Manitoba’s rich mixed curling legacy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/03/2024 (760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first Canadian curling championship for men was played at the Granite Club in Toronto in March 1927 with eight teams competing. The Murray Macneill team from Halifax was the first winner of the Macdonald’s Brier Tankard. In 1960, the Canadian Ladies Curling Association (CLCA) was formed and in the following year, 10 provincial teams competed for a national title in Ottawa. The Saskatchewan team skipped by Joyce McKee won the championship.

The Canadian curling landscape changed again in 1964, with the introduction of a mixed championship. The first mixed was held that at the Royal Canadian Curling Club in Toronto, from March 16 to 21. The Manitoba team from the Heather Curling Club, consisting of skip Ernie Boushy, third Mrs. Ina Light, second Garry DeBlonde, and lead Mrs. Bea McKenzie, won the title with a round-robin record of 9-1. (Note that, in the style of the day, the female curlers were identified as ‘Mrs.’) Boushy had won the first Manitoba mixed championship by defeating Ross Pearce from the Deer Lodge.

Competitive mixed curling was more popular in the east than the west, where most mixed curling was either company- or organization-related or very social, such as the Bide-a-Wee Mixed Club in Winnipeg, which at one point boasted more than 100 teams. Unlike men’s and women’s play, whereby team members had to belong to the same club, the provincial mixed rules allowed male players to recruit any women who curled at their club, either as club members or as part of a rental group, such as the Bide-a-Wee, which curled at several clubs around the City. After winning the Canadian, Boushy said his team had the two best female curlers, both of whom were members at the Heather.

With Betty Hird replacing McKenzie, the Boushy squad captured the next three provincial championships. Lee Green from Alberta won the Canadian in 1965, when Boushy was third, but the Manitoba team was back on top again in 1966 when the championship moved from Toronto to Fort William. In 1967, in Quebec City, Larry McGrath from Saskatchewan won with Boushy finishing second. McGrath and company took the title the next year when the championship came west for the first time to the Heather in St. Boniface. Manitoba’s team of Jim and Marion Hodgson and John and Arlene Bartley, from Roland, finished well down in the standings.

Barry Fry and his Maple Leaf team of third Peggy Casselman, second Stephen Decter, and lead Susan Lynch won Manitoba’s next Canadian mixed championship in 1973. Hal Tanasichuk, his wife Rose, Jim Kirkness, and Debbie Orr from the Civic Caledonian took the title in 1977. Another Heather team of Jim and Carol Dunstone, Del Stitt, and Elaine Jones was Canadian champion in 1980.

In 1988 and again in 1991, Jeff Stoughton and his Wildwood squad won the Canadian title. Sisters Karen Fallis and Lynn Morrow were on both teams with Rob Meakin playing second in 1988 and Scott Morrow in 1991. Manitoba had to wait until 2009 for another champion, when Sean Grassie and his Deer Lodge team of Allison Nimik, Ross Derksen, and Kendra Green won in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

Our province’s last Canadian mixed champion team was Colin Kurz, Megan Walter, Brendan Bilawka, and Sara Oliver in 2019 when the event was played at the Fort Rouge club. The team from Assiniboine Memorial then won the world championship in Sweden beating Germany in the final.

The 1964-67 Boushy teams were inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame in 1994. While Boushy is best known for his curling accomplishments, he was also a fine baseball player, who was inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000. He played senior baseball for the Dauphin Redbirds and in 1953, while playing organized baseball in Welch, W. Va., he led the Class D Appalachian League in batting with a .349 average. Boushy died in Calgary in 2020.

Bea (Hall) McKenzie, lead on Boushy’s first championship team, was one of our greatest women’s softball players, who starred from 1930 to 1952 primarily as a catcher with the senior St. Boniface Athletics. She was inducted into the Manitoba Softball Hall of Fame with the first class in 2002. She died in 2011.

Ina Light, third for Boushy, played for Manitoba senior women’s and masters champions and served as president of the Manitoba Ladies Curling Association in 1981-82. During the 1970s, she wrote a weekly column on women’s curling for the Winnipeg Free Press. Garry DeBlonde (who played seond) also curled for provincial men’s and senior champions and served as a Curl Canada national technical director. Both were inducted into the Manitoba Curling Hall of Fame in the curler/builder category.

The 2024 Canadian mixed curling championship will be held this fall. The 2023 championships were held in November 2023 in Swift Current, Sask., where a team skipped by Saskatchewan’s Shaun Meachem defeated Manitoba’s Kyle Kurz. Beth Peterson (third), Ian McMillan (second) and Melissa Kurz (lead) rounded out the rink from Manitoba.