Mogul incident “strangest thing ever seen”
If you’re following Canada’s Curling Club Championships—the national titleshoot for recreational league curlers—you’ve noticed this year’s setting is very, very cool.
The enormous West Edmonton Mall is hosting, at its Ice Palace, which was once known as the secondary practice facility of the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers.
But this isn’t the first time the massive shopping mall has hosted a curling event. This is, in fact, the third time, following two major World Curling Tour stops that made noise back in 1995 and 1996.
That’s when this week’s TV commentators, Jennifer Jones and Brent Laing, were still in juniors.
The 1995 event was titled the Telus West Edmonton Mall Curling Classic. Sixteen top teams competed for the $30,000 first prize, with the finalists earning $20,000 and the semifinalists $10,000 each. There was no quarterfinal money, which didn’t deter the big names from making the trip—the field included Kevin Martin (during his ill-fated half-season with Randy Ferbey at third), Winnipeg’s Vic Peters, Kerry Burtnyk and Jeff Stoughton, British Columbia’s Rick Folk, Ontario’s Russ Howard, Saskatoon’s Randy Woytowich and Calgary’s Paul Gowsell.
The final was an all-Ontario affair, and it was Eddie “The Wrench” Werenich who defeated Thunder Bay’s Al “The Iceman” Hackner to win the top prize by a 7-5 scoreline.
This was a wild event. Uneven ice caused the first draw to be wiped out and played later in the day, which meant the opening night draw didn’t start until 11:30 p.m.
The first draw that did take place was a festival of hogged stones as the temperature at ice level skyrocketed. Yes, the glass roof was blamed—the panes were only partially covered by tarps—but so was the crowd of 1,500 in the bleachers, not to mention hundreds more hanging over railings between shopping trips.
Icemaker Tim Yeo and co-organizer Kevin Martin eventually wrestled the ice into semi-submission, but it was far from perfect. Yours truly can attest to the on-ice weirdness; I was there competing with the father-son combo of Paul and Brad Savage as well as Reid Ferguson … and the tale of the ice mogul, which was first published in the December 1995 issue of The Curling News, is still told to this day.
Team Savage was tied coming home without last rock against Burtnyk. There’s a distant corner guard, a centre guard, and a Burtnyk stone in the back 12-foot. Savage threw the come-around draw to try and steal, and the photo below seems to show a successful result.
Actually, it’s a peach; the red stone is completely stuffed behind the guard, touching the button. And on that ice … trust me, Kerry didn’t have a draw for the win.
But why the weird expressions on the faces of my team, in the blue shirts?
As an expert witness, I can tell you that Paul’s draw was tight all the way and was going to wreck on the centre guard, i.e. game over. A few feet before impact, Brad Savage and I abandoned our brushing duties and turned away to shake hands with Kerry’s front end, Rob Meakin and Keith Fenton.
I even started booting Kerry’s corner guard down the ice with me.
Suddenly, people were shouting: the rock had made a sudden, harsh movement and somehow went by the guard, then started curling in behind. Brad scrambled back to sweep it to the edge of the button.
Our third, Reid, had already shaken hands with Burtnyk third Jeff Ryan and congratulated him on the win. Now he was staring back at Ryan, wondering if he could take the handshake back.
Oops.
The Manitobans were not amused, although the crowd certainly was. Burtnyk’s face turned purple as he realized he didn’t even have a draw for the win.
There was a lengthy delay, whereupon Burtnyk slid down the ice to the hack, reared back and fired an angle runback—on his corner guard, that we’d put back in position—and nailed it cold, 20 feet of total distance, with no roll whatsoever.
Bubba celebrated his win, which was actually funny because his face was still red with the rage.
We’ll never really know what the stone struck to suddenly warp it beyond the guard, and then back into a perfect curling line. Ceiling drips had created some moguls on the ice, and there was a new one forming when we went back and checked amid the confusion, so we settled on that.
Burtynk called the incident “an optical illusion.” Randy Woytowich called it “the strangest thing I’d ever seen.” But Burtnyk’s shot was amazing, and all was once again well with the curling world.
The Classic ran a second time in the fall of 1996, with the new Team Wayne Middaugh making their first appearance. And things got weird, again, but in a different way.
Just prior to the start of the ’spiel, a new professional league called Curling International held its first (and only) series of games. The competing teams, who all stayed on to compete at the Classic, had franchise owners—such as Edmonton curling backer Bruce Saville—and team names, such as Martin’s “Edmonton Freez.”
Burtnyk’s squad was labelled “Chicago Fire” and Hackner’s was “Saskatoon Savage” … but the most notorious of the franchises was the “Anaheim Earthquake” featuring a rotating series of stars—Ed Lukowich, Pat Ryan and Randy Ferbey among them.
Consistent in the lineup at lead stone was a mysterious figure named Merv Bodnarchuk, who had a piece of the Curling International brand along with tournament organizer “Wild” Bill Hunter, a hockey impresario who came within a whisker of moving the NHL’s St. Louis Blues to Saskatoon in 1983.
Bodnarchuk was eventually convicted of theft—on unrelated matters—and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
You can’t make this stuff up, right?
(Our friends at the Curling Legends Podcast have been mulling a Bodnarchuk episode for a while now; we hope to see if come to fruition.)
Curling International died quickly, but it’s also quite a story. Maybe I’ll tell it sometime.
Here’s a 1996 mall match between Werenich and Pat Ryan’s Earthquake squad, broadcast by Shaw TV. Cathy Borst (King) is the analyst. You can check out Mr. Bodnarchuk, and see how he fares against the legend of lead players, Neil Harrison.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDR3K3tRV4o[/embed]
Burtnyk won the title that year, thrashing Werenich in the final.
It would take a number of years before a curling event returned to the West Edmonton Mall. The 2022 Canadian Curling Club Championships can be viewed on Curling Canada’s YouTube page.