When Illingworth took the first point of the fourth game, Broadbent—playing an opponent he hadn’t beaten during his college career, on Illingworth’s home court, in front of a hostile crowd—could easily have folded.
Instead, he turned things around and ran the table to win the fourth game 9-1.
Then, in the fifth game, Broadbent dropped the first three points but recovered to take a 5-3 lead. After falling behind 6-5, Broadbent regained the serve by barely grazing the front wall as Illingworth prepared for a deep shot and ran the score to 8-5. Illingworth won a handout, but then lost the next point, throwing his racket and discrediting whispers in the crowd that he didn’t care about the outcome of the match because Harvard had already locked up the victory in the process.
“You don’t fight back from 8-3 to 10-8 and stay in a match five games [if you don’t want to win],” co-captain James Bullock said.
The next day, with the Crimson and the Bantams even at three individual matches apiece and the title on the line, Broadbent picked apart 2002 intercollegiate champion Samper, lunging to put several points away as Samper repeatedly caught the top of the tin on others.
“I’m a big guy,” Broadbent said. “I can cover the court side to side very well. If I can just keep the ball on my racket in the middle of the court, then I’m the one in control. I’m the one dictating pace.”
That Broadbent beat Samper was in itself surprising; that he did so so handily and so convincingly was downright shocking.
“He didn’t just beat Samper,” Suchde said. “He demolished him.
“He made him look like a beginner.”
“He gave Bernardo a clinic,” junior Asher Hochberg said.
Broadbent’s weekend—combined with Illingworth’s 3-1 victory over No. 1 Yasser El-Halaby of Princeton on Sunday—leaves the top of the rankings in disarray entering this weekend’s CSA Individual Championships.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone taking more momentum into the weekend than Broadbent.
That—for Whitman, anyway—is enough.
“I always bet on Will,” he said.
—ALAN G. GINSBERG