SASKATCHEWAN DUE TO HARVEST A TITLE AT THE BRIER
Ernie Richardson is 86 years old.
“Matt Baldwin is the oldest living Brier champion. I’m the second oldest,” the four-time winner from Regina said.
Baldwin, a 91-year-old Edmontonian, won his Briers in 1954, ’57 and ’58. Richardson won his in ’59, ’60, ’62 and ’63.
Alberta has won 20 Briers since Baldwin won. Saskatchewan has won two since the days of the Richardsons.
Harvey Mazinke and Rick Folk have been the only skips from the heartland of curling to win it since. Mazinke won in Edmonton in 1973 and Folk in Calgary in 1980. Folk also won in 1994 representing B.C.
Ernie, Arnold, Sammy and Wes Richardson won it four times in a span of five years and nobody from Riderville has won it in the last 37 years. This year’s team, skipped by Steve Laycock, came out of the gate at 0-2. At the wonderful opening ceremonies, there were 76 curlers, all of them wearing the trademark Saskatchewan green-and-white sweaters.
“They all won the provincial championship and played in the Brier. It was nice to see them all together like that. They’ll never be all together like that again,” Ernie Richardson marvelled, looking at the group in the bowels of the building before being introduced.
“I just want to watch Saskatchewan win another Brier before I die.”
Back when the Richardsons were on top of the curling world, the belief was that Saskatchewan would win a multitude of Briers.
“In Saskatchewan, we used to have the most curlers of any province in Canada. Back in the old days, there was nothing else to do during the cold winters for the farmers and everybody else, so they all went curling,” Richardson said.
“Our curling population has slipped. We don’t have the number of curlers we used to have. I’m disappointed at that. I didn’t even start curling until I was 21.
“We didn’t take it up until we did because we had nothing else to do in the winter either. I was just a rough labour guy then. We just decided to put a curling team together for something to do. That’s how we started.”
Richardson figures it could happen this year with Laycock skipping a team with 22-year-old Manitoba import Matt Dunstone throwing fourth rocks.
“The team we have now, if they play like (American) John Shuster did (winning gold) at the Olympics and get hot at the end like Shuster did and catch the other teams just a shade off their games, they have a chance to win the Brier.
“I’ll be cheering for them.” Laycock said this would be the year to do it.
“It was a lot of fun to come here and see all those guys wearing their old uniforms and being part of the ceremonies. Boy, there were a lot of familiar faces. Every time you looked at one of them you kind of remembered their story from their Brier that year, too,” Laycock said.
“It’s amazing that since 1980, no one has broken through and won this thing. There were certainly a lot of people out there in those ceremonies who were capable of it.”
With his team, including Dunstone and the front-end brother combination of Kirk and Dallan Muyres, Laycock figures there’s potential to do what Shuster did in Pyeongchang.
“You look across the field here with all the top teams and there’s nobody here we haven’t beaten,” he said. “As long as we keep ourselves in striking distance at the end of the week, I don’t know why we couldn’t have that kind of outcome.”
After losing 5-2 to Quebec for openers Saturday, Laycock came within a heroic sweeping job by the front end of Reid Carruthers’s Manitoba rink from scoring three in the 10th end.
He lost 7-5 in an extra-end in Sunday’s morning draw.
“It doesn’t matter when the losses happen,” Laycock said.
“I didn’t think we were going to go through this pool with less than two losses.”