Reluctant rock star Curling virtuoso Jennifer Jones shies away from the spotlight By: Paul Wiecek  Posted: 5:30 PM CST Friday, Dec. 1, 2017 Last Modified: 12:06 AM CST Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017

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This article was published 01/12/2017 (3041 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You think you know Jennifer Jones.

 

You think you know her because, almost unique in sports, curlers wear microphones when they’re competing on television — and those microphones simultaneously create both a compelling narrative and an entirely false sense of intimacy.

You can listen to what curlers are saying on the ice in a way you’ll never hear, say, a Winnipeg Jets player talking during a game. (Don’t you wish Evgeni Malkin and Blake Wheeler were wired for sound that night in Pittsburgh last season?)

And you can hear curlers when they’re under duress. Want to see someone’s dreams, fears and inner-backbone revealed in one moment? You could do worse than giving them a last-rock draw to the four-foot with everything on the line.

Still, more than anything, those microphones reveal the inner workings of a curler, not a person. There’s a big difference — just ask a person who curls.

“What they see on TV is only a small piece of who we are,” says longtime Jones second Jill Officer. “A lot of athletes have a certain performance state that is not reflective of who we are as a person or who we are off the ice.

“People have told me I seem so stoic on the ice. I am so not like that.”

But mostly, you think you know Jones because you cannot remember a time when she wasn’t a part of the Manitoba sports scene.

She won her first major title — a Canadian juniors championship — back in 1994 when the Jets 1.0 were still a thing.

She won her last major title — a Canadian championship — in 2015 when the Jets 2.0 were a relatively new thing.

In between, she took down four other Canadian titles (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010), a world championship (2008), an Olympic gold medal (2014) and too many bonspiels to count, including a mind-boggling 15 Grand Slams.

If Jones has her way, she’s going to add another trip to the Winter Olympics to her resumé over the next week-and-a-half at the Roar of the Rings in Ottawa, where her team is among the favourites to once again win the right to represent Canada in women’s curling this February in South Korea.

Jones has authored an unparallelled curling career that is approaching a quarter-century in length and has made her, I contend, one of the most recognizable faces in Manitoba, if not the country.

You might recognize Brian Pallister in a grocery store. You’d probably recognize Blake Wheeler in a grocery store. You’d definitely recognize Jones in a grocery store — and probably have.

Yet for all the hours we’ve spent with her in our living rooms over the years, it says here you don’t know a darn thing about who Jones really is.

When we’re all done here a couple of thousand words from now, you’re still not, sadly, going to know who she is. Not really, anyway.

That’s because I still don’t know who she is. After covering Jones for the past 20 years, if anyone should know better, it’s me.

I’ve travelled to seven different provinces — and crossed an ocean — to watch her compete. I was present to see her win four of her five Canadian championships, six of her seven provincial championships, her only world championship and, one memorable night in Winnipeg in 2013, the right to represent Canada at the Olympics.

I’ve seen her cry tears of joy too many times to mention. I’ve seen her cry tears of sadness twice. She yelled at me once (long story… suffice to say, I had it coming.)

I covered her in 1998 when she was toiling on the Manitoba Curling Tour as the third for a local team skipped by Karen Porritt.

I was 10 feet away when she authored the greatest walk-off shot to win a Canadian curling title in history — the infamous “in-off-for-four” to capture her first Canadian title in St. John’s, N.L., in 2005.

All of which is to say I can tell you a lot about Jennifer Jones the curler. That’s not nothing, especially when being a curler has also been the driving force in Jones’ life since, well, forever.

So there are lessons about Jones, I suppose, to be drawn from how a frustratingly conservative curler, who at the start of her career never saw a rock she didn’t want to remove from play, completely reinvented her game in the intervening decades to become one of the most aggressive skips in the women’s game.

•••

It tells you a lot about the perfectionist Jones is that in a sport where everyone — and I mean everyone — has a weakness in their game, Jones has none.

Just look at the percentages she’s put up over the years in 12 visits to the national Scotties Tournament of Hearts: her in-turns (80 per cent) are as good as her out-turns (79 per cent) and her takeouts (80 per cent) are as ruthlessly efficient as her draws (78 per cent). In total, she’s thrown 2,964 rocks at the Scotties with 79 per cent efficiency.

Both those last two numbers are staggering. It tells you a lot about the inner workings of Jones that nobody — ever — in the women’s game has played better under pressure than she has.

A slow starter at major events for a lot of years, she’d stumble her way through the week until finally, with her back to the wall and no margin for error remaining, she’d wake up and run the table.

Twice (in 2008 and 2009) she needed to win a tiebreaker just to make the playoffs at the Scotties — and both times she never lost again en route to Canadian titles.

Then there was the biggest bonspiel of them all — the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

You probably already know Jones skipped the only women’s team in history to go undefeated at the curling event in the Olympics. But what you might not remember is that in the biggest game of her life, Jones put her entire team on her back in the gold-medal final against Sweden.

In a game that saw both Officer (76 per cent) and third Kaitlyn Lawes (68 per cent) get badly out-curled at their positions, Jones bailed her team out end after end, throwing a sizzling 88 per cent to make sure Canada’s gold in women’s curling didn’t turn to silver.

So yeah, heckuva curler, and money in the big games.

Then there is this about Jones — she has been as polarizing a curler as has ever played the game.

No one I’ve covered — and it’s really not even close — has generated more passionate email in my inbox — good and bad — than she has.

•••

Jones is loved for the same reasons she is hated: because she did whatever it took to win and seemingly didn’t much care (more on that in a minute) if she upset a few people — or curling’s staid traditions — along the way.

Her personnel moves seemed ruthless at a time when even elite curling teams were still made up of mostly friends and family.

She fired longtime friends — Dana Allerton — and she fired longtime teammates — her decision to gas third Cathy Overton-Clapham in 2010 at a time when their team was the three-time reigning Canadian champions made Jones persona non grata among a huge swath of Canadian curling fans, who felt she’d gone too far.

She was booed in arenas, shredded on Twitter and eviscerated at kitchen tables from Come By Chance, N.L., to B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands.

Yet, in retrospect, Jones was simply ahead of her time.

With the overriding emphasis curlers now place on the Olympics quadrennial, there’s not a competitive team in curling that isn’t constantly swapping out personnel — or at least thinking about it — in hopes of finding a winning combination that will get them to the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang.

You know who was drafting and developing before Winnipeg Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff? It was Jones, who replaced Overton-Clapham in 2010 with Lawes — who was just 22 at the time — and then stayed patient with her through some lean years as the team slowly, but unmistakably, built towards Sochi.

I suppose if there’s a knock against Jones, it’s that she saw the future of women’s curling before anyone else — and grabbed it by the throat.

Like most groundbreakers, she paid a price for it.

•••

All of which — finally — brings us back to Jones and the idea that she never cared what you thought about her.

Now, it is a rare profile of an athlete that doesn’t quote the athlete until we’ve reached the 1,500-word mark, but that’s been by design here because I have long felt it’s the things Jones has done over the years, rather than the things she has said, which have come the closest to revealing insights about her.

Indeed, I’d argue all the interviews she’s done over the years are the least revealing thing about her. This is a woman who took the lessons learned in law school — say a lot, without ever saying anything actually meaningful that can be used against you — and applied them to a career in athletics.

If platitudes were an art form, Jones would be Da Vinci.

That’s why I was taken aback last week when I talked to Jones about all the criticism she has taken over the years and — in particular — the heat she drew from both the media (columnist slowly raises hand in shame) and the public over firing Overton-Clapham.

Maybe it was just my timing, on the eve of an event in Ottawa that, depending on how things turn out this winter, might yet prove to be the last major Canadian curling event Jones plays in. Or maybe it was just a subject she had been waiting forever to be asked about.

But whatever it was, Jones gave me the most brutally frank answer I’ve ever gotten from her in 20 years of trying when we got talking about hard it was to be everyone’s favourite whipping girl.

“It was excruciatingly hard to hear all that criticism. It hurt me to my core,” she told me. “Because I truly believed that I’m a good and kind person. And people were attacking my character, when they didn’t really know all the information. And I didn’t care for them to know all the information.

“It really did hurt me a lot. And it very quickly made me realize who are the people I wanted to surround myself with. People that wanted to judge me on the information they didn’t know, I had no time for them in my life, to be honest.

“And the people who accept you for who you are and don’t judge you are the people I have all the time in the world for. Because I think that’s the kind of person I am, too.”

“People that wanted to judge me on the information they didn’t know, I had no time for them in my life, to be honest. And the people who accept you for who you are and don’t judge you are the people I have all the time in the world for. Because I think that’s the kind of person I am, too.”–Jennifer Jones

She’s also — and this is as close to an original insight as you’re going to find here about Jones — an intensely private person.

Think about what that must be like for her: you have one of the most recognizable faces in Canada, every curling fan in the country has an opinion about you and you cannot walk through a supermarket without some stranger stopping you to talk — and all you really want to do is get through the day without anyone noticing you at all.

It ain’t easy, Jones says. “I think I’ve opened up a lot more over the last five to 10 years. But overall, I’m a very private person. And yes, I’m very shy. I don’t think people realize that about me.”

•••

It is not by accident that while continuing to skip a team based in Winnipeg, Jones has actually lived for the last few years in Ontario with her husband Brent Laing and their two children in a tiny little town on Lake Simcoe called Shanty Bay.

It is a very private place for this most public of women, who curls despite the attention, not because of it.

Put it all together and it demands the most obvious of questions: why would someone who is wired to avoid the spotlight — and who has already won everything there is to win in curling and already been to the top of the most important podium in the sport — still be curling at the age of 43?

Jones will tell you it’s the thrill of competition, a desire to continue pushing herself to get better and the camaraderie of teammates who are now in their eighth season together.

Throw in the fact that Jones doesn’t really know any other way to spend her winters and the result is this intensely private woman will spend the next week or so curling in an 18,500-seat NHL arena for the right to curl even more this February in the biggest spotlight of them all.

You think you know Jennifer Jones? You know what she’s allowed you to see the last two decades, which has been both everything on the ice and next to nothing off of it.

In a superlative career, that’s maybe been her greatest play of all.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca 

Twitter: @PaulWiecek