When our beloved coach earned his mettle—and medal

#Nagano25Years – Chapter 11, February 11 1998

This is the third chapter of this series published to this website. Other chapters, including yesterday’s, can be found at The Curling Guy Facebook page.

This chapter is all about our alternate/coach, Paul Savage, and my friends from Germany. But first, a look at what the Schmirler girls were up to.

They had two games on the day, and this is where they started rolling. In the morning they dispatched Denmark’s Helena Blach-Lavrsen 9-5, scoring a three-ender in the third end and a big four in the fifth.

In the evening they belted Kirsty Hay of Great Britain 8-3 in eight ends, scoring another four-banger in the fifth.

This put them at 4-1, and a showdown with Sweden’s Elisabet Gustafson loomed the next day.

Meanwhile, we had a single game booked for the afternoon draw, against Andy Kapp’s Germany.

The day started innocently enough, with the usual bus ride from our satellite athlete’s village to the venue. But it would be a big day for Paul.

No alternates at these inaugural medal-status Olympic Games were guaranteed to get a medal themselves. The rules were different. Each player on a team had to actually compete, in other words throw two stones in an end of play, to qualify to get a medal at the end of the tournament. It’s not like it is these days, where a fifth player can sit on the bench for the entire Games and still achieve gold, silver or bronze.

It was suggested to all teams that the best way to get the alternate into a game is—wait for it—injury replacement. Believe it or not, it was more-or-less suggested that it needs to look like someone is hurting and needs to come out.

That’s also nowhere near the situation in any curling championships today, including the Olympics.

So, in the late stages of our previous two games I had been feigning a sore back—just walking stiffly, stretching things out, and grimacing a bit. This was five years before my acting debut in Men With Brooms, and it was absolutely ridiculous, but I had fun—it kind of fit with my role on the team.

The problem was that both USA and Great Britain had quit early (six and eight ends) and we missed those windows to insert Paul into the game as my replacement.

So we switched it up, and Paul got the call to start the game at lead stone.

I shouldn’t have to point Paul’s resume—multiple Briers at skip and third position, a world champion with fellow legend Ed Werenich and a true curling pioneer—but folks might not recall that he skipped our team for the past two Septembers and Octobers, while Mike was still working in Austria. A nice chunk of World Curling Tour winnings, including that $75,000 total in 1996, can be credited to him. And he was an invaluable fifth/coach at the Olympic Trials two months earlier.

Our third Richard Hart won another coin toss for last rock advantage, his fifth in a row.

The call on Paul’s first stone was a tight guard, somewhere between a centre and a corner. He placed it perfectly.

Then came an out-turn—sorry, in-turn—for the legendary lefty’s second throw. Mike was now dealing with two lefties and a second skip as teammates, can you imagine?

That one wasn’t quite as good as the first, so Savage was ordered to sweep his ass off for the rest of the end. Ha!

We ended up taking two to start the game. I came in and Paul left the match. He told us after the game he was alone in the locker room and, feeling emotional, he had a good cry. I don’t recall if I hugged him after hearing that, but I hope I did.

I’ll always treasure the great humour, savvy and experience he gave to our team, and I don’t believe we could have accomplished what we did in 1997-98 without him.

Kapp and his mates got into trouble in the second end, and we stole a pair to go up 4-0. By the time we stole another deuce in the sixth end, we were up 8-3.

Germany ended up scoring two, and they stole a point in the eighth end. However, we scored a pair in the ninth and then ran them out of stones in the 10th for a 10-6 victory.

Paul was autographing game tickets in our “Brier Patch” after the draw.

I love the German guys. Andy, his brother Uli, Holger Höhne and Oliver Axnick have been friends and rock-steady informants over the last 25 years (I didn’t get to know Michael Schäffer quite as well). I know they will always feel disappointed with their Nagano results, just as our team will forever mourn the way our tournament ended, but I’m they have great memories and feel proud to have competed in the first official Olympic curling tournament (before the IOC retroactively declared Chamonix 1924 to be the first).

I’ll tell you something else about these guys. This will require me to sound a bit geeky.

The organizing committee installed 1,000 computer terminals all over the venues and villages, offering athletes, officials and spectators up-to-the-minute results, standings and other information. This was the start of the IOC’s “Info” system. They also created email addresses for each athlete, Olympic team and sport discipline and sure enough, the messages were pouring in from random people all over the world.

(Email was still a growing thing at that time, and forget about portable smart devices like the ones we have today.)

I found myself at one of the terminals one day, looking through messages sent to either myself or “Canada Curling” and responding to a few. There were thousands of messages, and there was no way I could make a real dent, but I spent a couple of hours there, getting a feel for what the average global sport fan thought about this new sport they were just getting exposed to.

A few of the German guys came along–it might have been Holgi, Uli and Oli—and wouldn’t you know it, they sat down and started answering messages with me. This marked the first Olympic curling athlete outreach in the still-developing digital age.

So there’s a salute to some of the best people I met at the Games. I checked in with Holgi recently, and he showed off his closing ceremony lamp … which still works. I am jealous.

Tomorrow’s Feb. 12 chapter, number 12, will be posted to The Curling Guy Facebook page.