I had been at the U.S. Pro a couple of times, most notably ten years ago when I stopped by on a Friday afternoon there and happened to catch one of the great upsets in the seventy—two year history of pro doubles (first pro tournament was in 1938 at the Heights Casino in Brooklyn), when Stoneburgh & Wahlstedt beat Waite & Mudge. It was a fantastic match. Stoney & Anders had to qualify and here in their quarterfinal match they faced a juggernaut: Waite & Mudge hadn’t lost in twelve previous tournaments and would go on to win twenty-four more in a row.

But in the chilly WCC courts, anything can happen and Stoney with masterly finesse and Anders with some Scandinavian calmness won in five.

There were no epoch-making upsets this weekend. Mudge & Ben Gould, the latest undefeated power couple, strolled to victory with the loss of just one game in three matches. The only five-gamer in the main draw came courtesy of Yvain Badan & Manek Mathur. The young Trinity alums—Swiss ’06 was a senior when Manek ’09 was a freshman—live together in Port Chester and work as pros at Apawamis. Like any good roommates, they squabble about whether to get a pet, but on court they are very much in simpatico. Down 2-1 against John Russell & Preston Quick, they pulled out a tight fourth game 15-13. In the fifth they were down 12-8 but got it to 13-11. Manek has a long, fluid southpaw swing, full of rapacious velocity and he unleashed another rocket down the line. Sadly, it tinned.

Then on match point, the ball broke. Balls broke a ton. Something is wrong with the batches, as both the Whitey and the U.S. Pro went through balls like they were road salt in a Buffalo retirement community in January (some matches used four or five a game). So they had to laboriously warm up the ball and then JR & Preston quickly won the point and the match was over.

Swiss & Manek are not up-and-coming: they are just up. They just started playing together this fall. In October they reached the final in St. Louis; in November in New York they lost to JR & Preston 15-14 in the fourth at NYAC and then won the challenger event in Buffalo. And they look good, as anyone who is nicknamed GQ like Manek would insist. They’ve got snazzy shirts that have their last names on the back and their country’s flags (Switzerland & India) adjoined. Poor Swiss, though. Last year he & Jonny Smith lost a simultaneous double match point in the finals of the U.S. Pro. Talk about some tough luck

Other cool names in Wilmington were seeing Gil Mateer, age fifty-five, in the qualies (losing with Todd Anderson, the son of Harry the Horse Anderson, to Swiss & Manek); and the brothers Imran & Asad Kahn, who qualified in.

If you look at the draw, you’ll see a lot of 15-13 and 15-14 game scores and might think that everyone was boldly calling no-set when the score reached 13-all or 14-all. Well, that wasn’t the case. The 2001 U.S. Pro was the first ISDA tournament to experiment with having no tiebreakers beyond no-set. James Hewitt, the ISDA executive director, explained to me that this idea originated in the Toronto squash doubles league (the world’s most vibrant) where matches were running long and dinners were waiting (Toronto’s leagues are also very social). After a couple of years with the amateurs, the idea trickled up to the pros. It tends to shorten some matches by ten or fifteen minutes, Hewitt said, in part because no only are there fewer points, but also there is less time for lets and posturing and lets and whispering consultations and more lets. The U.S. Pro’s main draw had eight games that could have gone into tiebreakers but with the new rule didn’t.

So farewell the old set three and set five, the epic 18-17 in the fifth scoreline. But don’t cry too hard. Remember: in that famous 2001 U.S. Pro match, not a single game was closer than 15-12.