Remembering curling’s roaring days

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/01/2015 (3890 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A large ‘Sold’ sign is up on the side of the Victoria Curling Club on William Avenue. The building had been for sale since the club decided to cease operations after the 2013-14 season.

The opening evening draw for the Manitoba Open bonspiel, which ran Jan. 15 to 19 at various city clubs, was recently published in the Winnipeg Free Press and it took up little more than half a page. Games for the 256 teams will be played at 15 different clubs. In the glory days of what used to be known as the MCA bonspiel, the printed draw for the two main events, the Henry Birks and the Sir John C. Eaton, would take up two or more pages of much smaller type.

This thought led to some sliding down the curling memory lane.

The Victoria, whose history can be traced back to the CPR Club, is just the latest curling club to disappear. The Grain Exchange on Fort Street is gone and the Thistle on Minto Street burned down.

Who remembers the Civic Caledonian on Sherbrook Street, the Strathcona on nearby Furby Place or when the Fort Garry was on Main Street? Just across the road was the Eaton on Mayfair Place. The Maple Leaf  was located on Machray Avenue in the North End. Both the Leaf and the Strathcona relocated to the Highlander on Ellice Avenue, which once had 24 curling sheets.

Today the Highlander, now called Canlan Ice Sports, has none.

From 1975 through the 1980s, the MCA always attracted more than 700 entries. The total reached 1,280 for the 100th bonspiel in 1988. Many teams came from rural Manitoba each January and the 100th included such familiar names as Sawatzky of Altona, Good of Balmoral, Wolfe of MacGregor, Croy of Petersfield, McCannell from Pilot Mound, Motheral of Snowflake and White of Swan River.

Two-time Canadian champion Ab (Spats) Gowanlock skipped a team from Dauphin and current Progressive Conservative leader Brian Pallister threw last rock for a Portage team. A Morris team had two future MCA presidents in Resby Coutts and Lorne Hamblin, even though no rural curler headed the MCA until 1974-75.

This year the Manitoba Open had less than 50 rural entries.

Club curling was important in those days and every Winnipeg club had teams that could knock off the so-called “big names.”

That group would include Gord Lins from CFB, Jim Lowe of Deer Lodge, Bill Mowat of Elmwood, Bob Trager of Fort Garry, Ken Hilton of Fort Rouge, George Link of Grain Ex, Wilf Jeffries of Maple Leaf, Oscar Huyghebaert of Pembina, Howie Restall of Rossmere, Greg Milloy of St. Vital, Harvey Swain of Thistle, Vic Lindsay of Victoria, Dan Puls of West Kildonan and Harold Hamilton of Wildwood.

Until the paper folded, Winnipeg Tribune sports editor Jack Matheson wrote a column called “This Figured, This Didn’t” during the bonspiel. Club curlers no one had heard of would check the paper to see if they made Matty’s This Didn’t section after a surprise victory.
The annual MCA bonspiel yearbook was a treasure trove of information. It included the teams that reached the semi-finals of all events the previous year, past bonspiel trophy winners, provincial and Canadian honour rolls, lists of MCA executives and honorary life members, and statistics and executives of affiliated clubs. The yearbook also included the bonspiel rules and the rules of curling.

Sadly, Curl Manitoba no longer publishes the yearbook.  

Memories of Sport appears every second week in the Canstar Community News weeklies. Kent Morgan can be contacted at 204-489-6641 or email: sportsmemories@canstarnews.com