The final day of the City Section’s individual tennis tournament felt like an all-Palisades High affair’and in many respects, it was. Taking place at Balboa Park on June 6, the boys’ singles final featured Pali senior and No. 1 seed Oliver Thornton, the third-place match sported sophomore Joe Silvers and the doubles final included two Dolphins’ duos in top-seeded team Sam Catanzaro and Spencer Pekar and No. 2 Trinity Thornton and Robert Silvers. In the end, the Dolphins exited with a title, two runner-up finishes and a third-place award. Pekar and Catanzaro defeated Thornton and Silvers in the double final, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4, while Oliver Thornton fell in a lengthy (and somewhat controversial) three-set final to Sam Catabona of Van Nuys, 6-1, 3-6. 4-6; meanwhile, Silvers (who dropped his semifinal match against Thornton) beat El Camino Real freshman Jamie Barajas, 6-0, 6-0 to take third place. The all-Pali doubles final pitted the two top-seeds against each other and the close match lived up to the seeding. A 5-3 opening-set lead for Silvers and Thornton wouldn’t last long, as Pekar and Catanzaro forced a tiebreak. There, Silvers was called for a point violation after hitting a ball into the back fence to give Pekar and Catanzaro a 4-3 lead and the top-seed wouldn’t look back from there. ’In practice, they’ve gotten the better of us,’ Pekar said afterwards. ‘We wanted to win knowing that; we know their games well. We tried to keep the ball deep and pick our spots to come in. And it worked out.’ In Thornton’s match, the Dolphins senior jumped out to a 6-1 first set victory, but fell in the second, 6-3. In the deciding third-set, both players started to feel the effects of the long match (which almost went three hours), having to call for an injury timeout to stretch their legs with Catabona serving at 15-15 and 5-4 in games. After the brief break, the play restarted and soon went to Deuce, setting up a swing-point (because of the no-ad scoring) that marked a chance for Thornton to even the third at 5-5 and a match point for Catabona. Catabona’s deciding forehand sailed to the baseline and Thornton called it out; however, a tournament official overruled his call to give Catabona to the win. ’It was a tough way to go out,’ Pali coach Bud Kling said. ‘You almost never see an overrule like that, unless it’s really obvious ‘ and that ball, it was very, very close.’ The same could be said of the Dolphins and how close they came to adding a singles individual title to the doubles win, not to mention their City team championship. And given Pali returns the majority of its team next season, there’s good reason to suspect the Dolphins could be close to the same City trifecta in 2012. ’We’re definitely setting the bar high and we want to live up to that,’ Pekar said.
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