NY Squash Legend: Damien Mudge, All-Time Greatest Doubles Player

By Rob Dinerman
August, 2024

Damien Mudge was 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. His entire career was a paragon of longevity and not just record-breaking but record-shattering excellence. He was on the No. 1 ranked doubles team virtually uninterrupted from the outset of the 1999-2000 season, when he and Gary Waite had the first of their three wire-to-wire undefeated performances (also 2001-02 and 2004-05) all the way through the 19-year period that extended to the end of the 2017-18 season, during which he and Manek Mathur went undefeated as well—and he excelled on both walls, a distinct rarity in doubles squash. After seven years— and 75 tournament wins, the most all-time of any combination—playing the right wall 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 (and returning to the right wall after nine years on the left) with Mathur prior to the 2016-17 season.

After (barely—15-13 in the fifth) losing to Michael Ferreira and Yvain Badan in their debut as partners at the season-opening 2016 Maryland Club Open final, 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 won 169 pro doubles tournaments—the only player with more than 100, other than Waite’s 114—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 Memorial 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 quarter-century 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.

Although he could go short when he had to, Mudge’s game was primarily based on power (especially) and athleticism. Particularly during his years on the right wall, he could blast his forehand drives to terrifying effect, and his impressive wingspan and reflexes enabled him to position himself well forward of the tee, daring his left-wall opponents to try to hit the ball either past him, through him or over him—most of those who tried had the ball crushed right back at them before they had even completed their follow-through.

Especially during the seven-year Waite/Mudge collaboration, they simply generated too much heat for any of their opponents to repulse or withstand, although they were also versatile enough to make adjustments when they were forced to do so. Once when shortly before a big tournament both sustained significant off-court injuries that kept them from hitting the ball with anywhere near their normal pace—Waite shredded a tendon near his collarbone in a skiing wipe-out and Mudge tore the labrum in his playing shoulder when he was dumped by a wave while swimming in Amagansett—they nevertheless somehow persevered by successfully lobbing their opponents to the back and shooting when the opportunity arose.

Queried afterwards about how they were able to win despite such a reduction in their arsenal, Mudge’s forthright response was, “At the end of the day, our ball control is better than any other team—we can hit the four corners”—thereby citing an often-overlooked aspect of their partnership. That tournament was one of many in which they succeeded even when one or both of them was dealing with injuries or other maladies. When Waite was asked if on those occasions they devised a game plan beforehand that was adjusted to compensate for the resulting constraints, he said no, explaining, “In many of our matches we just ‘played on feel’ once the match began.  

In addition to his prepossessing physical skills and ability to adjust his game to mesh with the very different talents and styles that his four main partners—Waite, Berg and Mathur—possessed, Mudge also had a flair for the dramatic and an ability to come up with the big shot when circumstances required him to do so. The most noteworthy example of the foregoing occurred in the closing stretch of the 2010 Johnson Memorial, the longest continually running doubles tournament in North America. Although Mudge and Berg had been well ahead in the fifth game, Berg severely sprained his ankle late in the game, rendering him virtually immobile as their biggest rivals at time, Gould and 2000 British Open finalist Paul Price, won five straight points to go from 8-14 to 13-14.

What tiebreaker would Mudge and Berg choose if they were caught at 14-all? Would they give themselves a seventh consecutive match-ball by calling “no-set?” Would they have a realistic chance of winning whichever tiebreaker length they chose after failing on six consecutive match-balls and with such a gaping void in the front-right portion of the court against a foe that possessed such fearsome firepower? Whatever speculation (of which there was plenty) made the rounds in the overflowing Heights Casino gallery was brought to an instantaneous halt when Mudge, who by that time had to have known that it was up to him to come up with something spectacular to save the day, did exactly that by circling around a cross-court lob and conjuring up a daring, totally unexpected and perfectly-angled inside-out forehand roll-corner winner from the absolute depths of the back-left corner of the court that caught Price completely flat-footed, following which Mudge let out a war whoop of triumph as he and his wounded partner fell unto each other’s arms in relieved appreciation of their narrow-escape 15-13 fifth-game victory. That win clinched Mudge’s ninth straight Johnson crown—with incredibly (and as previously referenced), eight-straight more to follow.

An undefeated 2010-11 season with Gould—culminating in their winning the 2011 World Doubles title, with a successful defense of this biennial title to follow in 2013—jump-started this pair of Aussies to a partnership that lasted until the December 2015 Briggs Cup, following which Gould retired. Mudge closed out that season with Berg before then teaming with Mathur for the next two years. When they won the 2017 Briggs Cup, it marked the fifth time that Mudge captured this biennial event (the most lucrative on the tour)—with five different partners! He won with Michael Pirnak in 2003, Waite in 2005, Berg in 2009, Gould in 2015 and Mathur in 2017.

In the final tournament of that 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, putting 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 that greatly reduced his mobility for the rest of the 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 an allograft procedure in August 2018.

This constituted Mudge’s seventh knee operation overall (and the fifth on his right knee), and was a far more complicated and invasive operation than any of its predecessors, involving transplanting the cartilage of a cadaver to fill the hole and sidelining him throughout the 2018-19 season. 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 a 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.

Although Mudge had hoped to return to the competitive fray in 2019-20, his leg never fully responded during the subsequent year, and in August 2019, in deference not only to his persisting right-knee condition but also to the cumulative effect of a number of other injuries and depleting maladies that had 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 reluctantly concluded that the time had come for him to end his doubles career. He did remain as the head pro at the University Club of New York—where he was based for more than two decades, the first few as Waite’s assistant before becoming the head pro when Waite returned to his native Canada in 2001—for several more years before he returned to Australia during the pandemic.

Mudge’s retirement punctuated a Spring/Summer 2019 period during which some of the all-time best players in squash’s various professional Associations 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 in the spring of 2019, as did three-time World Open Champion Ramy Ashour, two-time British Open champion Laura Massaro and former World No. 2 Jenny Duncalf.

In Mudge’s final few competitive seasons, he 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, Pirnak, David Kay, Scott Dulmage, Jamie Bentley, Scott Stoneburgh and Anders Wahlstedt, and extended through the Gould/Russell/Price/Preston Quick/Greg Park set of stars later that decade and into the next, all the way to the Mathur/Chris Callis/Badan/Ferreira/Bernardo Samper/James Stout/Greg McArthur contingent of players headlining the late-twenty-teens era. Throughout that lengthy time frame encapsulating several player generations, the only relentless constant was Damien Mudge’s standing as the dominant player in professional doubles squash in North America, and his retirement symbolized the passing of a glorious era in the history of doubles squash on this continent.

Rob Dinerman is a squash historian who was the Official Writer for the MSRA Yearbook from 1985-94 and has written nearly 20 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the robdinerman.com home page. His next book, on the first 100 years of college squash (1923-2023), is scheduled to be released in February 2024.