Only one number mattered to the UCLA men’s tennis team on
Friday.
Four.
Get there as quickly as possible. Take no prisoners. Leave no
doubt.
In a hostile environment, getting to four points is the most
important thing a team can do. And at USC, in the most hostile of
environments, history has shown that it’s more important
still.
On Friday, the No. 8 Bruins (17-5, 6-1 Pac-10) executed their
plan to perfection, winning the doubles point and then cruising to
straight-set victories in three singles matches to build an
insurmountable lead. Though the final score was 4-3, tensions were
never high and the match was hardly close.
“Looking back at last year, it was important to just get
the four there,” said junior Philipp Gruendler, whose 6-4,
6-0 victory over USC’s Chong Wang gave the Bruins a 3-0 lead.
“Get the three singles wins, get the four, win the
match.”
Following Friday’s victory, the Bruins couldn’t help
but talk about what had happened at USC last year, when the four
never came. In that match, UCLA won the doubles point and five out
of six first sets in singles.
Then complacency set in, the crowd got involved, and the Trojans
stormed back for an improbable 5-2 victory.
In preparing for this year’s rematch, the Bruins wanted to
do everything possible to avoid a repeat performance.
“Here, if you win the first set, you’ve just got to
crush them in the second,” junior Chris Surapol said.
“You can’t let it start getting close.”
Surapol certainly followed his own advice, giving USC fans
nothing to cheer about in an overwhelming 6-1, 6-0 victory over
Trojan Garrett Snyder at the No. 5 position.
With Surapol and Gruendler having finished, junior Ben
Kohlloeffel took care of business and closed out his match in
dominating fashion.
Despite not playing his best tennis, No. 1-ranked Kohlloeffel
cruised to a 7-5, 6-1 win over Dejan Cvetkovic. Their objective
complete, the Bruins were able to watch the remainder of an
anticlimactic 4-3 match with smiles on their faces.
“It was just so important to have 4-0,” Kohlloeffel
said. “It’s so much easier to play and so much more
relaxed to watch when you know we’ve won.”
The victory over the struggling Trojans (8-14, 1-6 Pac-10) gave
the Bruins their third consecutive Pac-10 championship. It also
included a truly impressive milestone that was anything but easy to
achieve.
Kohlloeffel and Gruendler, ranked No. 2 nationally in doubles,
won their 20th consecutive match in thrilling fashion against USC,
fighting off four match points en route to a 9-8 (6) victory over
32nd-ranked Cvetkovic and Jamil Al-Agba.
Twenty consecutive dual-match victories is a new UCLA record,
breaking the old mark of 19 set by Pat Galbraith and Brian Garrow
in 1989.
“We knew if we won that match, we would have the record
alone,” Gruendler said. “For me it was important. I
just thought about it all the time ““ “˜Don’t tie
with those guys. Get the 20th. Make school history.’ That
pumped me up a little bit.”
Their come-from-behind victory gave the Bruins the doubles point
and all the momentum necessary to cruise to the team victory.
Of USC’s three points Friday, two came in third-set
super-tiebreakers, which were played instead of an entire third
set.
With last year’s USC demons officially exorcised and the
bad taste of the previous weekend’s 4-3 loss to Washington
gone, the defending champion Bruins can now turn to the postseason
with confidence.
“We really needed to win this match to end the year on a
good note, instead of feeling like, “˜God, we’ve got to
turn this around going into the NCAAs,'” UCLA coach
Billy Martin said. “That’s not the way you want to do
it. There’s no better way for us to do it than to beat our
archrivals.”