The 8-ender

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/11/2008 (6455 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

1Manitoba’s Sean Grassie has found a warm welcome in the Far North.

Grassie is skipping Manitoba at the Canadian Mixed Curling Championship in Iqaluit, Nunavut, this week and his team has been red-hot in the bitter cold.

Grassie beat Nova Scotia’s Mark Dacey — a former Brier and Mixed national champion — 7-5 Sunday afternoon to improve to 2-0 and put Manitoba in a three-way tie for first with B.C. and Saskatchewan heading into last night’s late draw.

Earlier in the weekend, Grassie thumped Ontario’s Wayne Tuck 8-2 in a game in which Grassie shot a sizzling 89 per cent.

Manitoba returns to the ice today with games this morning against New Brunswick and this afternoon against the Northwest Territories.

1The stats section included individual and team statistics from national championships and was widely used by the media. But a CCA official said last week that in the lead-up to Vancouver, the numbers — which charted a curler’s tendencies and could be used to determine whether they favoured in-turns over out-turns, draws over takeouts — were giving other countries an unfair advantage because Canada is unable to call up such stats for other countries’ curlers.

After a protest by the Canadian Curling Reporters association, a CCA official pledged last week that the organization would continue to make the stats available to the media on request.

1Resby Coutts and his show, Rocktalk, airs every Monday on 1290 CFRW at 7 p.m.

1The Chinese men’s team skipped by Feng Chun Wang and the women’s team skipped by Bingyu Wang both won gold at the Pacifics, qualifying both of them for the 2009 world curling championships.

Both Chinese teams live almost full-time in Canada during the winter, curling against Canadian teams most weekends. They’re also coached by a Quebecker, Daniel Rafael.

The work’s been paying dividends — and quickly — for the Chinese curling program. Curling fans here will recall Bingyu Wang gave Asia its best performance at a world curling championship when she finished second to Winnipeg’s Jennifer Jones at last April’s World Women’s Curling Championship.

1Edmonton’s Ferbey won four Briers with Winnipeg’s David Nedohin as his vice-skip and this weekend reached out to another Winnipeg curler, Reid Carruthers, as a replacement for Nedohin, who was unable to compete in an $80,000 World Curling Tour event in Lloydminster.

The revamped Ferbey team beat Seattle’s Jason Larway 7-1 Sunday afternoon to advance to a C-side qualifying game late last night.

1Edmonton’s Don Walchuk, who’s curling third for Kerry Burtnyk this winter, told Edmonton curling writer Con Griwkowsky over the weekend that he was trying to put together a new team last spring that would have included himself and fellow Brier veterans from Alberta, Kevin Park and Don Bartlett.

But then Winnipeg’s Jeff Stoughton scuttled those plans, calling up Park first and luring him to Winnipeg to play third for him.

That left Walchuk without a team again — until Burtnyk called him up, bringing him to Winnipeg where he’s now a provincial rival of the same man with whom he was almost a teammate.

As the rock turns…