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.