Todd Montgomery and Jeff Race bucked a slow start to beat Faheem Ebrahim and Rory Mackay in three thrilling sets for the men\u2019s open doubles title of the 5th Annual Coca-Cola Tennis Championships Sunday at the Pacific Islands Club.<\/p>\n
Ebrahim and Mackay were more than willing to capitalize when Montgomery had his service game desert him completely in the opening set. They went up 5-2 but saw the top-seeded pair of Montgomery and Race break back and hold serve to make it 4-5.<\/p>\n
Montgomery then failed to return one of Mackay\u2019s many rockets from the baseline, as the No. 2 seeds and 2005 XTERAA Saipan participants took a 1-0 lead in the set count.<\/p>\n
Montgomery and Race had vengeance written all over the second set. With Montgomery finally finding his rhythm from the service line and Race volleying more consistently, the duo forced Ebrahim and Mackay to a number of unforced errors, while converting on a fare share of winners to level the game at a set apiece.<\/p>\n
In the third and deciding set, both sides held serve in the first four games for a 2-2 deadlock. But Montgomery and Race made their push in the fifth game when they broke Ebrahim\u2019 serve with the last point coming on a beautiful volley by Race, 3-2.<\/p>\n
They followed that up with a dominating service game from Race, which forced action on the embattled second seeds resulting in a handful of miscues, 4-2.<\/p>\n
After an exchange of holds of serves from Mackay and Montgomery made it 5-3, the No. 1 seeds had a chance to wrap up the contest when they moved ahead 0-30 against Ebharim\u2019s serve.<\/p>\n
Battling a bad back and in obvious pain, Ebrahim reached deep down his reserves and forced deuce with one of his finest serves of the match. They would eventually stave off elimination and narrow the gap at 4-5 on a Mackay smash.<\/p>\n
Both sides played like champs in the 10th game with the highlight of the finale coming with score deadlocked at 30-30. That was when all four players traded slices and drop shots at the net with Montgomery and Race eventually winning the point when Mackay\u2019s drop shot fell wide.<\/p>\n
At championship point, Race uncharacteristically double faulted which sent the match to another deuce. But the top-seeded pair didn\u2019t let their second chance slip away and a picture-perfect volley by Montgomery finished off the match in a score of 4-6, 6-3, 6-4.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a tough game. We did a lot of running because everybody wanted to keep the ball in play. And we had the point of the match at 30-all there, there were a couple of good gets and couple of tough shots where it looked like either team could win the point and I just sort of gotten lucky and got a slice back. Rory missed a great shot, like one inch and that\u2019s the way tennis is, it\u2019s a game of inches. Just one inch here and there determines the team that wins. And it was a good match, and hopefully we\u2019ll be sharper and have an even better quality game in the next tournament,\u201d said Race after the epic match that was delayed after the second set because of rain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think everybody kind of expected it would go to three. We could play 10 times and we\u2019re going to split five. These guys did XTERRA, they\u2019re tired and fatigued. They also have some health issues. Like what Jeff said I struggled a lot on my first serve and he\u2019s the coach and he said, \u2018just keep going at it\u2019 and I finally found confidence and we held. It was fun out there,\u201d said Montgomery.<\/p>\n
Despite the loss Ebrahim and Mackay agreed that it was indeed a great game the four-some played.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was all pretty good tennis. My back is a little bit tight, it\u2019s hard to move a lot and I really couldn\u2019t serve very well. Just the same, they played very well,\u201d said Ebrahim.<\/p>\n
Mackay also admired Montgomery for adjusting his game as the match progressed. \u201cIt was fun because we\u2019re playing well and basically have a good time. Try not to worry about the outcome too much and enjoy the tennis and you could probably win more often that way anyways. But I thought Todd really played well in the last couple of sets and served well and returned extremely well. It was tough to deal with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the mixed doubles open finals that immediately followed the match, Peter Loyola and Cleofe Santos won against Ebrahim and Sally Wong after the Hong Kong native and former University of Miami star couldn\u2019t continue because of the said injury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Todd Montgomery and Jeff Race bucked a slow start to beat Faheem Ebrahim and Rory Mackay in three thrilling sets for the men\u2019s open doubles title of the 5th Annual Coca-Cola Tennis Championships Sunday at the Pacific Islands Club.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}