Popular curler therapeutic on a daily basis
There’s a goldmine, near where Colin Hodgson lives, and it’s two miles deep, he says. Deepest mine in North America, he says. He’d like to journey to its depths one day soon.
Hodgson thinks it would be a good idea to see what’s down there in case there’s an emergency. It’s going to be important for him to know something about the layout if that day— God forbid—ever comes, because he is just a little paperwork away from becoming a full-fledged volunteer firefighter in Red Lake, Ontario.
Two miles. Imagine being game to travel two miles down inside the earth’s surface.
Maybe it’s no surprise, really, that Hodgson is good to head down into that mine. He’s already —quite publicly—ventured deep into the recesses of his own emotions for exploration. As a vocal advocate for mental health, he’s poked around in the mineshafts of his own psyche and knows the value of returning to the surface where the gold that’s been scooped up can be seen to sparkle in the sun.
“It’s just easier to live that way than hiding,” he says of the discovery.
Hodgson has become a kind of pied piper when it comes to wearing your heart on your sleeve, for one’s own good. His Twitter and Instagram feeds are brimming with that sensibility. He finds himself encouraging others to follow his lead, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. In fact, it probably wasn’t intentional at all, at first. His leadership on emotional well-being was born out of personal need and his willingness to publicly open up brings him as much as it gives.
“I don’t just reach out with social media stuff to say a message or something,” he explains. “It’s therapeutic on a daily basis.”
Hodgson has come through this past year a changed man, which has been good for him. At the same time he has emerged as a leader in promoting emotional well-being, which is good for everyone else. A year of challenges has also been a year of growth and it feels good.
Those challenges? There has been a protracted battle with a badly-injured quadriceps muscle that has gone on for months. There has been depression, there has been self-doubt and there has been fear.
Then came the positive COVID-19 test which has eliminated Hodgson from competing at the Brier in Lethbridge, Alta.
His reaction? Disappointment, of course. But nowadays Hodgson is better equipped to handle this kind of gut-punch. Practicing living in the light has been beneficial.
Nearly a year ago, Hodgson was on the road, halfway to Calgary, where he was to reunite with his Team Mike McEwen mates for two Grand Slam of Curling events inside the Covid-forced curling bubble. He didn’t make it, though, having decided he just could not do it. He turned the car around and headed back to Northern Ontario.
“I was pretty depressed back then, he says. “Not to say it’s not always there. It’s always there. It’s never going to change. But there’s some level of understanding, which has been totally transformative of how I live my life.”
“I have a lot more Zen going on now,” he says, during a lengthy conversation about taking good care of one’s self. He’s happy, he’s warm and he is open, which precisely fits the expectations I had of him, having never before met or spoken with him. In a sport that is filled with kind hearts, Colin Hodgson has a reputation for being kinder still. Genuinely.
“I want people to be happy around me,” he says at one point. “That makes me feel more comfortable.”
Hodgson’s exclusion from this year’s Brier is yet another test for the 31-year-old curler, apparel company proprietor and almost-firefighter. But it’s one that he seems to be meeting with a tempered disappointment rather than one that is hogging all the space in his head. There is room for pragmatism as well, and the knowledge that his personal growth over the past year has him on more solid footing.
“Yeah, I would have been freaking out,” he says, asked how the positive test and his missing the Brier might have gone 12 months ago. A portion of his relatively calm reaction, he says, comes from the comfort he takes from being triple-vaccinated, and the general feeling around Covid as opposed to this time in 2021. “There’s more peace of mind now than there was a year ago. I don’t feel I’m tremendously at risk right now.”
As well, he may have put undue pressure on himself, a year ago, over having to perform with his team. It’s possible that Hodgson could have tested negative just ahead of or at the start of the Brier, and been allowed to participate after all. But he knows that his diagnosis, coupled with the ongoing questions about his finicky quad, creates uncertainty. So he’s chosen to remove that uncertainty and let Team McEwen move forward, which they have done, bumping alternate Colton Lott up to Hodgson’s usual spot at lead, and adding Kyle Doering as the fifth.
“I think a year ago would have been a lot tougher, I wouldn’t have been in as good a position to make the right decision for myself and more so in my own mind, for my teammates,” he says. Then, in a short burst that suggests an acceptance of his situation he adds “I just want them to do well.”
At the end of last month’s Manitoba men’s championship, the emotions ran high for Hodgson and his teammates, just after they’d booked their nationals berth with a win over Lott, the same man who now takes up Hodgson’s position at the Brier. There were hugs, there were tears.
“Best curling moment I’ve had with my team,” says Hodgson. “That was special.”
The backdrop of that win and its subsequent emotional outburst was wrought with an awful lot. There was Hodgson’s continuing battle against his failing quad muscle, for one. It had been dogging him for months, including one mixed doubles game where Hodgson says he fell down “four or five times.” He’d later find out he had a series of micro tears in that quad, something that can really only be healed over time.
Competitive curling certainly doesn’t help in the healing. Just makes it worse. “Probably the most pain I think I’ve really felt in this sport,” Hodgson says.
He played the first game at men’s provincials, but pulled himself off the ice after throwing two rocks in the second game, and then missed the team’s third game entirely. He remembers the dejection, sitting alone in the locker room after removing himself from the lineup. “Why am I doing this? What’s the point? What’s the purpose other than letting people down? That’s kind of where I was. It was tough.”
After undergoing an intensive series of physiotherapy and massage sessions, Hodgson was able to tough it out for the final four games that week, including the final, which, thankfully, he says, ended in eight ends.
But there was more to that scene at game’s end. More than just relief on Hodgson’s part that he’d been able to perform through the physical pain.
The members of Team McEwen had gone into action at provincials wondering if that might be their last ride. Hodgson, Derek Samagalski and Reid Carruthers have been teammates for eight years. McEwen has been with them for four. They’re tight. Hodgson says they hadn’t talked about the future up to that point and he, at least, was thinking about that when his quad muscle wasn’t on his mind.
“That's where the emotions came from,” he says. “It could have been all over (after) that game. We probably don’t make the Players’ Championship if we lose that game. We don’t go the Brier, our season’s over.”
That moment, on the ice at the Selkirk Curling Club, provided Hodgson with an outlet, as well as a symbol of his emotional growth through a difficult year.
“Men aren’t supposed to have these emotions publicly,” he says. “They’re supposed to suppress it. And I suppressed it for years. I suppressed emotional pain for years. And I suppressed physical pain for a month and it was like, ‘it'll destroy me if I don’t let something go.’ So the floodgate just came and it was years of built-up stuff. And a lot of appreciation for those guys.”
Having the floodgate open is just fine for Hodgson. As he allowed more and more of himself to surface, and to be publicly displayed, he found more and more of his curling brothers and sisters were communicating their own, similar feelings to him.
And not just those in the world of curling. It went beyond.
“I figured out this is kind of on the right track when I started getting messages from people saying ‘Thank you,’ or, ‘I feel this way, and I haven’t talked to anyone about it.’ And then you can encourage them or tell them to reach out or even, you know, do a quick Google search and see what resources they have around them. It’s so easy right now to do that. But there just needs to be a catalyst whether it’s one tweet or an Instagram post or just even sharing someone else’s thoughts.”
At one point, Hodgson recalls, someone messaged to tell him that they were depressed and had been considering committing suicide. However, one of his social media posts had inspired them to instead reach out to their parents to talk. And that they now felt they were on the right path.
“And I was like, Holy fuck. This is way more important than sport. This is a human connection. Sport is that catalyst, the connections are real.”
Hodgson’s willingness to allow his feelings to show, evident as that has been for anyone who follows him on social media, is abundant during our conversation. He chokes up a number of times, most notably when he thinks of the gratitude he has for his teammates on the McEwen squad and for his doubles partner, Chelsea Carey.
“Chelsea was, like, willing to give up her Olympic dream, which was pretty unbelievable,” Hodgson says, remembering how Carey told him not to put himself through the physical pain, even though quitting would have ended their pursuit of a Trials berth. He dabbed an eye as his voice broke.
He shows great joy when Rachel Homan’s name is mentioned, which it was, in the context of Homan’s post-Olympics statement concerning the “deepest of black holes” she found herself in after she and doubles partner John Morris missed out on getting to the podium.
“Rachel’s post about that was just perfect,” Hodgson says excitedly. “It’s more powerful than bringing home a medal, in my opinion. To share that and say that and be vulnerable like that, it’s so good. I think it’s gonna be an amazing thing for her kids to look at that one day and say ‘this is my mom and this is why I’m proud of her.’”
Asked if he thinks we might all be making some gains in understanding and accepting each other and our battles with mental health, Hodgson nods.
“It’s going that way quickly and I love it,” he says. And in a bit of a twist of irony, Hodgson credits the pandemic that had him turning his car around a year ago—the same pandemic that led to a positive Covid test that’s scuttled his Lethbridge Brier—with being part of that evolution. Isolation has been difficult, very much so, for so many people.
Hodgson thinks it’s laid bare more depression, yes. But it’s also, he figures, bolstered discussion and brought greater acceptance and understanding into the sunlight. And that is the gold that sparkles.
“It’s been, I think, revolutionary for people to understand that other people are going through it,” he says. “That’s been a big positive towards the mental health conversation that’s becoming much more worldwide.”
With that, our interview is over. Nearly 40 minutes of Colin Hodgson unabashedly owning his emotions and agreeably winding his way through the details of a challenging year and those of his own spiritual and psychological growth.
At least I think the interview is over. But Colin Hodgson has a question of his own, before he goes.
“How are you doing?” he asks. “You doing okay?”
