Kevin Martin, circa 1991. We kid you not.Huzzahs to our friend Bob Cowan at Skip Cottage Curling, the authority on all things Scottish in curling.
First, he recently launched a new blog design... and now, in recent months, he has begun transferring and posting all kinds of ancient videotaped curling footage onto the interweb. Oh joy.
In this posting today, Bob has showcased nearly 10 minutes of VHS footage from the 1991 Safeway World Men’s Curling Championship, featuring a young David Smith of Scotland and a remarkably young – and full-haired and moustached – Kevin Martin, the recent Olympic champion at Vancouver 2010.
As many curling fans are aware, this marked Martin’s adult debut on the world stage and, quite frankly, the peak of his unpopularity. This was mostly due to what we shall dub “Corngate”... and which we shall now explain.
In their round robin match, Martin trailed the Scottish team by a few points at the halfway mark, whereupon he and teammate Kevin Park pulled out corn brooms – the classic, original curling sweeping device – to give the ice surface some more, er, character. A move that was fully within the rules (at that time) but which was considered unethical by many... including the pro-Canadian crowd.
The expected rematch took place in the final, and once again the Scots took the early advantage and... again... the Edmonton squad pulled out the straw. The Winnipeg crowd was not appreciative of this move.
“Listen to the crowd booing and jeering. Quite right, too,” offers BBC commentator Richard Harding.
But the Scots had learned from this strategy, and with some help from some Canadian compatriots, they were prepared to counteract the sticky corn with hog hair brushes purchased from a local curling shop. Scotland went on to prevail, and captured their first world men’s championship in 24 years.
Fantastic stuff.
Click here for the Skip Cottage Curling story page, which will lead you to the video.