Comment by Rob Schnaiberg
Team Canada captured their first gold in curling in a 10-4 rout over Finland, and I can’t stop laughing.
Forget about hockey, I don’t want to hear the words goal, assist and shutout anymore. Just give me that sweet curling terminology: hard, hurry and sweep. If you had never seen a game of curling in your life, it doesn’t matter. Canada jumped on the Gushue bandwagon February 24, and some may never get off. I have been a curling enthusiast for ten years, long before it was ever the cool thing to do, and at this moment, is there anything cooler?
After the fifth end of the gold medal game between Canada and Finland I started calling up my friends to get them out of their post hockey funk. I told them to gather up their unused hockey enthusiasm and tune into the CBC because three Newfies and one Newbie were showing big time Canada what an Olympic experience is about: guts and glory, not a passionless effort.
According to worldcurling.org there are over three hundred professional, and countless amateur curling teams in Canada. After Friday’s gold medal game, that number will surely balloon. Perhaps in the future more kids will chose a curling broom instead of a hockey stick and one day capture the innocence of four men no one expected to win.
What was there not to love about this team? Lead Jamie Korab was recovering from the flu. Second, Russ Howard is fifty and lacking in the sweeping department. Third, Mark Nichols, looked young enough to be my classmate and skip Gushue is a self described sook (baby in Newfanease).
In the seventh end, with six points and victory all but certain for team Canada, I could only laugh when Gushue missed his last shot and sent his rock through the house. I was not laughing at him, but laughing with him. It was a laugh that said, “Don’t worry about it, Brad. If I were there, I would have missed that one too.” Next time I have the lead while curling and miss my last shot I will chuckle a bit and think to myself, “I am such a sook and I couldn’t be happier.”
Contact Rob at rschnaibs[at]hotmail.com
