Squash Magazine: Jeff Mulligan

Fore! No Mulligan for Top-Ranked US Doubles Star By James Zug

Curricula vitae for today's professional doubles players always include either a Toronto upbringing or an anoxic ranking on the old pro hardball tour or a degree of success on the pro softball tour. The resumé of Jeff Mulligan, the top-ranked American on the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) tour, has instead a Nevada childhood, a national junior championship in racquetball and All-American laurels as a college pole vaulter. Coming to squash through racquetball, then pole vaulting, Jeff Mulligan (Center) is the top ranked American player on the ISDA tour Silk purses can be sewed from sow's ears in doubles, which has always been charitable to outsiders. Vic Niederhoffer, a world class currency speculator and former three-time national doubles champion, famously gets his news only from the National Enquirer; bruises that Mel Sokolow—ebullient club champion of the Lone Star Boat Club—inflicted on his opponents still pain today; and who is still breathing after taking a spin with leather-clad, hot-rodder Joe Fabiani, national champion in 1992? Take a mulligan, for here is another rare blast off the tee that trimmed a few trees before landing square in the middle of the doubles fairway. Growing up in Reno, Mulligan came upon a racquetball court next door to the health club his father owned. He tried the game, got addicted and for the next four years played almost every day. In his first tournament, he lost in the semis to his friend Jeff Conine. They won the doubles—Conine now is a Baltimore Oriole. Mulligan played in a tournament every weekend, traveling around the country. Often he played in adult tournaments and a couple of times qualified into pro events. In 1982 he won the Boys Under 16 Nationals. Fried on the sport and no longer having fun, Mulligan switched tools of his trade and picked up pole vaulting. His brother, eight years older, had been a top vaulter in the nation. Living in Encinitas, California, just north of San Diego, Mulligan started flying down a runway, sticking a pole into a box and flinging himself into the air. He jumped 16 feet in high school, went to Long Beach Junior College and then took a track scholarship for his final two years of college at Arizona State University. He was All-Pac 10, All-American and qualified for the men's nationals. His top height: 17 feet, seven inches. “Vaulting is one of the toughest sports,” he says. “You can't go through the motions. There is no middle ground. Either you do or do not get off the ground. The timing of your run, your plant, your position as you go up—it's very complicated. It's analogous to a golf swing, only more dangerous if you don't do it right. It's an emotional sport, you have to muster up courage on a bad day.” Ski bumming and flipping omelets in Vail, Colorado, consumed a year after he finished ASU in 1989, and then Mulligan moved to Denver. He launched an exercise equipment repair company, then ran a construction design firm. Today his chief project is a new $14 million, six story residential and retail building in lower downtown Denver. Work has not slaked his competitive juices. In the mid-1990s he started playing racquetball again and was pondering a go at the pro tour when one day he told his practice partner at the Denver Athletic Club that he was going to check out this other game at the club, squash. He never came back. “I was a big sponge with squash,” Mulligan says. “I was 13 again, learning racquetball. I soaked it up. John Lesko taught me softball and then Rick Smith, the pro at the Denver Club, got me going on doubles. Everyone said doubles was a perfect fit for me and it was.” Learning the ropes took time. His first doubles tournament was the 1996 Nationals in Baltimore, playing the left wall with a young Preston Quick. After losing to Fabiani & Geoff Kennedy, they ran through the consolation draw with ease, putting bullet holes in a number of players, including this author. In 1998 in Denver playing the right wall with Dave Rosen, Mulligan lost in the finals to Eric Vlcek & Morris Clothier. The following year in St. Louis, Rosen & Mulligan endured one of the most spectacular collapses in national doubles history: up 2-0, 12-6 in the third in the semis to Vlcek & Clothier, they cratered and lost in five. Enough of this amateur twaddle, Mulligan thought, and the next season he turned pro. He qualified into a couple of tournaments with James Hewitt, but they lost in the opening round. At the 2000 Johnson he asked Todd Binns if he wanted to start up together. Smart move. Binns, a perennial top six hardball singles player in the 1980s with a four-time number-one doubles ranking, is now 44 but still has some gas left in the tank. Although he is famously taciturn, Binns teaches by osmosis. Why not, with his roots? Binns' first partner was Gordy Anderson (they won the World Doubles title in 1985); one of Anderson's earliest partners was Sam Howe (they lost in the quarters of the 1974 Nationals); Howe was taught the game at Merion by eight-time national champion Hunter Lott (he persuaded Howe to play in the Nationals as a teenager); back in 1936 Lott played in his first Nationals with Bill Slack; and Slack played in front of Fred Tompkins, the man who invented the game. “Todd is perfect for my mentality,” says Mulligan. “I'm not good with chatty, coaching types. In that way I wouldn't be good with Jamie Bentley. I would be thinking too much. Todd's approachable and in between games we sometimes chat about what we could be doing differently. I've learned a ton from playing with him. He's Todd Binns.” Binns & Mulligan reached the quarters of their first tournament, the 2000 World Doubles in Philadelphia. In their first full season together, they bookended the year with two semifinal appearances, at the Hamilton Cup in Denver in September and the Kellner Cup in New York in April. Mulligan finished the year ranked 13th in the world, three spots above Doug Lifford, the next highest American. This season Binns & Mulligan have already matched their successes from last year, reaching the semis at the Hamilton Cup again and the semis at the North American Open in Greenwich. The Hamilton Cup was the most satisfying, for in front of his home crowd, Mulligan played a fantastic match. He and Binns crawled back from being down 2-1 against Josh McDonald & Tyler Millard and won the grueler 15-14 in the fifth with a Mulligan warp-speed rail at double match point. They are an unusual partnership, for like Binns, Mulligan is a basher. He hits as hard as anyone on the tour, including Brett Martin, Gary Waite and even Damien Mudge. Although he needs to develop some crisper shots, his real issue is perfecting his bashing. Mudge can hit hard 10 times a point, whereas Mulligan can only wallop it maybe 10 times a game. Fitness is the key. He has active footwork and an increasingly sure sense of court positioning, but he is still out of shape compared with the other heavy hitters. “Pound for pound Jeff's the strongest guy on the tour,” says Waite. “So if he does actually get fit, we're in trouble.” Thirty-five and married, Mulligan is now a major figure in the ISDA. He is a founding principal in Harrow, the new racquet company that is rapidly gaining market share in North America. Ultra-serious on court, he enjoys the tournament chatter in the gallery and locker room. “I've been pleasantly surprised about the differences between racquetball and squash,” he says. “Squash people have such a vested interest. No one is there trying to get a handout. We all want pro squash to succeed.” © by James Zug, 2002

Fore!

No Mulligan for Top-Ranked US Doubles Star