Too good to be through

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This article was published 16/12/2014 (4131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With a quarter-century of competitive curling under his belt, it’s safe to say just about everything that could happen to Jeff Stoughton on a sheet of curling ice has already happened to Jeff Stoughton on a sheet of curling ice.

So yeah — Stoughton has been swept out of a bonspiel in three consecutive losses before. But it hasn’t happened often in a hall of fame career. And it has been a very, very long time since what happened to him at the Canadian Open in Yorkton over the weekend last occurred.

“Probably sometime in the ’90s,” Stoughton said on Monday. “I’m serious. It has been a very long time. Not good.”

A curling season that has thus far seen Stoughton struggle to find traction with a team that is both new and young hit rock bottom for the 11-time Manitoba men’s champion on the weekend when the Stoughton foursome — third Rob Fowler, second Alex Forrest and lead Connor Njegovan — lost every game they played at the $100,000 Open.

Playing in a Grand Slam event formatted as a three-game knockout, Stoughton lost three games in succession, falling to John Morris, former teammate Reid Carruthers and Scotland’s David Murdoch, to find himself slinking home to Winnipeg before the event had even gotten interesting.

That’s not the kind of ignominy Manitoba curling fans expect to see out of teams skipped by Stoughton, a three-time Brier champion, two-time world champion and nothing less than the winningest men’s curler in the history of Manitoba.

But it has been a tough cashspiel season for Stoughton, who has won just once in eight events this fall and missed the playoffs three times, including in each of his last two events.

Stoughton sits just 15th on the tour’s Order of Merit and is in serious jeopardy of not qualifying to play in the final two events of curling’s Grand Slam, an elite tour Stoughton helped found and with which his name has been synonymous until now.

This is not the script Stoughton envisioned last spring when he scrapped any designs on retirement at the end of another Olympic quadrennial, deciding instead to put together a new team — at the ripe old age of 51 — with a former teammate in Fowler and a young front end in Forrest and Njegovan.

Alas, the new team looked much better on paper last spring than it has on the ice this fall.

‘There is definitely a learning curve with a new team and learning what makes people click’

— Jeff Stoughton

“It’s definitely been a bit of a struggle,” said Stoughton. “We have moments where everything seems like it’s coming together. We make eight shots in a row and you think, ‘All right, this is good.’

“And then a couple ends later, we’re brain-dead and we’re only making three out of eight. We’re just not consistent.”

Is some of that inconsistency problem attributable to an aging Stoughton? Not according to his teammates.

“He’s still unbelievable,” says Fowler. “Jeff throws so great. There’s no shot he can’t make.

“He makes shots to save ends and he makes shots to put big points up on the wall. Our only job is to give him the opportunities to make those shots.”

Stoughton was asked which is the bigger problem, that he has a new team or that he has an inexperienced front end?

“A bit of both. There is definitely a learning curve with a new team and learning what makes people click. And then it’s also being a young team and learning that to play at the top level, you have to be consistent.

“You can’t throw away a couple games or even a couple ends as a player. There aren’t a lot of misses out there and you have to pretty much be your best all the time.”

The good news is Stoughton can still salvage his team’s season. As good as he has been on the cash circuit over the decades, Stoughton’s curling legend was built on his epic performances on the playdowns circuit, where his 11 Manitoba men’s titles are alongside Billy Mosienko’s hat trick and Wilt Chamberlain’s bedding of 20,000 women in the lexicon of unbreakable sports records.

The good news is Stoughton’s playdowns season is still entirely in front of him. He will compete this weekend at his home club at Charleswood in the Winnipeg regional playdowns, where he will be the top seed vying to take down one of the berths up for grabs into February’s Manitoba men’s provincial championship in Brandon.

It is in Brandon where things will get really interesting. Because at the same time Stoughton has struggled mightily on the cash tour this fall, his longtime Winnipeg rival, Mike McEwen, has been having the season of his life, dominating the money list and winning almost every weekend.

But while McEwen’s team is the best in the world right now, he’s still second to Stoughton in Manitoba until he can finally figure out a way to beat Stoughton in the provincials, where McEwen has lost four finals — three to Stoughton.

So, Stoughton was asked Monday, is this the year McEwen finally beats you at the provincials?

“I have no idea,” Stoughton laughed. “You’ll have to ask him.”

Stoughton is gushing in his praise of what McEwen has done on the cash tour this season. “It’s unbelievable — you couldn’t have scripted it any better. They’ve been on fire all year. They’re having one of the best fall (seasons) ever.”

But Stoughton also points out, that in his opinion, the true measure of Canadian curling teams is taken at playdowns time, when the lights are the hottest. “The whole idea is you still have to perform your best at the right time. And for me, I always wanted to be my best in early February so that I could get to that Brier and perform really well in March.

“For me, that’s always been the ultimate goal.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek