Campbell makes champion’s return

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2010 (5637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MORRIS — Robert Campbell won that day. Won it all, in fact.

But it is Jeff Stoughton who has done all the winning in the two decades since.

And so even as the Prince Edward Island skip returns this week to the scene of his greatest curling triumph, Campbell’s memory of that win in Brandon over Stoughton in the final of the 1989 Canadian Mixed Curling Championship has a bittersweet tinge to it.

Not, mind you, because of anything that happened that day at the Keystone Centre; rather, it’s everything that has happened in the lives of the two men since.

“I would gladly trade places with Jeff,” Campbell said here this week at the 2011 Mixed, “if Jeff would be willing.”

Campbell was just 22 that day in 1989 when he faced Stoughton, the defending Canadian Mixed champion that year, in the final.

Stoughton was 25 at the time and had the edge on Campbell in terms of experience. But the Charlottetown skip was hardly a green rookie. While he hailed from a tiny province with a thin curling history, Campbell brought big-game experience to that showdown with Stoughton. Four years earlier, Campbell had lost a Canadian Juniors final to some skip from Alberta named Kevin Martin.

What’s more, Campbell’s team had cruised through the Mixed that week with a 9-2 record and finished first, while Stoughton stumbled to a 4-4 record and had to win five games in a row just to get to the final in Brandon.

And so when Campbell drew the eight-foot with the last rock of the game to win the final over Stoughton that day, the crowd at the Keystone would have been disappointed — “It was us against the world that day,” Campbell recalls — but hardly shocked. Stoughton was a talented young curler who clearly had a bright future, but anyone who’d been a fan of curling in those years could only have concluded the same of Campbell.

“At that time,” Stoughton recalled this week, “Robert would have been considered one of the top up and coming young players in the whole country… And I’d had some success myself by that point and there were some expectations of me as well.”

Alas, those lofty expectations that day have, 21 years later, proven to be only half true. For Stoughton, the most optimistic projections have been met and long since surpassed in a career that saw him go on to win the Canadian Mixed one more time in 1991 and then move on to a spectacular men’s career that has seen him win eight Manitoba men’s titles, two Briers and a world championship.

But for Campbell, that win over Stoughton in Brandon has proven to be the apex of the 43-year-old skip’s career. Campbell would not get back to a Canadian Mixed until this year. And while he has represented P.E.I. at eight Briers in the intervening years, he has never again come even close to winning a championship for a province that struggles to compete nationally.

“I was very fortunate to have been in those finals at such a young age — first in 1985 against Kevin and then four years later against Jeff,” Campbell says. “And I never took it for granted, even at the time.

“It’s not easy coming out of P.E.I. Obviously, there’s not as much depth as the other provinces. And we don’t get the games and experience on arena-type ice… But I’ve been at it, still, all these years, just trying to get back to as many nationals as I can and hopefully win one again.”

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All of which brings Campbell back to Manitoba this week in the completion of a very large circle. He’s only curled in Manitoba one other time since that triumphant day in 1989 — a cashspiel in the mid-1990s — and he grins as he talks about the possibility of lightning striking twice here this week in what coincidentally, marks the first time Manitoba has hosted a Canadian Mixed since that event Campbell won in 1989.

“I have some great memories coming back here. And hopefully some good luck will come out of it.”

Campbell’s P.E.I. foursome are still in the hunt midway through the event in Morris. A dramatic 7-6 come-from-behind win over Ontario Tuesday afternoon vaulted them to 4-1, good for a tie for third place heading into a game against New Brunswick’s Charlie Sullivan last night.

New Brunswick was 5-1 and in second place heading into that game, one win behind Manitoba’s Terry McNamee, who was at 6-1. The Manitoba team lost to previously winless Quebec 8-3 on the morning draw. But the Manitobans stormed back in the afternoon draw, drilling Newfoundland and Labrador’s Gary Wensman 9-2 in just seven ends.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca