The 2021 Brier is over, a fact which makes me immensely sad; my secret hopes that a jaunt into a couple weeks of escapism would produce a seismic shift in the world’s current sociopolitical calculus were immediately dashed when, upon looking up from my TV at the conclusion of Sunday’s title match, I did not see a parade of crabs outside my window, blaring EDM and proclaiming “COVID IS GONE.” There is, fortunately, more curling — the Home Hardware Canadian Mixed Doubles championship is running right now, and men’s and women’s worlds are slated for the next couple months (which will aid in my escapist desires, as I can root for the cool teams from the 2018 Olympics — go Garlic Girls! — and casually also pretend like it’s 2018) — but there’s something a little unsatisfying about going from likely the pinnacle of competitive play to a much more standardly high level. It’d be like if college football hosted its national championship game, then — a week later — held the RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl; I’d probably watch, but I don’t think I could stop my overall mood from approximating a thinking emoji.
One thing that might help in alleviating this sensation of mild dissatisfaction is that it’s probably not fair to point to this year’s Brier as a paragon of competitive excellence in the sport of curling. Obviously everyone played well, at a level that would shame your average club curler, but it was hard to shake the specter of “rust around the edges,” given the usual standard of professional play. My aforementioned life partner Mike McEwen, for example, got bounced after group pools, because he was clearly not in midseason form; for the first few days, pretty much every broadcast cut-in to their games went something like “here’s Mike McEwen, with an open draw and the opponent sitting 2… and he just misses it.” I felt bad for him; it was not hard to imagine that curling, for some reason, had perhaps not been at the top of his list of priorities recently. He wasn’t the only one; the tournament arcs of a couple other teams were also privy to the whims of the rust demon. In classic horror movie fashion, Brad Gushue — the skip of Team Canada — essentially looked back and got devoured by the monster; he started the week shooting 100% in his first game, but by the time championship pools rolled around, he was inexplicably awful, shooting 50 something percent, missing shots by 20 feet, and leaving the announcers (and his teammates) dumbfounded. You could hear his team’s on-ice chatter, searching for an explanation — maybe the rock picked, maybe our line was wrong — but I’ve been there; sometimes the answer is “I just missed. My bad,” which the pros aren’t exactly used to. This circumstance led to Gushue receiving a savage curling insult, borne out of a peculiar quirk of the TSN Brier broadcast format, which focuses entirely on one game out of the four currently in progress; the broadcast cut away from his final championship pool game because he was losing by too much (they were down 7–0 in the 5th end, at the time). It was hard not to imagine the other teams regrouping afterwards, and slowly realizing they were missing one of the group; “where’s Brad?” “I don’t know, I just saw him yesterday.” If the camera caught the ice at the right angle, you might have been able to see the reflection of the rust monster, in frame only for a split second.
The two teams I was rooting for after group pools also got devoured, inevitably, albeit in nearly polar opposite circumstances. The first team — Manitoba, skipped by Jason Gunnlaugson — had started the tournament blazing hot, opening 5–0 (including victories over some pretty decent teams, including Team Bottcher — back-to-back-to-back finalists — in the opener). Gunnlaugson was everything, as far as narrative stereotypes go — a former professional poker player, who showed up at the Brier looking nearly unrecognizable with a shock of long, wild COVID hair (causing one of the announcers to quip, “I see Jason Gunnlaugson has been visiting the same barber as me”) — and a controversial figure who, in the past, had angered the curling community by briefly, mercernarily, defecting to Russia (with illustrative picture). True to form, he basically only played shots that involved throwing as hard as he could, eschewing conservative lines of play in favor of pure, unadulterated, ignore-the-downside-technically-the-odds-are-in-our-favor-there’s-no-POSSIBLE-way-this-could-go-wrong risky takeouts. As tends to happen after a hot streak at the casino, though, Manitoba came crashing back down to Earth, losing their last three games of groups (including basically chess-clocking themselves at one point), narrowly beating Ontario in a sort of dead cat bounce, then continuing to lose out in spectacular fashion — 12–2 to Gushue, 12–4 to Koe, 9–6 (but it wasn’t that close) to Dunstone/Saskatchewan. Gunnlaugson continually found himself falling victim to the classic gambler’s trap of doubling down in a losing situation, forcing near-impossible hero shots after falling behind, then missing and digging himself a deeper hole, forcing an even more impossible shot in the next end — rinse, repeat. If the Brier was a MOBA, he probably would have been reported for feeding. In this case, the monster didn’t even have to do any work for its prey; it just sat back and watched the twice-as-bright flame burn itself out, snickering.
My other rooting interest was Team Howard, whose name was a misnomer; the eponymous Howard was not playing in the Brier. Instead, in one of the best stories of the tournament (ignoring the whole spurred-by-misfortune part): Glenn Howard, the team’s usual skip, was unable to curl due to broken ribs from a snowmobile accident several weeks earlier. As his replacement, the team called up Wayne Middaugh, a Canadian Curling Hall of Famer who hadn’t curled professionally in 5 years, having been forced into retirement after breaking his leg in 11 places while skiing. (In case you needed further evidence that curling might be the best sport: apparently you can just call up someone in the Hall of Fame and be like, “hey buddy, want to come play with us?”) I was obviously, immediately, rooting for Middaugh, his team, and the big “one last job” energy they brought to the proceedings. This was a very strange experience as someone who had not grown up watching Canadian curling, and who has only a passing familiarity with the history and culture of the professional ranks; the announcers (and curlers, during brief interviews) all assumed that viewers knew exactly who Wayne Middaugh was, which — while technically I did, because I read the linked Sports Illustrated article 10 minutes before the first draw of the tournament — I certainly didn’t in the heavily internalized manner that seemed to be implicit in every reference to Middaugh or his accomplishments. I imagine this sensation is rather like being an alien trying to pass as a human, context-cluing yourself into developing rough approximations of things with which you are totally unfamiliar, in order to not blow your cover. In a post-match interview with a curler, they’d drop “we all grew up watching Wayne Middaugh,” and I’d nod along — yep, grew up watching Wayne Middaugh, I definitely did that, checks out. When Middaugh would make a good shot, the announcers would say something along the lines of “of course, it’s Wayne Middaugh, at the Brier!”; watching on the display of the center console of my spaceship, I’d pump my fist in elation — let’s go, Wayne-Middaugh-At-The-Brier.
As it turns out, I also ended up rooting for Wayne-Middaugh-At-The-Brier for actual curling reasons: Middaugh was the smart character in the horror movie, in that he seemed to be the only one taking any precautions against the monster. In stark contrast to Gunnlaugson — and, to a lesser degree, the entire rest of the field — Middaugh continually called and played extremely conservative shots, approaching each end with the goal of minimizing downside and always giving himself an out with his last shot. At an amateur level, this is what you do when you’re skipping a bad team — since it’s unlikely you’ll get the high reward from high-risk shots, it makes more sense to keep the score low and try to capitalize if your opponent screws up. Middaugh’s team obviously wasn’t bad, but it turns out this is also a reasonably effective strategy for avoiding magnification of the tiny mistakes you tend to make when you’re rusty, especially if everyone else is playing as if they can hit high-degree-of-difficulty shots like normal (and therefore screwing up); I have a fervent respect for zigging in the face of a collective zag, particularly when it’s the objectively right call. It worked well for a while, as Team Howard was tied for the best record after group pools, but it was probably inevitable that the monster would catch up to the guy with one leg; Middaugh had a chance to make the playoffs, but faltered in the final game. Near the end, after missing two key shots, he threw his broom in frustration, which was like hearing your always-jovial uncle mildly swear for the first time. I felt bad for him; it’s too easy to forget that the last job usually only goes well in the movies.
Much like the Scotties, it took until the tournament finals to realize that I had been rooting for the wrong team the entire time. The Brier playoffs came down to Saskatchewan (Dunstone), Alberta (Bottcher), and Wild Card #2 (Koe), and faced with these three, I had to make what I initially thought was a tough choice. Saskatchewan was immediately out; their skip, I’m sure, is a perfectly fine person, but his body language was super questionable — apart from his earlier outburst, I also saw one shot where he released the stone, immediately hung his head, and didn’t say anything as it traveled down the ice. (He actually made this shot, barely, which made the vibe even weirder.) With that, I was down to Bottcher and Koe — who were mostly pretty quiet and reserved, as far as on-ice demeanor, making it a little tough to choose. I ended up picking Bottcher, for a couple of reasons; for one, his team had lost the last 3 Brier finals, making them the Buffalo Bills of curling, and the clear underdogs (even if they had technically been favorites, people would have expected the choke). Additionally, they’d had to deal with a strange incident earlier in the tournament where their game was delayed 45 minutes after an opponent inadvertently damaged the ice in frustration; the delay clearly disrupted Bottcher’s rhythm, and caused them to almost lose a game where they had been in a pretty favorable position. (The r/curling thread on this suggested that the ice-damager’s team should have immediately forfeited, as this action was “the same as driving drunk.” Presumably, he should have also been summarily executed, in the true spirit of curling.) Finally, the most important reason I picked Bottcher was that he was wearing cool pastel rainbow socks. I then looked up the socks, and realized that Brendan Bottcher was actually awesome: an 88-year-old fan had mailed them to him halfway through the Brier, and he started wearing them because he thought it was a sweet gesture. Even a context-cluing alien would have been hard-pressed not to find that heartwarming.
As far as the final went, the primary theme was “communication,” at first merely as a curiosity, but later as the deciding narrative. To wit: there was the “communication” of Mitch Minken, the chair of the Board of Governors of Curling Canada, who was tasked with reading a congratulatory “thank you to the fans and the city of Calgary, etc.” message during the finals, and was awful at it, clearly having never been trained to use a teleprompter or talk on-air; he was continually looking offscreen, down and away, fumbling his words. He was also in a random hockey rink instead of the actual curling venue, for some reason. (I looked up his Twitter, and found yet more examples of good communication.) There was also the communication of Bottcher and his vice, who were whispering strategy to each other, so as not to disturb their opponents during their shots — a bizarre, yet sensibly polite gesture, necessitated by the complete lack of sound in the arena (due to the lack of other simultaneous games); the utter silence meant that their whispering was actually picked up by the broadcast mics, briefly turning the Brier into a broadcast-TV ASMR stream.
Most importantly, however, there was the “communication” of Kevin Koe and his team — which, during the rest of the tournament, had been a little touchy, yet glossed over by the fact that they were mostly winning. His vice, John Morris — a recent addition to the team, having joined a little under a year prior — had been out of sync with the rest of the team, often advocating for alternate shots, contrary to the agreed-upon strategy of the other three; he even moved Koe’s specified broom target a couple times while Koe’s back was turned, with the broadcast picking up Koe’s admonition — “can you not move the broom on me” — in a tone somewhere between “a transformation from worried to disappointed dad” and “I would really prefer if you would be quiet.” (I’m not the only one who picked up on this awkward dynamic; there was a thread about it at the top of r/curling the day after the final.) For a while, it seemed as if this shakiness was destined to fall by the wayside; through 6 ends, Koe and Bottcher essentially played to a dead draw, neither team making a mistake — first one to blink gets eaten by the monster. Then Koe blinked; a missed setup by Morris here, a glance off the guard by Koe there, and all of a sudden Bottcher had 3 points, and the lead. Koe’s visibly mounting frustration shone through, as much as it could have with a guy who never actually changes his facial expression — all of a sudden the strategy discussion was overtly curt, and in a rare manifestation of definitive salt, Team Koe opted to concede rather than playing the final (admittedly extremely low percentage) shot of the game. The monster claimed its final victim, and Team Bottcher celebrated, victorious; somewhere, an 88-year-old lady was presumably very happy. I turned the keys in the ignition of my ship, planning to circle back around in a month or so; maybe next time, the victory would come with a crab parade.
