Brier consequences
Has it really been 59 years since that famous slide down the ice?
On an unseasonably mild March 5 afternoon in 1954, the chant in the red-bricked Edmonton Gardens started off innocently enough: a single voice rising above the others.
Soon, that one leather-lunged fan was joined by others, then before long it seemed as if everyone was yelling the same word over and over.
“Slide, slide, slide,” they shouted and pleaded at hometown boy Matt Baldwin as he crouched and settled into the hack – one throw away from winning the first Brier ever held in Edmonton. “Slide, slide, slide.” The near capacity crowd of 5,000 yelled some more.
“You want it?” Baldwin stood to ask. Did they ever. So slide he did. Ever the showman — grinning like a cat all the way — Baldwin and his flaming red sweater slid through the rings, past the hog line and almost halfway down the ice before finally releasing the 18-kilogram curling rock.
“The game was essentially over – we were up on New Brunswick 9-5 — so my last shot really didn’t matter,” said Baldwin, now 86.
“So I thought, why not? It was the 12th and final end – we played 12 ends in those days instead of the 10 they play today.
“I said to my guys, ‘I’m going to give this thing a go.’ And I wound up as hard as I possibly could go. Just before I almost came to a stop I gave it a little push.
“I had no idea where it was going to end up. But the most unbelievable thing happened — it ended up right on the can, right on the button.”
The crowd, which paid $1.25 for rush seats — $1.50 for reserved — roared louder than ever.
Baldwin, elected to the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 1973, said there were no rules in those days about how far you could slide.
“If you wanted to be an arsehole you could go all the way down the sheet of ice. If, of course, you could slide that far in the first place. It just wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do.
“But, like I said, this was different; we had it in the bag. It was over,” said Baldwin, who had stolen two in the seventh end and one in the eighth before slamming shut the book on New Brunswick with three more in the 10th.
Not long after Baldwin’s etched-in-Brier-history slide, curling associations everywhere put in a rule stating that rocks had to be out of a curler’s hand before reaching the first hog line. Sliding halfway down the ice would no longer be allowed.
“I wasn’t the first one to slide that far,” Baldwin said. “And I certainly wasn’t the only one who could do it. A couple of guys in Winnipeg – Ken Watson and Bob Dunbar – had also used it.”
So, too, did Saskatchewan’s Stan Austman.
“The first time I saw one of them do it I said, ‘Holy mackerel, that’s really neat. This is for me.’ There was this fascination about sliding. I would practise it at the Granite club.
“But the thing is, back then, we didn’t have anything to put on the bottom of our shoes that would allow you to slide very far. Teflon wasn’t invented then,” said Baldwin, who went on to win the Briers in 1957 and 1958, establishing himself as one of the greatest curlers of all time.
“Most of the time, curlers would let go of their rocks a few feet from the hack. It was considered monumental to be able to slide 10 feet past the hog line.”
Back then, curlers tried to put a number of different things on the bottom of their sliding shoe. Liquid solder and the sides of plastic milk cartons were just two ideas tried.
A former petroleum engineer as well as a former director and president of the Edmonton Eskimos, Baldwin’s solution was a pair of tan Oxfords.
“They had the hardest leather I had ever seen before or since. You could hardly cut it with a knife. And they were slippery. The more I used them, the more slippery they got. I wore a rubber boot over my one foot and nothing on the bottom of my sliding shoe.
“Your accuracy is a lot better when you can slide.”
Baldwin and his team of lead Jimmy Collins, second Pete Ferry and third Glenn Gray were more than just accurate in that ’54 Brier, which gave Alberta its fifth title in a championship that goes back to 1927.
They powered past Nova Scotia 23-4, ran over Newfoundland 20-6 and annihilated Quebec 16-4, losing only one game – to Ontario – to finish with a 9-1 record.
Saskatchewan and its four farming brothers – Gordon, Glen, Donald and Garnet Campbell – finished second at 8-2.
Unless there was a tie at the top there were no playoffs back then. The team with the best record was named Canadian champions.
Baldwin, at age 27, became the youngest skip to win a Brier.
“Baldwin took up curling in a period when it was still considered an old man’s game,” Warren Hansen wrote in his book Curling, the History, the Players, the Game.
Skips were typically 50 or 60 years old but Baldwin thought it was too good a game to leave to “the old guys.”
“Baldwin is still just a big kid at heart,” the Journal’s curling and horse racing writer Don Fleming wrote in the following day’s paper. “His infectious, boyish grin readily appeals to opponents and spectators alike.”
“We have just witnessed the greatest curling championships in the world,” wrote Journal sports editor Hal Pawson, quoting Ross Harstone, a Brier trustee, who added, “The crowds in the afternoon and evening exceeded anything we had ever seen previously.”
The story appeared in the newspaper near ads offering new Ford Tudor Sedans for $2,384, “a spring bouquet of pretty new hats” for $7.95 each and four grapefruits for 29 cents.
On another page, a story purported that Indians of the Peruvian Andes, living at an altitude of 18,000 feet, would be better adapted to life on Mars than most earthlings.
The 1954 championship, contested over just five days, was the first Brier held in Edmonton.
Saskatchewan’s Harvey Mazinke’s crew won here in 1973.
Russ Howard’s Ontario rink was victorious in 1987 when, after a relatively easy open hit, his rink scored five in the 10th end against B.C.’s Bernie Sparkes to win 11-7.
In 1999, a then-record crowd of 242,887 watched Manitoba’s Jeff Stoughton easily (9-5) win in a final against Quebec’s Guy Hemmings – keyed by a threepoint eighth end.
Randy Ferbey’s Edmonton rink won its fourth Brier in five years here at home in 2005, taking down Nova Scotia’s Shawn Adams.
Dave Nedohin, throwing last, sealed the win when he took a deep breath then drew around a guard and cuddled his rock up against a Nova Scotia stone for the 5-4 victory.
“An out-turn to the back four foot on really, really quick ice,” recalled Ferbey. “It would have been easy to miss it wide and heavy.
“I remember the crowd cheering before (the rock) even got there and then Dave throwing his hands in the air.”
Total attendance that week reached a record 281,985. On top of that, CBC drew another 1.499 million viewers for the final game.
“Playing in front of that many people … My God it was unbelievable,” said Ferbey.
“Especially in the final when you have 15,000 people who are just watching you. Just watching the one game. It was an unbelievable feeling.”
Edmonton’s sixth Brier kicks off today and wraps up next Sunday. Twelve-time Alberta champion Kevin Martin will try to win his fifth Brier, this time in front of a home crowd.
Baldwin said playing in front of hometown fans was definitely a plus for his rink.
“It helped me. And I think it will help Kevin. Playing at home will not be a detriment to him.
“It didn’t hurt me to have my ego stroked a bit. It was a helluva thrill and even though it was 59 years ago, it’s still easy to remember all of it.
“It was like a dream come true.”