Team Spirit” had players including Clement Lee, Jerry Chang, Louis Wong, Selwyn Chan, Roger Wong and William Wan while“Team Challenge” had players including Ronnie Cheng, Leung Sze Wai, Sammy Tam, Patrick Chan, Eugene Chow and Vincent Cheung.
In the new format, our “NSS” (Not-So-Scientific) seeding system initially ranked the players on each team from seeds 1 to 6. The first round matches had each seed play a total of four games against their corresponding rival seed. In the second round’s cross-over matches, the Number 1 seeds again played four games against the Number 2’s while the Number 3’s played against the number 4’s, and finally the Number 5’s against the Number 6’s. Three doubles matches of 8 games pro-set were to follow after the singles. In the end the team with the higher total of games won would be declared the tournament’s champion.
Team Spirit was up at 14 against 10 at the end of the first round singles with convincing victories from Clement and Roger. Ronnie and Sammy of Team Challenge then scored well in their cross-over singles helping to narrow the gap slightly. By the end of the cross-over singles round, Team Spirit had 27 games versus Team Challenge’s 21. With the doubles left to play, it was hardly a foregone conclusion. Both teams were strategizing their line-up’s hoping to maximize the chance of victory but as luck would have it, rain came soon after the first pair of doubles began play and the tournament had to be suspended.
With the Chinese New Year holidays at the end of February, it took a while until March 26 to resume the doubles matches. Unfortunately we were only able to gather enough players for two matches due the many reasons. This time however, Team Challenge with the help of Sammy, Patrick, Eugene and Vincent caught up with two victories and evened up the score at 37 games apiece.
It was only fitting to bring out the big guns for the final showdown. With the championship title on the line, the top seeds of both teams – Clement / Louis, Ronnie / Sze-Wai made their commitment to slug it out on April 30 under a revised format of best-of-three tie-break sets.
In the end, Clement/Louis claimed victory with a convincing score 6-0, 6-1. Fresh off his campaign at the April’s Hong Kong Nationals, Clement was still as much the dominant player as ever. The final score had hardly done justice to the valiant effort put out by Ronnie and Sze-Wai.
On behalf of the DSOBA, I must also appreciate all the players for their wonderful spirit and love of the game to produce the exciting see-sawing battle sprinkled with fun and camaraderie.
The individual names of the winning team will be engraved on the President’s Cup and souvenir trophies for each player will be presented at the May 11 AGM in Central. Hope to see you all there!
Victor Tan
Class of 1980
