Curling Stones: Just Throw Strikes

Maybe it’s spring training combined with the Brier, but I was thinking a lot about baseball and curling last week.

I loved watching the Okanagan Brier. The shooting percentages seemed to be as high as ever, with player after player regularly hitting around the 90% mark. I was impressed, even though I don’t put all my stock in the numbers. Baseball wisdom often suggests “statistics are like bikinis, they show a lot but not everything.”

Thomas Ulsrud’s lead felt shooting stats outright lie, at times. Back in 2013 he wrote a guest column for The Curling News called Bad Math: Curling Statistics Are Wrong.

During the Brier I starting reading Bob Tewksbury’s book, Ninety Percent Mental. Tewksbury had an impressive baseball career, and holds the third-lowest career walks per nine innings stat for any MLB pitcher in history.

If you put that in curling parlance, that’s throwing granite in the 90% range game after game after game.

Early in Tewksbury’s career the late Catfish Hunter was brought into the Yankees’ spring training to mentor young pitchers. Tewksbury loved to sit down with Catfish. One day he asked him what the keys were to being a successful pitcher; both of them were control pitchers without a blazing fastball.

Hunter’s response was brief.

“Just throw strikes.”

Thirteen big-league years and 236 pages into his bestseller later, Tewksbury learned to flesh out what that really meant. Three simple words similar to “Hit the broom.”

Like any sport, curling can seem simple on the surface. Hitting the broom really is the essence of becoming competent but there are many nuances: weight control, throwing to the brushers, alignment, trusting your skip (catcher), perfecting your kick speeds, guiding the rock with your arm, having good rotation—nowadays a small handful of good rotations—reading ice, positive thinking, mindfulness, having a short memory after delivering a miss (similar to giving up a big hit in baseball), release, mastering good misses, etc.

Not to overwhelm you … “just throw strikes.”

These Brier musings got me thinking. Two Calgarians, of the many I admire, had their own way of saying throw strikes—or keep it in or near the strike zone (home plate).

Eddie Lukowich often said, and I paraphrase slightly, “The broom is a guide along with throwing the right weight. Generally, you have three or four inches of missing the broom the right way or having a good miss.”

As I watched TSN, “broom variance” seemed to be a buzz phrase for both Joanne Courtney and Russ Howard a few times. It got me thinking that perfection is overrated and can often be a stumbling block, but excellence is possible. And this was an excellent week of curling.

I wonder if actor and humanitarian Michael J. Fox got this idea from his curling family when he said “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.”

Fox was on the David Letterman show a few years back, after winning one of his five Emmys. He told Letterman that he gave his first Emmy to his mother, but she made sure his sister’s curling trophy from a bonspiel still had centre stage. That may have been Letterman’s first introduction to curling.

Calgarian number two was my knee therapist and 2013 Canadian Masters champion Gord Dewar. One day as he was giving me acupuncture, I felt a couple of those zings go up my leg. “Nailed it!” he said.

I asked him why doesn’t that always happen? Being curlers, he said, “It’s like throwing the right weight near the broom. It’s still a good shot when you make it. The zing is when you nail the broom and throw the perfect weight.

“In acupuncture you actually have an area about the size of a dime to be effective, whether you hit the exact spot or not,” he continued. “Just like curling and baseball; keep it in the strike zone. Isn’t that why we have brushers?”

I swear my curling shot average went up 10% after being around Gord. I still get acupuncture, but I’d like to think I’m better at broom tolerance or throwing strikes.

Sticking with Calgary—since our new Brier champions call the Glencoe Club their curling home—Paul Webster is their coach. Fun fact: Paul has coached 17 world champion teams at various levels (if I heard Vic Rauter correctly).

Paul was mentored under one of my favorites, Bill Tschirhart: the Curling Canada’s former National Development Coach at the National Training Centre in Calgary. Paul then segued into Bill’s position when he retired.

The two of them brought in Kevin Koe’s longtime coach/sports psychologist John Dunn out of the University of Alberta for a high-performance evening. One of Dunn’s favorite emphases is from golfing psychologist and author Bob Rotella: “golf is not a game of perfect. And, curling, also is not a game of perfect.” 

He was also stressing the point of consistency or having good misses/tolerance in the back of your mind, always.

I couldn’t believe how many of our American curling friends were watching the Brier. Another fun fact: most American curling centres tap into Canadian satellites to watch curling. That’s where I’d go to watch Saskatchewan Roughrider games when I lived down south.

I was even invited to be in a Brier pool based in Wisconsin last week. Jeff Thompson from the Eau Claire Curling Club organizes it. He also told me he wouldn’t be against all the northern border states becoming the 11th province.

Ninety percent! What are we talking about? Two complete misses or four or five half-shots? Let’s be honest, a lot of those half-shots are damage control or setup shots. And we are watching a sports world where degree of difficulty seems to always be on the radar. I think Catfish Hunter and Bob Tewksbury would enjoy the granite game and the mental gymnastics that play such a huge role.

Onto the world men’s championship in Moose Jaw. I’m looking forward to it, as my home is a tad over 45 minutes to the arena.