Damien Mudge, SDA All-Time Greatest Doubles Player, Retires

Damien Mudge, 

SDA All-Time Greatest Doubles Player, Retires          

by Rob Dinerman

Damien Mudge and Ben Gould
Squash Magazin

Dateline August 14th, 2019 --- Damien Mudge, the most accomplished doubles player in the history of the sport and the Squash Doubles Association’s (SDA) “all-time leading scorer” by a wide margin, has decided to retire from the tour after 19 years of record-shattering achievement. Mudge, 43, underwent a major allograft procedure on his right knee (his seventh knee surgery overall, the fourth on his right leg) in August 2018 and was sidelined throughout the subsequent 2018-19 SDA season. With his leg currently still at least several months away from being ready to return to SDA-level competition, and in deference to the cumulative effect of a number of other injuries and depleting maladies that have befallen him over the course of nearly two decades of grueling play --- among them shoulder and wrist injuries, one of which required the insertion of a pin for several months to stabilize the joint; a painful neuroma and a plantar fascia tear on his right foot; a two-and-a-half-year bout with chronic-fatigue-syndrome; and multiple concussions --- Mudge, who has been based at the University Club of New York for more than two decades, the last 18 as its head squash pro, recently concluded that the time has come for him to end his doubles career.

   And what an extraordinary career it has been! Mudge has been ranked No. 1 virtually uninterrupted since the outset of the 1999-2000 season, when he and Gary Waite had the first of their three wire-to-wire undefeated seasons (also 2001-02 and 2004-05). After seven years (and 75 tournament wins, the most all-time of any combination) with Waite, Mudge switched to the left wall and led the tour in wins first from 2007-10 with Viktor Berg and then from 2010-15 with Ben Gould before joining forces with Manek Mathur prior to the 2016-17 season. After losing to Michael Ferreira and Yvain Badan, 15-13 in the fifth, in their debut as partners at the Maryland Club Open final in September 2016, Mudge and Mathur went undefeated throughout the remainder of both that season and the 2017-18 season that followed, covering 16 straight tournaments and 54 consecutive matches, while receiving the SDA Team of the Year Award both years. Mudge with his various partners has won nearly 175 pro doubles tournaments, more than double the number amassed by any other player, and he holds the most-times-won record for every established tournament on the SDA schedule, highlighted by 15 North American Opens, 10 Kellner Cups, six Briggs Cups and 17 David Johnson Invitational titles (all in a row from 2002-18) at the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn. His Player of The Year and Doubles Team of the Year Awards totals far exceed anyone else’s and in all five seasons during the nearly two decades that the SDA and its forerunner, the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) have existed in which one team has gone undefeated, Mudge has been on that team: as noted, three times with Waite as well as in 2010-11 with Gould and 2017-18 with Mathur.

   In their eighth and final appearance of the 2017-18 season, the Tavern Club Invitational in Cleveland, Mathur and Mudge capped off their 24-0 slate with a four-game final-round win over John Russell and Scott Arnold that swung on the forehand drive that Mathur lashed down the left wall for a clear winner at 14-all in the third game that put his team ahead to stay. Earlier in that game, Mudge, playing in his first tournament since undergoing a right-knee arthroscopic procedure to repair torn cartilage slightly more than a month earlier, planted to reverse direction and felt a searing pain in that joint, greatly reducing his mobility for the rest of that match. A subsequent examination immediately upon his return to New York revealed that he had blown a hole through the cartilage around the medial part of the knee, necessitating the allograft procedure, a far more complicated and invasive operation than any if its predecessors and one that involves transplanting the cartilage of a cadaver to fill the hole. Mathur’s 2018-19 season ended prematurely as well when he ruptured his left Achilles tendon in the late-October 2018 Big Apple Open at the New York Athletic Club. Mudge was in attendance that night, sitting in the bench just behind the glass back wall of the host club’s doubles court and, ironically in light of how full of energy and health both he and Mathur had been during their undefeated 2017-18 season, it was Mudge’s crutch that Mathur had to lean on in order to exit the court after incurring his own serious season-ending injury.

     Mudge’s retirement punctuates a Spring/Summer 2019 period during which some of the all-time best players in squash’s various professional Associations have stepped away from the sport. Five-time British Open champion Nicol David, who enjoyed nearly a decade atop the women’s pro singles tour, retired this past spring as did three-time World Open Champion Ramy Ashour, two-time British Open champion Laura Massaro and former World No. 2 Jenny Duncalf. In recent years Mudge had been the only SDA player whose playing career dated back to the formation of the ISDA in February 2000, making him the bridge that spanned the early-2000’s top-tier group consisting of Waite, Berg, Clive Leach, Blair Horler, Willie Hosey, Michael Pirnak, David Kay, Scott Dulmage, Jamie Bentley, Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt, and extended through the Gould/Russell/Paul Price/Preston Quick/Greg Park set of stars later that decade and into the next, all the way to the Mathur/Callis/Yvain Badan/Michael Ferreira/Bernardo Samper/James Stout/Greg McArthur contingent of players headlining the current era. Throughout that lengthy time frame encapsulating several player generations, the only relentless constant has been Damien Mudge’s standing as the dominant player in professional doubles squash in North America, and his retirement symbolizes the passing of a glorious era in the history of squash on this continent.