Colleen Jones’ curling memoir a rip-roarin’ read

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/10/2015 (3862 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The phone rang shortly after lunch Friday, right at the appointed time, and a familiar and television-polished voice piped up on the other end of the line.

“Before we start,” Colleen Jones said. “Do you know what the score was in the game Mary-Anne Arsenault played against Jennifer Jones this morning?”

In a way, the question just felt right. Over the next 40 minutes, the iconic Canadian curler would chat about her legacy, her favourite memories, and the future of chess on ice. But the conversation began the same way she did, as a young Nova Scotian studying the game: with the love of some friends, and of the play.

As it happened, that morning Jones’ longtime teammate Arsenault had trounced the reigning Olympic champions 8-3 in the Masters Grand Slam of Curling round robin. And Colleen, who will speak at McNally Robinson Monday night to launch her new book, Throwing Rocks at Houses, was pleased.

It’s been less than three years since the six-time Canadian champion last played with that team, when she made her emotional 2013 swan song at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Jones threw second for Arsenault then, a triumphant return to the ice after a 2010 bout with bacterial meningitis threatened her life.

That’s where the idea of writing a book happened. It’s funny, Jones mused, everything in her 55-year-old life seems to have flowed out of a Scotties: her career as a CBC television host, her two world champioships and globetrotting travels, her faith in herself that she could win — and, now, write.

It was sports journalist Perry Lefko who proposed it to her, at those 2013 nationals in Kingston, Ont. “You’ve got a book in you,” Jones remembers him saying, and the timing seemed right. She was just about to complete a 35-year career on the ice, and the circle was closing. Lefko would become her co-author.

Maybe the Canadian curling world is also ripe for Jones’ memoir, now. The sport has accelerated over the last decade, barrelling through sweeping changes in visibility and higher stakes. The heavyweights of curling are getting sharper, television coverage is getting wider, and the money is coming in.

Thirty-three years after she won her first Canadian women’s championship, at a record-setting age of 22, Jones has had a prime seat to observe those changes. When she won her second Scotties in 1999, it was already a “world of difference,” with thousands of spectators at the games. And now?

“It’s been such a wild trip of fabulousness for women’s curling,” she said. “The professionalism that’s coming into the sport, is not a thing to be feared, but a thing to be applauded and encouraged. There aren’t a lot of sports in Canada where females get the exact same coverage as men in almost every regard.”

Not that Jones would necessarily have guessed it would have gone that far back when she was starting out in Nova Scotia. Contrary to popular assumption, she didn’t come from a family of curlers, and her parents had little knowledge of the game. What she and her teammates learned, they had to discover on her own.

It was harder in the late 1970s, long before the digital revolution linked the world together. Compared to today’s jam-packed World Curling Tour circuit, curlers rarely left Nova Scotia before the nationals, and there were few chances to observe future opponents in action.

As a young university student, Jones would hit up the Dalhousie University library, where she could find imported copies of the Winnipeg Free Press. She’d pour over curling reports, trying to read between the lines of the score and the stories, to glean insight into the strategies employed by the big guns out west.

The sport itself was different then, which is something she doesn’t miss. Not the corn brooms leaving debris on the ice, or the heavy wool sweaters, or the rough sheets that doggedly resisted the best-laid attempts at precision. Back then, she laughed, the strategy was “hit, hit, hit, and hit some more.”

That worked for Jones, who was famously intense on the sheet (“(Fans) might be surprised to find out that off the ice, I’m kind of funny and light,” she laughed). It powered her 1982 team, which included vice Kay Smith, second Monica Jones and lead Barbara Jones-Gordon, to that stunning win.

One thing fans forget, is what came next. Yes, Jones would go on to win a record four consecutive Canadian titles, from 2001 through 2004. But first, she would lead her team through what she dubbed “the longest losing streak in curling history,” 17 years of top play without a national victory.

It’s interesting she would describe it that way, when the annals of curling history only gush over the triumphant milestones, and the record 140 Scotties wins as a skip. But that’s one of the lessons curling imparted, and one that Jones’ book examines in the world on and off the sheet: balance, always.

“Through the ’80s and ’90s, we were pretty much written off as ‘she was good once,’ or ‘we were good once, but they’re not what they used to be.’ ” Jones said. “To come back and win… curling does lend itself to that. A career can be such a long one, for sport. There’s great Manitoba curlers that have had that resiliency… I think that gives everybody hope that, you can get better. In many ways, in curling, you have to keep reinventing the wheel.”

That wheel is spinning quicker than ever now. The balance between curling, work and life is becoming harder to find, with the travel and practice time required to make it to the top. That’s something Jones is watching closely, curious to see where it ends up.

Once, around the time she won her first world championship in 2001, Jones’ coach Ken Bagnall told the team theirs might be the last to come out of a cozy Halifax curling rink the old-fashioned way, and win it all. He may have jumped the gun somewhat on that prediction, but the trend holds is unmistakable.

“The beauty of curling was that always, there was room for guys or gals from the small town to become Olympic champions,” Jones said. “Now, you can recruit players from other provinces, and try to build a team that way. Whether or not that’s an improvement, who knows. The jury has to remain out until history sees, is that a good evolution of the sport? Or where does it go?”

The upside, after all, is better curling. The downside is the gap between great curlers and everybody else is growing. Last year, Team Nova Scotia didn’t even make it into the Brier, having fallen out in the new, highly controversial pre-tournament relegation round.

“Oh God, how sad is that?” Jones said. “I think they’ll change that rule eventually.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca