got
Illingworth to 14-12, whereupon he hit a forehand mis-direction winner
to seal that game.
A mis-hit
reverse-corner winner off Illingworth’s racquet tied the third game at
13-all, after which he hit a backhand rail that Walker mistakenly
thought would rebound off the back wall, collected a Walker tin and hit
another late mid-court roll-corner winner (this one off his backhand
flank) to close out the match. Walker’s set-three call for the
tiebreaker was a refreshing reminder that the hardball singles game
still retains the tiebreaker options at 13-all and 14-all, which have
been discarded in recent years by the powers-that-be in the hardball
doubles game.
There was a
disappointing total of only 20 combined entrants in the four age-group
divisions, nine of them in the 60-plus flight, in which Eric Berger
toppled multiple-times defending champ Tefft Smith three-love in the
final. Harrity yielded less than ten points in any of the six games he
played in the three-man 50’s round-robin, Charlie Baker similarly won
the three-man 80’s round-robin event without dropping a game, and,
after years of coming close, Henry Steinglass, playing with verve and
confidence on his “home” courts, took the five-player 70’s division
with a quartet of 3-0 matches, the last of which, on Sunday morning,
was against Lucky Young in what was effectively the final, since Young
had been undefeated coming into that match as well.
