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Harrity and Scharff Win on Last Point
By Rob Dinerman © 2002; all rights of reproduction reserved.
Posted Dec 12

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Second seeds Steve Scharff and Tom Harrity extricated themselves from a triple-match-point predicament to win the 2002 Gold Racquet Invitational Ray Chauncey Doubles championship, 15-14 in the fifth, over Geordie Lemmon and Jamie Heldring this past Sunday afternoon. It was the second consecutive Chauncey title for Harrity, who won last year with Eric Vlcek, and, incredibly, the second consecutive simultaneous-match-point outcome of the day for the Philadelphia-based runners-up, who had overcome a two-game deficit in the bottom-half semis just a few hours earlier against San Francisco residents Keen Butcher and USSRA president Kevin Jernigan.

The personality of the 14-team tournament, hosted as always by the Rockaway Hunting Club in Cedarhurst, Long Island during its traditional time slot on December's first full weekend, was defined by what Lemmon and Heldring achieved not only during their Sunday pair of last-point thrillers but even more by their Saturday afternoon quarter-final win over Beau Buford and Morris Clothier, who had been byed to that juncture by virtue of their top-seeded status before falling in three straight games.

Clothier had won this tournament with Vlcek in both 1999 and 2000 before missing last year's event due to the birth of his son, and he was making his first tournament appearance since late last March, when he and ISDA superstar Gary Waite had won a thrilling five-game USSRA National Doubles final over Vlcek and Clive Leach.

CLOTHIER SWAN SONG?
A Chauncey champion in 1995 as well with Jon Foster, Clothier had intimated after last spring's Nationals championship, his eighth overall, which had come on his "home" court at the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown Manhattan, that such a circumstance might constitute a poetically perfect swan song, but he has evidently reconsidered during the interim, and it will be interesting to see how the brusque reversal he and Buford suffered will affect his future competitive plans. They both played a full level below their capabilities, as had also happened, ominously in retrospect, two nights earlier in their unexpected but convincing defeat at the hands of Jeff Stanley and Ned Edwards in a Racquet vs. University Bigelow Cup match) and by their own post-match admissions were just never able to really get started in time to avert defeat at the hands of the sharp-shooting Pennsylvanians, who went for front-court winners at every opportunity and found success with
this tactic far more often than not.

Even before this conversation-piece had gotten underway late Saturday afternoon, another pair of Philadelphians, namely Rob Whitehouse and Mike Noll, had climbed out of a pair of two games to love holes to secure a spot in the semis and thereby provide an early taste of the drama that awaited on Sunday. They overtook Michael Pierce (a multiple Chauncey winner whose first title occurred in '69 and his last 23 years later in '92!) and Aashish Kamat in the round-of-16, then did the same to the Greenwich-based duo of Jessie Sammis and John McAtee in the quarters. The latter pairing even held a 13-8 lead in the fourth game, just two points from victory, but Whitehouse and Noll were able to grind it out from there, benefiting from s number of tins in the process of rescuing that game in a tiebreaker and the fifth in more routine fashion.

BUTCHER FALLS SHORT
Butcher is one of the few players in the resplendent 75-year history of this revered invitational to have reached five singles finals(winning in '97, when he beat Anders Wahlstedt and Jamie Dean), and he and Jernigan, the current USSRA President, were on the verge of what would have been a remarkable achievement had they attained the doubles final by closing out their 2-0 semi-final advantage, given the total lack of doubles courts in San Francisco while the University Club is undergoing its present massive renovation, due to be completed this spring. They had gotten to the semis by defeating first New Yorkers Ted Duff and Jim Ardrey and then two-time and defending USSRA 40-and-over Doubles champions Rich Sheppard (Pierce's
partner for his last Chauncey title 10 years earlier) and Gregg Finn.

Heldring and Lemmon trailed the transplanted Californians all through the match and all through the fifth game before finally forcing a five-point tiebreaker, which eerily seesawed to 4-all, set-five. A long series of exchanges was terminated by a hard Heldring forehand crosscourt that broke past Butcher, who had been playing a "high tee," fairly far up in the court to enable him to get to Lemmon's reverse-corner. Jernigan had been covering the deep left-wall area for his teammate throughout the match and was seemingly very capable of doing so in this case as well, but unbeknownst to anyone other than himself, he had pulled a muscle while making just such a retrieve earlier in the same point and was unable to summon enough of a push off the damaged muscle to keep the point alive. In retrospect, and in view of the manner in which the injured area tightened up on Jernigan in the hours following the match, there was even some question a to whether he could even have played the final had he and Butcher qualified for it.

The grueling match took a cumulative toll on the winners as well, as became glaringly clear during the closing stages of the ensuing final several hours later. Their opponents, second seeds Harrity and Scharff, had proceeded to that level via a pair of competitive but fairly convincing four-game victories over former mid-1990's Harvard teammates Andy Walter and Ted Bruenner and Philadelphia Racquet Club denizens Noll and Whitehouse, who were unable to re-create the eleventh-hour heroics that had saved them against Sammis and McAtee the previous afternoon. They took the first two games of the final as well, before Heldring and Lemmon again summoned the shot making magic that had impelled them all weekend.

DRAMATIC DENOUEMENT
Suddenly the match was even at two games apiece and a decisive fifth game
was in the offing. Heldring and Lemmon were able to stay just a point or two ahead through much of the end portion of the game, but by then a macabre
race against the clock was taking form, as an exhausted Lemmon was starting to
experience heart palpitations whose intensity level grew as the number of points to the finish line dwindled.

A questionable let call granted Harrity at 11-13 down kept him an Scharff from facing a triple-match-point, but at 12-13 Heldring, who was acutely aware of his partner's fading condition, punched a daring serve-return reverse-corner winner in front of Harrity to make it 14-12.

By this desperate time, Harrity and Scharff had abandoned any pretense of allowing Heldring into the action, and he could only watch helplessly as Lemmon, a Chauncey champ with Dave Proctor in 1990 and 1991, first was unable
to get enough racquet on a lob he normally would easily have handled to steer
it back into play (13-14), then was unable to move for a Harrity roll-corner that died in front of him (14-14), then sank ashen-faced into a deep knee bend while Harrity impatiently demanded to know which overtime option the Heldring/Lemmon team was selecting.

An injury time-out was briefly considered, and although it was never formally requested during the two-minute play stoppage, Lemmon's decimated condition gave his team no choice but to the select the "no set" option and hope for the best in a single roll of the dice. The poetically just ending, which most of the gallery was hoping would materialize, would have been for Lemmon, playing in his first Chauncey final in 10 years, and Heldring, appearing in his first-ever Chauncey final in an event he had been attending since 1989, to have won that last point and thus have followed an upset of the No. 1 seeds with a Sunday pair of consecutive simultaneous-match-point wins from two games to love down. The two had not even been planning to play as a team this weekend, and only wound up doing so when Lemmon's original partner, Brian Roberts, had been forced to withdraw earlier in the tournament week.

The actual ending, however, was far grounded far less in nostalgia and far more in reality: Scharff's serve to Lemmon was returned to Harrity, who hit a strong crosscourt that drew a racquet error from Lemmon, an anti-climactic conclusion to a thrilling weekend.

JANGBECKER ROLLS THrOUGH SINGLES FIELD
Thrilling as applies to the doubles draw, that is---the 71st edition of the Gold Racquet singles tournament, and fourth as a softball event following Edwards's five-game win over Rob Hill in the last hardball tourney in 1998, contained no five-game matches and little excitement, especially in view of the way Ola Jangbecker, a Swede who has been ranked in the PSA top 80, ran through the 11-man draw without the loss of a single game. He defeated Rockaway Hunting Club member Chi Chi Ubina, Peter Kelley, captain of last year's Ivy League champion Princeton Tigers, and former Trinity star and top seed Ahikl Behl with a level of execution and pace that none of his trio of rivals could match.

2001 champion Daniel Ezra might have given him a good match, but he was unable to defend, and John Musto had been forced to withdraw due to a bad chest cold he incurred in mid-week. Alec Decker defeated Yalie Albert McCrery in four games before losing to Behl, who then defeated Ryan O'Connell 3-1 after the latter's quarter-final win over McCrery's teammate Aftab Mathur.

The Gold Racquet singles invitational used to be at least as highly regarded as the doubles, and the softball portion has grown from a sparse round-robin a few years ago to a main-draw event each the past two years. But it still hasn't taken full hold yet in its new incarnation, besides which any event would have been hard pressed to equal or even approach the drama that this version of the doubles championship contained. A tremendous tribute to Tournament Chairmen Peter MacGuire and Mark Hinckley, as well as to the heart and soul of the Gold Racquet weekend, William Tredwell (Treddy) Ketcham, still remarkable spry at age 83, and now and always one of the most beloved figures in the history of the American game.

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