Worlds are his oyster

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This article was published 02/04/2011 (5495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — It is a monument to the unique nature of curling that when Jeff Stoughton takes the ice here today for the start of the World Men’s Curling Championship, he will be attempting to become the best curling team in the world fully 15 years after he last won that title.

 

Even more unique, he is favoured to actually

 

pull it off. There are few sports of any kind in which an athlete can have a realistic expectation of winning world championships 15 years apart, much less be favoured to do it.

 

But even in the sedate world of curling, where the unhurried pace and modest athletic demands allow elite curlers to compete well into their 40s, what Stoughton will attempt over the course of the next nine days is still a rarity.

 

Indeed, should Stoughton and lead Steve Gould win their second world championship next Sunday — 15 years after they won their first in Hamilton in 1996 — they would set a new record for the longest gap between world championships by a Canadian curler.

 

Ontario’s Glenn Howard — who won his first two world championships just six years apart in 1987 and 1993 — went 14 years before he won another one in 2007, as did Rick Folk, who won in 1980 and 1994. Only Scotland’s Peter Smith, who won world titles 18 years apart in 1991 and 2009, had a longer gap between world championships.

 

All of which has provided curling fans with a unique opportunity over the last two decades to watch Stoughton evolve not only as an athlete, but as a person.

 

And so as Stoughton embarks on a quest to once again prove that he is the best of the best on a sheet of curling ice, this seemed like a good time to step back and consider the evolution of a man whose public persona has been labelled with adjectives as disparate as brash and arrogant to classy and shy.

 

We don’t need no stinkin’ badges

 

TRUTH be told, Stoughton has been a little bit of all over the years.

 

The brash and arrogant labels were the result of three high profile incidents in which Stoughton was asked blunt questions by reporters and provided blunt — and, in retrospect, imprudent — answers.

 

The first episode occurred in January 1999 when Stoughton, down to his last life in the MCA Bonspiel as he tried to qualify for that winter’s provincials, pronounced to the Free Press that he didn’t much care anyway as he preferred to pursue “cash over badges.”

 

A furor immediately erupted over the hubris which seemed to underlie the pronouncement and, in particular, the use of the term “badges” to describe the coveted Purple Heart that goes with winning a provincial men’s curling championship in Canada.

 

Unbothered by the fire he’d set, Stoughton silenced the critics who claimed he’d gotten too big for his boots by promptly running the table at the Bonspiel, the provincials and the Brier that same winter, coming just an extra end from winning the world championship too.

 

Undaunted by the experience — or perhaps emboldened by it — Stoughton did it again one year later, telling a news conference prior to that year’s provincials that only three teams from Winnipeg — his included — had any realistic chance of winning the province that year and the remaining 29 teams scheduled to compete might as well not bother.

 

An entire section of the population — ‘rural Manitoba’ — clamoured again for Stoughton’s scalp, only to watch Stoughton win the province again.

 

And then in 2005, just a few days before the Olympic Trials, Stoughton was handicapping the field he’d face in Halifax for the Free Press when he announced that Newfoundland’s Brad Gushue had “no chance.” This time, an entire region of the country — Atlantic Canada — demanded Stoughton’s head and, for once, actually got it as Stoughton went on to lose the Trials final to none other than Gushue.

 

Loudmouth to senior statesman

 

THAT one stung. Badly.

 

And, really, the public Stoughton has never been quite the same since as brash and arrogant has given way to classy and shy. While he can still be abrasive at times — his pointed sarcasm came out a couple of times during the recent Brier in London, Ont. — he chooses his words much more carefully with reporters and has evolved over the last five years from a bit of a loudmouth into something more resembling a senior statesman in Canadian curling.

 

“Sure I’ve changed,” Stoughton says.

 

“As you grow older, you grow wiser and you have more input from other people who understand how everything works. Looking back on it, I don’t know I would have done anything differently. For the most part, I think I did what I thought was the right thing to do.

 

“Today, I don’t feel like I need to get into controversy. Life’s too short and I’ve definitely mellowed in the sense that we’re just taking care of ourselves and our kids and our families. I don’t go looking for stuff.”

 

Gould, who has curled with Stoughton longer than anyone and won six Manitoba titles with him, said his skip has long been misunderstood by curling fans. “Jeff’s best quality, as well as his worst quality, is that he’s very private,” Gould says. “He doesn’t let a lot of people into his environment. So the ones, like myself, who are privileged to get near him are really the only ones who know how great a dad he is, how great a husband he is, how great a friend he is.

 

“The other guys, say like Vic (Peters) or Kerry (Burtnyk), gave the public a little more of themselves. I remember (Global News anchor) Joe Pascucci telling me years ago that Jeff was the most boring interview in the world.”

 

Hardly, as it’s turned out. And Stoughton, while he is unquestionably humbled these days, says any perceived lack of verbal fireworks from him over the years has only partly been because of the answers he’s given.

 

“You guys,” he laughs, “just haven’t been asking the right questions.”

 

In the end, Stoughton says the public’s perception of him — and how it has or hasn’t changed over the years — is a bit besides the point, anyway.

 

“Public perception is your job, it’s not my job,” he says. “Now don’t get me wrong — I know there are people out there who don’t want me to win, jut as I know there were people out there who didn’t want Kerry Burtnyk or Kevin Martin to win. But fortunately we live in a society where if you have a complaint with a company, you tell the company. But if you have a complaint with an individual, you generally keep it to yourself and your friends.

 

“And fortunately there are also a lot of people, who do love the way we play the game and enjoy every moment we’re out there.”

 

Regrets almost too few to mention

 

IT is perhaps most illustrative of the Stoughton personality that when asked if he has any regrets — anything that he’s done or said over the years that he’d like a ‘re-do’ — the only instance he could conjure up was an episode that occurred on the ice and involved what he felt was a failure of his own work ethic, but perhaps might have resulted from a bit of arrogance too.

 

At the 1999 Worlds in Saint John, N.B., the last time Stoughton curled for a world championship, ice problems resulted in the ice-makers reflooding the entire ice at the end of the round-robin. That completely changed the conditions for the playoffs and it caught up to Stoughton in the final against Scotland’s Hammy McMillan, as Stoughton got fooled early and had to play catchup the rest of the game, finally losing in the extra end.

 

Never should have happened, Stoughton says.

 

“Everything we learned for the first six days was thrown out the window after the round-robin and we were playing on green ice again,” Stoughton says. “And that’s no one’s fault but our own for not requesting more practice time and not getting out and throwing as many rocks as possible to try and get comfortable again.

 

“We just weren’t prepared for that final and as the years go by, you realize, ‘Holy, we really dropped the ball on that one.’ You think at the time that you’ll just go back to the Worlds another time, and then you realize over time just how hard it is to get back there.”

 

Humbled by curling and humbled by life, Stoughton has been given this week that rarest of gifts in curling and in life — a second chance.

 

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca