Gushue emerges as the best at a Brier for the ages
Brad Gushue and his Newfoundland and Labrador teammates took home the Tankard Trophy, but the real winners at this year’s Brier were the fans of curling and the game itself.
There aren’t really enough superlatives to describe how good the curling was, how precise the shots were no matter the level of difficulty, and how conducive the ice conditions were to creating such brilliance.
Fans in the stands in Kingston, Ont., and watching at home on TSN were treated to the kinds of performances that led even the most veteran curlers to trot out the phrase “best Brier ever.”
There’s no doubt it was a great event off the ice. Kingston outdid itself with a tremendous atmosphere surrounding the Brier and big crowds at Leon’s Centre.
If there’s a blueprint on how to host a small-city Brier, this was it. But it was on the ice that the greatest memories were made.
“It was some of the highest-calibre curling I’ve ever been a part of,” Newfoundland third Mark Nichols said.
Bear in mind, Nichols has played in 16 Briers, two world championships, 12 Canada Cups, three Olympic trials and the Olympic Winter Games, not to mention dozens of Grand Slam events where it’s always best on best.
“The shotmaking was next level,” Nichols said. “If we didn’t make all of our shots, we would be sitting at home, watching.”
The original field of 16 teams included the top eight in the Canadian rankings and eight of the top 14 in the world, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the level of shotmaking.
Playing on the expertly crafted ice, created by Greg Ewasko and John Wall, the curlers were able to showcase their skills and bring fans out of their seats repeatedly.
All eight of the top teams made the championship round and eventually it was Gushue who topped Alberta’s hard-luck skip Brendan Bottcher — he has lost the final three years in a row — in a somewhat anticlimactic finale. It was anticlimactic because Gushue played so well and Bottcher played so poorly, resulting in a 7-3 Newfoundland win.
It was not in keeping with what we saw all week in a Brier where skips were curling 95 per cent and losing.
After winning the championship for the third time in four years, Gushue admitted the brilliant play of the other skips and the shooting percentages other teams were putting up lit a fire under the Newfoundlanders.
So did the pre-event predictions, which largely focused on Northern Ontario’s Brad Jacobs or Ontario’s John Epping.
“We came in here with a little bit of a chip on our shoulder,” Gushue said. “We didn’t get any credit to be one of the favourites. There was a lot of talk about other teams and we were kind of left to the side a little bit. We felt we should have been in there, having won two of the last three.” twyman@postmedia.com twitter.com/Ted_Wyman