Martin, Morris to meet in semi
— They chatted amiably through the first couple of ends — two champions who’d been through the biggest of battles together, and won everything there was to win.
Then the game got serious, and so did they. The smiles disappeared. The famous five-mile stare returned to John Morris’s face, and the Old Bear, Kevin Martin, hunkered down and got down to work.
Friendship, tattered as it was in the latter stages of their seven years as teammates, was now forgotten in pursuit of a final round robin game that really only had consequences for Morris’s Kelowna, B.C. rink, but which Martin wanted to win, too, just because he hates to lose.
And then, heading to an extra end, theoretically the height of drama, they all started laughing.
Three ice sheets away, their old clubmate from Edmonton days, Kevin Koe, had just handed Winnipeg’s Mike McEwen his fatal fourth loss of the Olympic curling trials and the explosion of relief from Morris was audible all over the rink.
“After Koe makes his last one, we’re all over there and we see Johnny just go, ‘Whoosh!’ That’s what we were laughing about,” said Martin.
“It didn’t hurt us — we were going to be (in the semifinal) anyway — and it wasn’t (Morris’s skip Jim) Cotter or the other guys, it was completely John. It was like, ‘Whew!’ Oh, man he didn’t want to go back to a tiebreaker.”
The McEwen loss, which guaranteed a rematch of Martin (6-1) vs. Morris (4-3) in Saturday afternoon’s men’s semifinal — winner to play 7-0 Brad Jacobs in Sunday’s final for the Olympic berth — took some of the urgency out of the 11th end.
Morris had forced it by scoring two in the 10th, aided greatly by a piece of grit turning a stone by Martin’s third Dave Nedohin sideways, but the reigning Olympic champion then had the hammer in the extra-end and needed only a nibble of the fourfoot with his last-rock draw for the 7-6 win.
The game had turned in Martin’s favour when he executed a perfect raise takeout, spilling two Morris stones to count three in the sixth end.
“Kevin made a beauty for three or else we keep control of that game, and it’s probably a different story at the end,” said Morris, who throws third stones for Cotter, but calls the shots.
If anything, he said, playing Martin again right away “may be a little easier coming off a loss rather than a win. It’s tough to beat a team like Kevin twice in a row. After McEwen lost, it was a bit of lighter atmosphere. We played a really good game. If we can bring up our game just a shade we will be in good shape.”
The early chit-chat with Morris — who left Martin’s slumping team at the end of last season, a Type A personality feeling increasingly unfulfilled by a subordinate role — showed that the bad blood storyline is probably a little overstated.
“Oh, we’re fine,” Martin said. “It was just ... seven years and that was enough. There’s no problem.
“I’m sure hockey teams that have done really, really well, and a guy gets traded, I’m sure they still go fishing the next summer. You bang each other on the boards when you play each other, but you’ve been through a lot of good stuff, so you don’t want to just throw all that away.
“We’re on different teams, but those gold medals still look exactly the same.”
Morris prefers to think of it as a trade that helped both teams.
“I knew it would refresh Kevin and that team and for myself, I feel like I got my curling heart and soul back,” he said, and it’s hard to argue, given that both are one victory away from playing for the Sochi Olympic berth as Team Canada.