Walsh won Arena’s first curling championship

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2021 (1619 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this final column for 2021, Memories of Sport continues the story of the first season that the Winnipeg Arena was in operation.

Curling took over the ice in February 1956, when six sheets were used for play in the second week of the 68th annual Manitoba Curling Association bonspiel. Event playoffs were scheduled there as well as the British Consols competition for the right to represent the province in the Canadian men’s championship.

Eight teams had qualified for the Consols by winning Winnipeg zones and another 24 were rural zone representatives. Teams, or rinks as they were known in those days, also made it by reaching the 16s of the two major bonspiel events, Henry Birks and Sir John C. Eaton, making the final count 60. The Granite club led with nine foursomes. The event was a straight knockout, so a team went home after one loss.

The four teams that reached the semi-finals were 1952 Canadian champion Billy Walsh from the Fort Rouge club, the Granite’s Howie Wood Jr., Bruce Hudson of the Strathcona, and Archie Rea from Dauphin. Wood and Hudson were sons of former Canadian champions, Howard Wood and Gordon Hudson. Howie beat Bruce in one semi-final and Walsh won the other.

In the final, the Fort Rouge lineup of third Al Langlois, second Cy White and lead Andy McWilliams beat Wood and his team of Gerry Duguid, Norm Hume and Don Duguid 10-6. In March, Walsh won the Brier in Moncton by beating Alf Phillips of Ontario in a one-game playoff after the teams finished round-robin play with identical records.

After losing the provincial final in 1956, Howie Jr. captured it the next season. He had won a Canadian title curling with his father in 1940, when the championship was played in Winnipeg at the Amphitheatre. Don Duguid later skipped Granite teams to back-to-back world championships in 1970 and 1971. His brother, Gerry, was a halfback for the Blue Bombers in 1950 and 1951.  

A Gordon Bell alumnus, Hudson went to his old school to recruit Mitch Czaja and Jim Ursel from Gene Walker’s 1954 provincial high school championship rink and filled out his lineup with his former Rosedales and St. Boniface Native Sons baseball teammate Ken Little. The Hudson/Little duo later curled for Manitoba championship teams in 1964 and 1967. Czaja, who was a top-scoring basketball player for the U of M in the late 1950s, played in the 1969 Brier with an Ontario team. In 1977, Ursel won the Canadian title skipping a team from Quebec,

On March 6, 1956, Alex Turk brought pro wrestling to the Arena. A record 11,500 fans watched the German pair of Fritz Van Erich and Karl Van Schoberg prevail in the feature tag-team match when the Russian duo of Ivan and Karol Kalniloff was disqualified.

The Winnipeg Warriors, who finished the regular schedule in first place in the Western Hockey League’s Prairie Division, topped the league in attendance with more than 166,000 fans. In the divisional playoffs, the Warriors ousted Saskatoon in one semi-final and then beat Calgary four games to one in the final. That set up a league final with the Coast champion Vancouver Canucks.

To cut down on travel costs, the first three games of the best-of-seven series were in Vancouver. The Canucks won game one 3-1, but the Warriors took the next two 5-1 and 3-2 in overtime.
At the Arena, Vancouver tied the series with a 4-2 victory. The Warriors won the fifth game 4-0 with Ed Chadwick getting the shutout. Mike Nykoluk with two, Bill Mosienko and Barry Cullen had the goals.

Partway through the sixth game on April 21 with the Canucks up 2-0, it appeared the teams might be travelling back to B.C. for a seventh contest. Once Mosienko thrilled the WHL record crowd of 9,534 fans with a goal, the Warriors went on to a 6-3 victory. Eddie Mazur scored twice with singles coming from Nykoluk, Gary Aldcorn and Chuck Lumsden, who had been brought up from amateur ranks for three playoff games.

Toronto Maple Leafs coach Howie Meeker, on hand to see the team’s prospects in the Warriors lineup, called Lumsden, who played for Pittsburgh in the Toronto system the previous two seasons, the best player on the ice in game five. Lumsden was a multi-sport athlete who played halfback for the Blue Bombers from 1952 to 1954.