PORTLAND – After dropping eight of the first 10 games, Chris Angell of Brooklin rallied to a three-set victory over defending champion Mike Burke of Lewiston to win the 39th annual Maine Tennis Association men’s singles championship Sunday afternoon at the Waynflete Athletic Complex.
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The score was 1-6, 6-2, 6-2 and left Burke muttering to himself about the sport’s inherent frustration.
“One second you can be playing your best tennis ever,” he said. “The next second you can feel like you haven’t practiced in two months.”
In the women’s final, 15-year-old Maisie Silverman of Brunswick finally converted her sixth match point to put away 38-year-old Helen Boucher of Topsham, 6-1, 7-6 (7-3).
“I just lost focus, I guess,” said Silverman, who wasted her first two match points at 5-1 in the second set. “But she just started hitting her shots. She starting playing awesome and getting the balls in and drop-shotting me, so I was trying to change the pace up, but it was hard to do.”
Silverman had two more chances at 5-4 but each time Boucher survived and eventually forced a tiebreaker. Silverman won the first four points and then alternated until clinching on serve.
Once the second set reached 5-all, Silverman said she told herself, “This is the time to focus. I need to put my beast mode on now.”
A finalist in the recent Maine Principals’ Association schoolgirl singles tournament, Silverman will be a sophomore at Brunswick High in the fall.
“I’m just glad I made it a close second set,” said Boucher, 38, a professor of psychology at Bates College who also reached the MTA final a year ago, “because she was killing me.”
Serving at 15-40, 1-5 in the second set, Boucher said she relaxed a bit and Silverman seemed to tighten up a tad, allowing Boucher to climb back into the match.
“She’s so fast,” Boucher said. “That was the thing I struggled with the most. She just chased everything down and then hit a respectable shot. She wasn’t just getting it back, she was actually hitting a pretty decent shot.”
The women’s singles field numbered 13, with Boucher seeded first and Silverman second. The top-seeded Angell and No. 3 Burke reached the finals of a men’s field of 51 by defeating, respectively, No. 4 Brandon Thompson 6-2, 6-1, and No. 2 Brian Mavor 6-1, 6-3, in Sunday morning’s semifinals.
The semifinal victory marked the first for Burke over Mavor, a former North Carolina State singles player who lives in Yarmouth. In four previous matches against Angell, Burke had won sets but never a match.
That seemed ready to change Sunday afternoon under cloudless blue skies and the rustling leaves of the trees that buffer Waynflete’s tennis courts from the Fore River.
“I was locked in,” said Burke, 25, who played for a year at the University of Southern Maine after graduating from Lewiston High, of winning five straight games to take the first set.
Burke led 2-1 in the second and was preparing to serve when Angell, 38, who played No. 1 singles at Clemson after three years at Indiana University, decided to change his sweat-soaked gray shirt and returned to his chair to pull on a brick red shirt. Coming on the heels of a changeover, the timing seemed odd, but as Angell explained later, he was “at that point of no return.”
“You either pick up the level of your play or you go to a tiebreaker,” he said. “I managed to pick up the level of my play and not only start chasing him, but run right past him.”
Indeed, Angell won eight games in a row to take the second set and a 3-0 lead in the third.
“It was like he was about off the edge of a cliff and I gave him a little bit of rope,” Burke said. “I let him back in and he started to play a little bit better. His shots were more crisp and I just wasn’t hitting the same balls I was earlier.”
Burke, occasionally growling at himself, won consecutive games on shots deflecting off the net cord to make it 3-2, then netted a backhand volley off an Angell defensive shot destined to land in the middle of the doubles alley.
Instead of a 30-15 lead with the serve, Burke trailed 15-30. He won the next point, but Angell took the next two to break serve and closed out the match by winning all but two points in the final two games.
“I played an out ball,” Burke said. “It was going to bounce out. I shouldn’t have let that bother me, but … that was crucial, because if I win the next point, like I did, it wouldn’t have been 30-all, it would have been (40-15), but who knows what would have happened? He could have still come back.”
Angell said Burke was a lot closer to winning that third set than he knew.
“When he broke back in the third set,” Angell said, “I felt a twinge and a cramp at that point.”
Angell said his high percentage of first serves, which he often followed to net, provided him the margin necessary to win the match and his first MTA title.
“One just needs a margin,” he said, “and where that margin is, is somewhere in the vortex.”
After Burke sent a forehand wide to end the match, he shook hands, packed his things and quickly left the court, shaking his head at what might have been.
“I can’t really explain why I had a meltdown and lost five games in a row after having won the last eight games out of 10,” he said. “I don’t know why it happened. I’m wondering about that now. I was still trying to play the same way.”
The three-day event also included men’s and women’s doubles tournaments and three age-group tournaments for men’s singles: 35-, 45- and 55-and-over.
The other singles winners crowned Sunday, in ascending age groups: Leo Scheidl of West Baldwin, Scott Steinberg of Falmouth and Art Goldsmith of Denmark. All three won in straight sets.
In doubles, Boucher teamed with Elisa Whittier of Auburn to win the women’s title and Ben Cox and Parker Senson defeated Mike Hill and Mike Hickey in the men’s final, 6-4, 7-6 (7-5).
Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at:
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