Shuster, curlers don’t slip up
GANGNEUNG, South Korea – Pardon the mixed metaphor, but Team Shuster is on a roll.
One day after the U.S. curlers upset gold medal favorite Canada on a heroic shot by skip John Shuster in extra ends, the Americans played perhaps their best game of the Olympic tournament Tuesday night at the Gangneung Curling Centre.
With Shuster again in rare form and making one clutch shot after another, the U.S. dominated Switzerland, 8-4, in a game in which the Swiss conceded defeat after nine ends.
“One through three, we weren’t quite as sharp as we were against Canada, but when your skip walks on water like John did today, it doesn’t matter a whole lot,” said U.S. vice skip Tyler George. “When he’s going out there making everything and walking around like he owns the sheet, it’s fun to watch.
“When you get a skip that plays like that, the rest of us can throw left-handed and probably win the game.”
After a scoreless first end, the Swiss were looking at a four-point second until Shuster’s clutch shot with the hammer took out three stones. What could have been a 4-0 deficit was just 1-0.
“The second end was not looking good,” said Shuster, of Superior, Wis. “Rocks were not lining up in a very good way for us. That was big for us to get that and then take the momentum and run with it.”
The Americans then scored three points in the fifth and three more in the seventh.
“I felt like the momentum changed after the second end, when they had our backs up against the wall,” George said. “Obviously, any time you put three points up it’s a big momentum swing, but I think it was building from the second end and they cracked a little bit before we even got to the fifth.”
Team USA was limping along at 2-4 but now has won on back-to-back nights and at 4-4 has a good chance to make the semifinals if it can beat Great Britain in its final round-robin game Wednesday, though it could come down to tiebreakers. The top four of 10 teams advance.
“All we can do is win,” George said. “I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a little scoreboard-watching going on because if we need a little help we’ll be eyeballing that, too, but I think if we win and we handle our own business, everything will be fine for us.”
It’s hard to overstate what the victory over Canada did not only for Team Shuster’s confidence, but for curling in the United States. The Canadians have won the gold medal in the last three Winter Games and the Americans had never beaten them in the Olympics.
Shuster said the team was deluged with messages from the States.
“It was a great day to be a member of Team USA and Team Shuster and USA Curling,” he said. “It was a lot of fun hearing from all the people back home, not just in our home towns but people all over the country. Really, it was messages coming from everywhere. A lot of awesome, awesome notes.”
Even after Team USA got thumped by Sweden, Japan and Norway earlier in the tournament, George said he, first John Landsteiner, second Matt Hamilton of McFarland, Wis., and Shuster felt they could turn it around. That it happened against Canada made it all the sweeter.
“Everybody was kind of waiting for us to play that game,” George said. “We knew we had it in us. That’s the team that we’ve been for the last three years and the team we were at the Olympic trials. To bring it out when we absolutely needed it against the best in the world was great.
“Like I’ve been saying, it’s a matter of doing it once. Once you play the game that you know you’re capable of, then you can say, ‘That’s who we are.’ We carried that through to today.”