University of Georgia Athletics

Allen & Ola - 1983 NCAA Champions

‘M&M Boys’ Were The First

May 22, 2018 | Men's Tennis, The Frierson Files

By John Frierson
Staff Writer

Ever since the Georgia men's tennis program fully blossomed into a national power in the early 1980s, many NCAA titles have followed. Today, May 22, 2018, marks the 35th anniversary of the first.

On court No. 2 of Georgia's Henry Feild Stadium, the doubles team of Allen Miller and Ola Malmqvist — a 6-foot-3 left-hander from Tucker, Ga., and a 6-7 Swede — bested the great team of Ken Flach and Robert Seguso of SIU-Edwardsville, 7-5, 6-3.

"Thirty-five years, that's unbelievable," said Malmqvist, the longtime head of women's tennis for the USTA development program, during a phone interview.

"Oh, that's impossible," Miller said last month while sitting in the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame, which he was inducted into in 2007.

The NCAA championship was a great result by a great, great duo, which had lost in the doubles final the year before. The ensuing years made the result look even better as Flach and Seguso went on to become the top doubles team in the world, winning six Grand Slam titles. Meanwhile, of the 70 players in the 35-team doubles draw, 10 have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

"I remember in the finals, Ola served incredibly," said Georgia coach Manuel Diaz, who was Dan Magill's assistant in 1983. "He had his best performance and served incredibly well — he had his best day of the tournament, which made things easier for them as a team."

Magill retired in 1988 as the winningest coach in history and is inducted into the Hall of Fame he helped found. He wrote about the "M&M Boys" in his tennis book "Match Pointers," published in 1995. The first four words of the Miller-Malmqvist section: "Georgia's elongated doubles duo." Pure Magill magic.

Magill, who passed away at age 93 in 2014, wrote that Miller and Malmqvist were first paired together the year before they won the NCAA title, when Miller was a freshman and Malmqvist was a junior transfer from Central Florida. They started out as the Bulldogs' No. 3 doubles team — "We were sort of put together by default," Miller said — but it didn't take long to see that there was something special about the pairing.

"We sort of clicked from the beginning, from the first couple of practices. We really clicked," said Miller, the director of tennis at the Athens Country Club.

In their first tournament together, in the fall of 1981, the Clemson Classic, they won their division. Then they won what is now called the Southern Intercollegiate Championships on Georgia's courts, beating the top three seeds. That earned them a spot in the ITA National Indoors at Princeton — they won that, too, beating four elite doubles pairings along the way, including the 1981 NCAA champions, Karl Pate and David Richter of TCU, and a team they'd see again, Flach and Seguso.

"I think personality-wise, we probably clicked pretty well, and we complemented each other pretty well," Malmqvist said. "I had a little bit more power and he had a lot of touch and great feel. Our first tournament together, we were happy to be in it and we ended up winning it."

In May of their first season together, Miller and Malmqvist made it all the way to the final of the 1982 NCAA doubles tournament. Facing another heralded team that would go on to win big after college, Arkansas' Peter Doohan and Pat Serret, the two Bulldogs came up short in a three-setter.

"We had a better year that first year, to be honest, we had better overall results," Miller said.

The following year, their run to the 1983 NCAA title was anything but easy. Malmqvist was injured for a long stretch, and when they did start playing together again the results weren't what they'd experienced the previous season.

"We got beat up a bit that second year, it wasn't just the injuries," Miller said.

Based on the fact that Miller and Malmqvist not only weren't seeded but they had to play in one of the three play-in matches, it appears they were close to not even making the field. But they did, and hit their top form of the spring at just the right time.

In the semifinals they beat the top-seeded team of Paul Smith and Roberto Saad from Wichita State in three sets. In the final were the No. 2 seeds, Flach and Seguso.

"I grew up playing against [Flach], since I was 12, and he got the better of me most of the time, singles and doubles," Miller said.

Not on this day, not in front of a huge crowd at Henry Feild. Magill's "M&M Boys" were able to break serve each set and get the Georgia program its first NCAA championship. Not only had the duo reached the final the year before, but in 1981 the team of John Mangan and Bill Rogers had reached the semifinals before losing to Pate and Richter.

"I remember that it was building up, starting with the guys that were our predecessors," Miller said. "You could see it, step by step."

The building continued. The following year, another Swedish transfer joined the team, Mikael Pernfors. He did OK, winning back to back NCAA singles titles in 1984-85 and helping lead the Bulldogs to the 1985 NCAA team title, along with Miller and fellow seniors George Bezecny and Deane Frey.

Miller went from the tall, quiet Swede in Malmqvist to the shorter, dynamic Pernfors and that partnership resulted in two more trips to the semifinals of the NCAA doubles tournament. That's four trips to the semis in four seasons for Miller, making him one of the greatest collegiate doubles players ever.

"Allen was just a wizard," Diaz said.

Georgia won the NCAA team title again in 1987, and since Diaz took over in 1989 the Bulldogs have won four more (1999, 2001, 2007-08). In addition, Matias Boeker won back to back NCAA singles titles in 2001-02, Boeker and Travis Parrot teamed up for the doubles title in 2001 and the team of John Isner and Antonio Ruiz captured the 2005 NCAA doubles title.

But it was Miller and Malmqvist that were the first — thrown together, hard to beat.

John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.

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