Brier legend Baldwin, 93, named to Order of Canada
Matt Baldwin fuelled roaring game’s boom in popularity after his 1954 Brier victory
Matt Baldwin, at age 92, after a three-hour interview in the lounge at the Derrick club for my book World Capital of Curling, insisted on picking up the tab for lunch.
The waitress handed him the bill and he signed it, filling in the space for his membership number with “8.” The young lady informed him he needed a number involving three or four digits. “It’s ‘8’,” he said. Baldwin was one of the 10 founders of the golf and curling club.
Back in October, the book launch was held at the Derrick, and Baldwin, along with several of the greats, attended. He left his walker elsewhere in the room to join the group of legends for a picture.
When the photo had been taken, he stood up and looked around the room and turned to me and started to laugh. “You know you’re getting old when you can’t remember where you left your walker,” he said.
There are many great people who have been awarded the ultimate honour in this nation of being named a member of the Order of Canada. But I’m not sure there are many greater characters.
Let’s go back. The year was 1954. It was the year Edmonton became a big-time sports city. The NHL still had 13 more seasons of Original Six hockey to play and was still more than a quarter-century away from coming to town.
But in 1954, the Edmonton Eskimos glory gang of Jackie Parker, Normie Kwong, Johnny Bright and Rollie Miles would win the first of three consecutive Grey Cups.
In the spring, Matt Baldwin won the Brier before record crowds at the Edmonton Gardens, the first-ever Brier held here. Curling in all of Canada changed that day, and that was especially true in Edmonton.
Baldwin’s win resulted in a massive boom in almost every measurable area, including the building of curling clubs.
Before Baldwin won his second and third Brier championships in 1957 and 1958, the number of curling sheets in Edmonton doubled. The Crestwood, Shamrock and Jasper Place all came into existence. Several others were on the way. The Derrick would soon be born as well.
Baldwin, at that time the youngest curler to win the Brier, was effectively to the roaring game what Arnold Palmer became to golf. He not only created a curling boom as a participation sport, Baldwin was the No. 1 reason it became a spectator sport.
Getting the Brier was one thing. Having a charismatic young Edmonton curler win it was something else.
“It was a big to-do,” remembered Baldwin almost 65 years later. “The next two or three years, after we won our first Brier in 1954 in Edmonton, our team must have opened 10 or 12 new curling rinks. Curling just took off.”
Wrote Larry Wood of the Calgary Herald in a look-back after he’d covered his 50th Brier: “Suddenly the Edmonton curling scene was awash with all sorts of would-be Brier and Carspiel contenders. The sport was enjoying its first real boom period, and it lasted a couple of decades.
“Matt Baldwin became the stuff of legends in Edmonton. He emerged as one of the game’s freshest new personalities. Charismatic. Colourful. He emerged, too, as far more than all of that. The game changed when Baldwin came along. That year when he won in his own hometown in 1954 was pivotal in the early evolution of the game, even as we know it today. And Baldwin was its original author. Before Baldwin, the so-called competitive game primarily was populated by gentlemen farmers and big city country club types wearing thick woollen sweaters and pin-laden tams who delivered their stones from squats in the hack.”
Wrote Breathless Bill Good, the recognized dean of early curling reporters: “Colour makes any sport. Baseball needed Dizzy Dean. Hockey needed Rocket Richard. Golf wouldn’t be the sport it became without Arnold Palmer. So those of us in the media welcomed the arrival of handsome Matt Baldwin to championship curling. It was
Baldwin who completely dominated every game he ever played, and this is said without taking anything away from the other obviously skilled members of his squad. He had charisma. He was tall, slim, nattily dressed, always had a wide smile on his face, and in the early days of his career his lighthearted attitude completely fooled some of the veteran skips around him.
“He always gave the appearance that he was out to have a good time and if he and his team curled well it was a bonus. At the Edmonton Gardens in 1954, he had the big crowds cheering his every move and he loved every minute of it.”
Wrote Jack Matheson, the legendary Winnipeg Tribune columnist: “He was curling’s first active gymnast and good humour man. If he felt unwell because of the rigours of the night before, he brought a chair with him and sat down between shots. When the lights went out in Quebec City in 1961, the opposing skip was horrified to find out that Baldwin had scored an eight-ender in the pitch dark arena by rearranging the stones. This dark deed had been done between trips to a blacked-out bar.”
Calgary Herald scribe Wood again: “Matthew was known for his assorted mischief and offbeat Brier manoeuvres as well as copious wins. At the 1956 Brier in Moncton he didn’t win but you knew he was around. He is alleged to have been responsible for removing the doors to the Manitoba team’s hotel room the night before an important game. And, of course, there were tall tales emanating from the cross-country Brier train trip that was instituted that year.”
Baldwin was born and raised in Blucher, Sask., just down the road from Floral, home of the great Gladys Howe.
“A highlight of living there in the ’30s was our girls softball team. Because of World War II, we didn’t have enough guys to have one. My dad, Norm, was the coach and I was the bat boy.
“They got the girls from 10 or 12 miles around and there was this girl, Gladys Howe, who was one of the pitchers and she had a wind-up delivery and she was something. I remember once we took the team to play at a town where they were having a huge picnic and I distinctly remember two guys standing around watching Gladys pitch. One guy was close to six-foot. That was Gladys’s brother Gordie.”
Yes, that Gordie Howe. Mr. Hockey. Gordie Howe became the greatest player in the history of hockey until Wayne Gretzky came along.
“He was about three years younger than I am, but we used to end up at the same softball games that his sister Gladys pitched in. So I saw him fairly frequently after that. He seemed like a nice guy.”
But it was Gladys Howe who was The Great One in the eyes of young Baldwin.
“That girls team was the pride and joy of Blucher. They were good. And Gladys was very, very good.”
Baldwin would become very, very good at curling.
“I went to a one-room school in Blucher. We didn’t have a baseball team or any other kind of team for the guys in Blucher, so the only thing for me to do, the only sport I could take part in, was curling.
“Because of World War II, all the young men from the area were gone to fight in the war and that only left the old guys who were all skips. To get a team together, they either had to use women or really young kids like me. And we were kind of conscripted. They said: ‘You’re going to curl with us on Tuesday and Thursday.’”
Baldwin fell in love with the game and the environment.
“I figured curling was a helluva sport. Four guys can get together and drink, play cards and have a great time. I figured it was too good for just the old guys.”
In 1946, the Brier was held in Saskatoon and Baldwin spent more time in the arena that week than on campus.
“That was my last year at the U of Saskatchewan and it was the first time the Brier was held in Saskatoon, and I was down there every day, and I was back there for the playoffs in the wee hours to watch Billy Rose of Sedgewick win it.”
Three years into college in Saskatchewan, and young Mr. Baldwin managed to get himself a summer job as a roughneck in the oilpatch at Lloydminster.
“I’d finished third year in engineering and had to go back for one more term. I went from working that summer as a roughneck at Lloydminster to the new program at the U of A instead.
“Leduc No. 1 had come in, and oil was suddenly a big deal. I found out about a petroleum engineering program starting at the University of Alberta. Leduc was discovered in the winter of 1947, and I came to Edmonton in the fall of 1948.
“The first place I headed for when I got to Edmonton was the Granite Curling Club, which was down the street. Curling was my salvation.”
The rest is history. Baldwin was exceptionally successful financially with the oilpatch company he founded and was just about the most fun-loving curler in history in an era when having fun came first.
A guy who used to bonspiel with his pal Jackie Parker and would go on to be a president of the Edmonton Eskimos board of directors, never set out to achieve anything like the honour just announced.
Baldwin received the Order of Canada “For his philanthropy and entrepreneurship and for his prowess as a champion curling skip.”
Matt Baldwin became the stuff of legends in Edmonton. He emerged as one of the game’s freshest new personalities.