NCAA Tennis Championships : Irvine Pair Stuns UCLA’s Garrow-Galbraith

UC Irvine’s Mark Kaplan and Richard Lubner thought they were on the verge of something big when they arrived at the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tennis tournament.

But their victory over defending champions Brian Garrow and Patrick Galbraith of UCLA, the top-seeded doubles team, was hardly expected.

Still, the Irvine pair pulled off the biggest doubles upset of tournament with surprising ease, 6-0, 6-3.

“This is by far the biggest match we’ve ever won, the biggest I’ve ever been involved in,” said Kaplan who, like Lubner, came to Irvine after a successful junior tennis career in South Africa. “We’ve been working so hard hoping something like this would happen to us.”

They weren’t alone. Irvine’s Trevor Kronemann and Mike Briggs also reached today’s quarterfinals with a 6-7, 6-2, 6-4 victory over Scott Mayo and Jeff Van Den Berg from Miami (Ohio).

In fact, four of the eight remaining doubles teams are from California, with Eric Amend and Byron Black of USC and Alex O’Brien and Jeff Tarango of Stanford also advancing.

The victory by Amend and Black was an upset, eliminating brothers Clinton and Ellis Ferreira of Alabama, 6-3, 6-7, 6-2.

Kaplan and Lubner, who had lost to the UCLA team last year, took control by being aggressive from the start.

“We just got on the court and didn’t even think about who we were playing,” Lubner said. “We know that every match in this tournament is going to be tough and this would be no different.”

Garrow earlier lost, 7-6, 7-6, to Francisco Montana of Georgia in singles, and he was visibly affected by the afternoon heat.

“We knew that Garrow had had a difficult time of it earlier in the day,” Kaplan said. “I was really surprised by the number of unforced errors they made.”