Palmer Captures Colombian Open Crown By Rob Dinerman

Dateline August 31st --- Black Knight is proud to report that Australian star (and Black Knight endorser) David Palmer has won the 12th annual Abierto Colombian Squash Open, a $30,000 PSA World Tour event hosted by Club El Nogal in the nation’s capital city of Bogota, with a thrilling final-round victory yesterday afternoon over second seed Borja Golan of Spain. Four of the 104-minute match’s five games went all the way to a tiebreaker, including the fifth, which seesawed treacherously to 12-all, at which juncture Golan injured his knee while pursuing a Palmer drop shot and was unable to continue.

The final tally --- 12-10 11-13 12-10 5-11 12-12, retired --- amply points up how tightly contested the play was, as Golan constantly moved the top-seeded Palmer to the front wall, only to have the latter ultimately rise superior both to the enervating altitude and his younger opponent’s salvos with effective retrievals and plenty of firepower of his own. By the end, few would dispute tournament spokesman Juan Carlos Santacruz’s declaration that it had been the best final in the dozen-year history of this tournament.

For Golan, it was his second hundred-minute-plus fifth-set-tiebreaker battle in as many days, preceded as it was by his 9-11 11-7 11-4 11-13 15-13 survival in his Saturday-afternoon semifinal win over Miguel Angel Rodriguez, the Colombian-born fifth seed, who was understandably the favorite of his “home” crowd. Palmer, by contrast, had a slightly easier time of it in his four-game semi against fourth seed Olli Tuominen of Finland, a match that was competitive in its own right, though that fact wound up being dwarfed in comparison to the riveting final that would follow.

With yesterday’s victory, the 26th final-round success in PSA competition of his career, Palmer is now three for three in tour finals in calendar 2009 and hopefully can ride this positive momentum into the U. S. Open, which will be held in Chicago this week, after which he will attempt to defend the British Open crown he won last year (again in a fifth-set tiebreaker, this time at the expense of British star James Willstrop) in Manchester later this month.

David Palmer In “Racquet Club Rumble”

Dateline October 23rd --- Black Knight’s own David Palmer was involved in a $10,000 Challenge Match billed as “The Racquet Club Rumble” on the evening of October 22nd in which he and fellow recent world No. 1 singles player John White were each paired up with doubles player on the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) tour (namely Damien Mudge and Ben Gould respectively) who has held the No. 1 ranking in calendar 2009. Hosted by the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown Manhattan and attended by several hundred passionately engaged spectators cramming the gallery, the match featured 75 minutes of ferociously hard-hitting action before Gould and White prevailed, three games to one.

Mudge was still riding the momentum of the final-round victory that he and partner Viktor Berg had registered three days earlier in the final round of the $100,000 Briggs Cup, the most lucrative event on the ISDA tour. Palmer, while maintaining an extremely active pro-singles schedule that has kept him in the world top-10 for a staggering 100 consecutive months, has also made prior forays into competitive doubles, including combining with former ISDA veteran Andrew Slater to win the 2009 Massachusetts State Doubles title this past spring. Gould, along with partner Paul Price, is the reigning World Doubles champion and White, who was ranked No. 1 in 2004, balances his playing schedule with his responsibilities as the Director of Squash at Franklin & Marshall in Pennsylvania. Immediately after their match ended, this Australian-born aggregate competed in a $1,000 fastest-ball-hit Challenge, but the speed gun could only register up to 166 miles-per-hour, a level that each participant exceeded, so no winner could be determined.

The “Rumble” capped off a busy week for Black Knight-sponsored squash players, coming as it did just three days after two of its torch-bearers, namely Chris Walker and Rob Dinerman, triumphed in the $15,000 Jennings Cup, which was part of the Briggs Cup extravaganza at the Apawamis Club in Westchester. Walker, a former world No. 4 and ’01 British Open finalist, is also the coach of the USA men’s team (which placed 12th, one of its best showings ever, in the World Team Championships last month in Denmark) and the executive director of Surf City squash, a youth-enrichment organization based in San Diego. He and Dinerman conjured up a pair of airtight victories with a win in the semis over former World Doubles champion Gordy Anderson and current ISDA No. 9 James Hewitt, followed by an extremely undulating final over Mark Walsh and ISDA No. 5 Clive Leach in which the Walsh/Leach pairing won 20 of the first 21 points and held quadruple-game-point in the second game before Walker and Dinerman rallied to a highly entertaining 1-15 15-14 15-10 15-12 triumph.

Self-Designed Black Knight Racquet and Ashaway String Help David Palmer to 4th British Open Crown

The fourth time was the sweetest for Squash great David Palmer. Confounding critics who said the 31-year-old Australian would no longer be able to compete for major titles, the fifth-seeded Palmer beat England's James Willstrop in an epic final to claim his fourth British Open men's squash title in Liverpool. The match proved to be one of the most dramatic in the 80-year history of the prestigious event and a major boost for the Lithgow, NSW, native, who had slipped from No. 2 to No. 6 in the world rankings after moving to the US with his young family.

Palmer saved two championship balls before beating fourth-seeded Willstrop 11-9 11-9 8-11 6-11 11-10 (3-1) in one hour and 52 minutes. It was the longest match of the tournament and the longest British Open final since 1997.

Among his acknowledgements, Palmer credited the new racquets he has been designing with Canadian racquet manufacturer, Black Knight. "I have five racquets in my bag," he said. "They are all different, all prototypes." As part of their sponsorship agreement, Black Knight is developing a high-end line of David Palmer signature racquets to be introduced to the worldwide squash market in September 2008. Palmer's new racquet will be strung with PowerNick® 18 from Ashaway (also a sponsor) which Palmer has used since it was first introduced.

Said Palmer: "They [Black Knight] were looking for an opening to the European and UK market, and what a great start in the relationship in winning the British Open!"

But the win was far from easy as both men appeared exhausted in the final game, yet continued to retrieve seemingly unreachable balls. "All the major titles I win, it always seems to come down to the wire," said Palmer. "It would have been nice to win this one 3 0, but all credit to James, he fought back. He is a great ambassador to the sport. He is one of the fairest guys around, and the English people should be very proud of him."

"You've got to take your hat off to him," said Willstrop. "I didn't have an answer in the first two games--but then I dug in. He's a true champion--it's no disgrace, I've just got to accept it."

Next up for Palmer is the World Open later this year. "It would be nice to try to win the double. It's something that I've never been able to do," said Palmer, who won the world crown in 2002 and 2006. "The challenge for me is to keep the speed around the court, not the fitness; I still consider myself one of the fittest guys on the circuit, but as you get older, you start to struggle with the speed with which you move on court, and there are a few shots that I used to recover that I don't seem to be able to get anymore. And that will be one of the challenges I'll have to face in the coming years, I'll have to work a lot on that…"