USA TODAY International Edition
MIRACURL ON ICE
Shuster, USA stone Sweden for gold
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – It didn’t matter if you never curled. It didn’t matter if you had never watched curling, much less knew anything about strategy or the power of the Swedish team the USA was trying to defeat to win its first-ever gold medal.
What connects all of us who get suckered into emotionally investing in these quirky sports that pop up once every four years at the Olympics are the moments of agony and opportunity written on faces and shouted in fist pumps.
And in the latter stages of a gold medal game that was tied at 5-5, one of those moments occurred, as easily identifiable as a crucial field goal pulled to the left in the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl or a missed wide-open threepointer to win an NBA Finals game.
After his final throw in the eighth end, the best player in the world could only slump over and roll his eyes. Under immense pressure thanks to some good strategy by the U.S. team, Sweden’s Niklas Edin had just made the mistake of his career, the one that he knew would cost him a gold medal.
“If it curls 3 centimeters more, it’s probably good for (limiting the damage),” Edin said. “But when I missed it I knew he was going to make that double and I knew we were going to lose.”
The question was whether John Shuster knew it, too.
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Eight years ago, Shuster was humiliated. The team skipper, ostensibly the player USA Curling had built its hopes around, he absolutely, unequivocally fell on his face in the Vancouver Games.
For all the skill it takes to compete at the highest levels of curling, it would be hard for the common fan to look at Shuster as an elite athlete. Even down 30 pounds from the 2014 Olympics, when he struggled again and was later told USA Curling was going to move on and find new talent, he looks more like someone you’d find working at a Dick’s Sporting Goods (which he does) than competing in the Olympics.
These are, by and large, regular guys who hold real jobs but find a way to spend several hours a day training for the World Curling Tour and Olympics.
Even in that context, they were basically an afterthought in these Olympics. The truth is, as much as Shuster had been cast aside, he was still the best this country could produce and proved it after joining up with Tyler George and Matt Hamilton (two other rejects from USA Curling’s high-performance program) along with John Landsteiner, who curled with Shuster in 2014.
“We never had conversations about 2010, 2014 or anything like that. It was always this team now, what are our goals and what we’re capable of,” George said. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want it badly for him (Shuster) because I want him to love the game.”
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On TV, they were instantly endearing. From Shuster to Hamilton with his mustache and tattoo sleeve, they looked like the everyman team.
But just a handful of days ago, they still looked like Olympic losers. Last Sunday, they lost to Japan in the morning and Norway in the afternoon, dropping to 2-4 in round-robin play. Any medal seemed impossible.
On the verge of elimination, they managed to regroup the next day and stun Canada, which had won the last three gold medals. Then they beat the Swiss and Great Britain, coming all the way back to earn a spot in the semifinals and a rematch with Canada. The USA won that one, too, 5-3, with Shuster clinching it on the final rock in the 10th frame with a picture-perfect shot.
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”They had nothing to lose, and we had everything to lose,” Edin said.
That manifested itself throughout the final. The Swedes made uncharacteristic mistakes. The Americans made some but had recovered to be tied 5-5 going into the eighth end with the advantage of the hammer (the last stone) in two of the final three ends.
By putting five stones in the “house,” which looks like a bull’s-eye, the USA had set up a potentially big moment. But with Edin, the No. 1-ranked player in the world, getting the last shots for Sweden, nothing was guaranteed.
“I think during the entire end we could kind of feel it building,” Shuster said. “Their margin for error got incredibly small.”
Although Edin’s stone stopped closest to the center of the house, he knew he had put it in a vulnerable spot.
If Shuster could execute, he could knock out that stone and give the USA a point. If he could hit it just the right way, though, it would knock out a stone Sweden had earlier placed in the house and give the USA multiple points. It was basically one shot for the gold medal from a guy who was once derided as a choker.
“The level of difficulty of that shot compared to shots we’d made was incredibly less difficult,” Shuster said. “I can’t tell you how un-nervous I was.”
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You don’t have to know anything about curling to understand the sounds that exploded moments later from the U.S. crowd, or the high-fives to his teammates or the almost flabbergasted smile on Shuster’s face as the scoreboard went from 5-5 to 10-5.
Here he was, delivering a moment for his country that everyone — curling fan or not — could find joy in.
“When something you love so much brings you pain, it’s hard to rationalize continuing to do it,” George said. “And then days like these happen and you don’t think about that much anymore. I’m happy he never has to make another shot the rest of his life to love the game.”