With a valentine to Vic Peters

The Curling News

Volume 54, Issues #5 and #6

March and April 2011

The first London Brier took place in 1974, and you can travel back to that previous chapter of Buried Treasure.

It’s only been a dozen years since 2011, the London Brier sequel. How many of these moments do you remember from that year?

• The King’s Speech is released in the UK in January and will go on to win the Best Picture award at the Oscars over films such as The Social Network, Black Swan, Inception, True Grit and The Fighter. Prepare for similar mistakes from the academy later tonight.

• Aaron Rodgers wins his (thus far) only Super Bowl. At the time, no one is aware he will later reach Tom Cruise-on-Oprah’s-couch level of strangeness—including the over-sharing of his toes on public television.

• The tohoku earthquake and tsunami hits Japan on March 11. Measuring 9.1 it is the largest magnitude ever recorded in Japan and third largest in the world since 1900.

• Charlie Sheen is fired from CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men. If I had ever watched more than two and a half minutes of the show, I may have been disappointed at the time.

• Longtime Winnipeg sportswriter, broadcaster and The Curling News scribe Jack Matheson passes away at the age of 86.

What can we learn from The Curling News about London Brier II of III? Let’s look back to see if anything interesting was happening in the curling world in the winter of 2011.

Allen Cameron used to write for The Curling News and could, in some cases, be critical of the Canadian Curling Association. Times change and the CCA became Curling Canada and Al Cameron has now been their communications director for over a decade. Though Al can no longer postulate in public on questionable CurlCan decisions, let’s hope he has been providing a sensible voice from inside the boardroom.

Al gets the Brier’s preview story, on a clever March issue cover designed by Steven Lobel.

There is speculation the gap is shrinking between the Kevin Martin team and his contemporaries. 

The Curling News solicits Brier predictions from active competitors and Mark Dacey, Al Hackner and junior champ Braeden Moskowy all pick Martin—and get it gloriously wrong, while offering a pile of interesting thoughts.  

Martin will finish 9-2 and lose to Glenn Howard in the 3 versus 4 playoff, then lose the first ever Brier bronze medal game to Brad Gushue. He will only appear in one more Brier (2013) and fail to reach the playoffs again.

Kasandra Leafloor shares a Valentine’s Day story of her mother Deb and her father, Vic Peters.

Vic Peters remains one of the more underrated skips of his era. Back then, Manitoba was possibly the hardest province in which to win a purple heart. To earn a buffalo crest you had to get past the likes of Jeff Stoughton, Kerry Burtnyk, Dale Duguid, Dave Smith, and a litany of other damn good squads like Ron Gauthier, Brent Scales, Randy Dutiaume (the list goes on), usually on suspect ice in a double knockout format.

In his three trips to the Brier Peters won (in 1992), lost a final (1997 in dramatic fashion) and led the field but lost in a controversial tiebreaker fiasco (1993).

Peters third Dan Carey shares many thoughts on Vic and their relationship as my guest in episode 16 of the Curling Legends Podcast. 

Peters passed away from cancer in 2016.

If you watch an entire week of Scotties and Brier coverage, four or five commercial spots will be seen dozens if not hundreds of times. 

This repeated exposure could start to damage your brain or lead you to wake up in a cold sweat after having nightmares of a loud man in a kilt screaming at you in a Scottish accent.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TRMx-ATyJo[/embed]

From hordes of mediocre curling commercials over the years, the tale of Curling Canada’s own Johnny “The Hammer” Chow emerged as a real gem.

Here is the behind-the-scenes profile of its development, which appeared in a four-page insert called “Xm” which went only to TCN’s individual subscribers at the time.

And here’s the finished Johnny “The Hammer” Chow product:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbvipaWCGKc[/embed]

Can it be possible that Mike Fournier has been writing columns for The Curling News since at least 2011?

Yes, for the proof is right here. In this one, Fournier pays tribute to upcoming Quebec Brier rep Francois Gagné and his journeyman third, Robert Desjardins. 

The colourful Desjardins went on to skip his own team at the Brier and now competes in mixed doubles (with his daughter) while operating Quebec-based curling tour events.

The April 2011 issue brings London Brier results stories including Jeff Stoughton’s third and final Brier victory.

Glenn Howard will win in 2012 and the reign of the big three (Martin, Howard and Stoughton) will come to an end. Over 22 years, from 1991 to 2013, these three skips will have 30 Brier appearances, 34 if you include Glenn’s trips as third for brother Russ. Excluding the two player boycott years, that’s two decades of Briers and one or more of Kevin, Glenn or Jeff will reach the finals in 15 of them.

Despite this, two of these legendary skips will meet in the final only four times. Jeff defeated Kevin in 1996 and Glenn in 2011 while Kevin beats Glenn in 2008 and Jeff in 2009.

TCN staff photographer Anil Mungal captured the cover image. Apparently the other on-ice photographers were well away from Mungal, hoping a celebrating Stoughton would turn their way. However, the veteran went in the other direction and Mungal was the only shooter in the perfect position to snap this iconic image.

You can see the other forlorn shooters in the background, taking shots of Stoughton’s backside. 

Larry Wood provides the cover story with full event recap and some thoughts on the new bronze medal game, which was first played in London. 

Feedback was less than positive from participants (Gushue and Martin) and Woody, nearing retirement, shares a more subtle form of criticism than in his younger Canadian Curling News days.

And that’s it for another chapter of Buried Treasure.

Once again, additional content from these issues were previously “teased” on the Curling Legends Facebook page—here’s one of those pieces; you’ll have to pursue the others.