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Philippine tennis team mainstay Treat Huey continued his climb back to world ranking prominence as he teamed up with American partner Nathaniel Lammons to bag the doubles title of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Challenger Tour 2020 Split Open.
Seeded 3rd in the tournament, Huey and Lammons defeated the top-seeded pair of Andre Goransson of Sweden and Hunter Reese of the United States in straight sets, 6-4, 7-6 (7-3), in the final on October 3, Saturday, on the red clay court of Split, Croatia.
The opening set of the championship match went according to serve until the 9th game when Huey and Lammons finally broke the top seeds to go up 5-4 before eventually winning the first set.
Huey and Lammons carried over their momentum in the second set as they once again were the first to break serve in the 3rd game to go up, 2-1.
Goransson and Reese, however, refused to go away easily as they broke back in the 8th game to tie the score at 4-4. The second set then went to tiebreak where the Filipino and American duo jumped the gun on their favored opponents.
After going down 0-1 in the second set tiebreak, Huey and Lammons racked up 6 straight points to get to match point, 6-1.
Two straight points by Goransson and Reese only delayed the inevitable as Huey and Lammons eventually closed out the second set to win their third Challenger title together this year.
Before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, Huey and Lammons also won Challenger tournaments in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio. These victories helped propel Huey to the 121st rank in the world doubles ranking.
Huey has had to deal with a back injury which sidelined him for almost a two-year stretch that saw his world ranking plummet out of the top 300. He reached a career high of 18th in the ATP world rankings in 2016 when he became the first Filipino to reach the semifinals of Wimbledon and the quarterfinals of the Australian Open.
Huey and Lammons will next see action in the Sanchez-Casal Leotron Catalonia Challenger event from October 5 to 11 in Barcelona, Spain. They are seeded 2nd in the competition. – Rappler.com
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