The First Curling Character

The death of three-time Brier champion and certified curling legend Matt Baldwin was met with the usual notices on social media… and not much else.

This was unacceptable.

So we contacted former TCN senior columnist Terry Jones—himself a living legend of Canadian sports journalism—and asked him to set things right. 

Here is his salute to one of the greatest to ever play the Roaring Game.

Matt Baldwin put having fun before anything.

He went down in curling history as the first household name in the sport and an all-time great in the game. And he’d be celebrated by most who crossed his path as one of the most memorable characters of all time in a sport that created dozens of them.

A young man of 27 in an era when older curlers dominated the sport, Baldwin became the sliding sensation of the nation when he won the Brier in Edmonton in 1954.

And, no, I wasn’t there. I was six at the time.

It wasn’t that Baldwin won the Brier and won it in Edmonton, it was the colourful, crowd-pleasing way he approached the game, on and off the ice.

I became a columnist in time to catch the end of the Baldwin era, covering a couple of provincial playdowns and bonspiels in which he’d been involved, and got to know him exceptionally well when he became president of the Edmonton Eskimos during the five-in-a-row Grey Cup era.

Baldwin grew up in Blutcher, Saskatchewan (pop. 57), just down the road from Gordie Howe and softball-pitching older sister Gladys who played for the team his dad coached. Matt was the batboy.

“Because of World War II, other than that girls’ softball team, the only other sport we had in town was curling,” said Baldwin.

“Because of all the men gone to the war, we were only left with old guys who were all skips. The old guys conscripted kids like me. They said: ‘You’re going to curl with us on Tuesday and Thursday.”

Baldwin’s beginnings explained a lot.

“I figured curling was a hell of a sport. Four guys would get together, drink, play cards and have a great time.”

Baldwin went to the University of Saskatchewan in engineering and in 1946 the Brier was held in Saskatoon where he spent more time watching Billy Rose of Alberta win it than he did on campus.

Prior to his final year at the U of S, Baldwin spent the summer working in Lloydminster as a roughneck.

“Leduc No. 1 had come in and oil was suddenly a big deal.

“The University of Alberta opened a petroleum engineering program, and I was accepted as the 16th student in a class of 16. I didn’t have very good marks at the U of S.”

That’s when the fun began.

“The first place I headed when I got to Edmonton was the Granite Curling Club, which was just down the street and was my salvation.”

Baldwin put together a U of A team that won everything. And in 1952 and 1953 he even won the grand aggregate at the big NACA bonspiel.

Then he became curling’s Arnold Palmer in 1954.

Wrote Breathless Bill Good, the recognized dean of early curling reporters and, of course, a Canadian Curling News scribe: 

“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 light-hearted 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.”

But Baldwin didn’t really start to have fun until he was headed to the Moncton Brier in 1956. He was introduced to the Brier Train for the first time. The Brier Train was a party. And nobody liked to party more than he did.

The train stopped to pick up a provincial title team in every province headed to the Maritimes.

“We had the last two cars to ourselves,” recalled Baldwin. “When we got to Toronto, we got off the train to attend a reception. When we arrived in Montreal, we got off the train again to attend another reception. That’s all we needed. Two more parties.

“All we did was drink, play cards and smoke Macdonald Tobacco cigarettes.

“They had told us Moncton was a dry town, but not to worry about it because they had private clubs and at any of the private clubs you could get all the booze you wanted. They told us Moncton was really going to put on a show there. They told us the Beaver Curling Club was all decked out and that we really had to see the place.

“The Beaver was right beside the arena where they would hold the Brier and it was a private club and we couldn’t wait to check it out. We went straight from the train to the Beaver. All I needed was another party. We walked in, and they had one-armed bandit slot machines in there and everything.”

Looking back, Baldwin said he probably partied himself out of that Brier, maybe even before he got there.

But he qualified the statement.

“I wouldn’t say it was because we were partying and no one else was. It was a different time and a different sport back then. It was almost as if you didn’t participate on the social end of it, you would have been considered a real shithead. And it was a decidedly different Brier that year, too. They had a dance at the Beaver every night.”

Baldwin, you are beginning to get the idea, made as much history off the ice as on.

The 1956 Moncton Brier was won by Billy Walsh of Manitoba. And Baldwin eventually confessed that he was the guilty party involved in creating an incident that happened that week.

“I caught those Manitoba guys sneaking into their hotel room about 11:00 p.m. Back then, and especially at that Brier, it was like ‘Let’s go out and drink together and then go out and see who can win.’ And I’m thinking: ‘Those assholes.’

“I got up in the middle of the night with a screwdriver and a wrench and took the door off their hotel room.”

In 1957 Baldwin was determined to make it back to the Brier to make up for his 5-5 performance the year before.

It was held in Kingston, Ontario, so the train trip was shorter. And Baldwin and his team decided to dial it down a bit.

Hall of Fame curling broadcaster Bob Picken of Winnipeg declared Baldwin’s performance to be:

Individual brilliance. His curling skills and creative strategy were so exceptional that many Brier veterans described it as the best single-handed display of curling in the history of the event.

The 1958 Brier featured teams flying to Calgary, where they boarded a train to travel through the Rockies to Vancouver, followed by a ferry trip to Victoria, where they checked in to the Empress Hotel and were paraded to Memorial Arena in the back of convertibles.

Baldwin won his third Brier title to equal the record of Manitoba’s Ken Watson.

Baldwin’s win in 1954 and the two that followed in 1957 and 1958 resulted in a massive boom in the popularity of the sport and especially in the phenomenal boom of curling rink construction from coast to coast.

“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,” said Baldwin.  

“Curling just took off.”

Now here is where we get to the essence of what was involved. Curling hadn’t been anything resembling Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius which is Latin for ‘Swifter, Higher, Stronger.’

Baldwin almost certainly could have set records that would never be broken. But in the 1960s he decided to have his fun mostly curling in bonspiels.

Baldwin delighted so many organizers not only by signing up to play in them but showing up with a team that included the man that would be voted the CFL’s greatest player of the first half century, Eskimos’ quarterback Jackie Parker.

“After winning those three Briers, I wasn’t trophy-hunting anymore. I was always a friend of Jackie’s. He liked the camaraderie of curling. I’d put together teams to curl with guys I really enjoyed getting together with for a week to have some fun.”

That was curling back then.

There are dozens of Baldwin stories from his bonspiel years. But in 1971 he got serious about trying to get back to the Brier to try win a fourth title, which is where I had an opportunity to cover him during the playdowns.

It was one last time for old times’ sake.

The Brier was in Quebec City. And I submit the number of people in curling that can remember who won that one are fewer than the number of people who will never forget Matt Baldwin from that week.

In 1971, he was 45 years old.

He was out of contention early.

“I decided if we weren’t going to win it, we might as well enjoy it,” said Baldwin. “I went down to the front desk of the Frontenac and asked if we could get a real big suite. They showed me the suite they’d use if the Queen came over. There were four bedrooms and down at the end there was what I quickly determined would be a wonderful party room. Inside of a day, I could hardly get down the hallway in my own suite.”

That was when a raging blizzard hit Quebec City for the rest of the week. Curlers traveled to the rink by snowmobile. Media stayed at the hotel and interviewed them when they returned. At one point during the proceedings, the lights went out in the arena.

“We went straight to the bar,” Baldwin laughed.

“When the lights came back on, we returned to the ice. We were laying eight.”

With the way he lived, you might not have expected Matt Baldwin to live that long.

“I’ve been the oldest living Brier-winning skip for 45 years now,” he said when he celebrated his birthday in 2002.

One of my favourite memories of him was when he attended the launch of my book World Capital of Curling and posed for a picture with me and a dozen of the biggest names in the game.

When the photo had been taken, he stood up and looked around the room.

“You know you’re getting old when you can’t remember where you left your walker,” he laughed.

I loved the guy. He was my favourite rock star of all time.

He died on April 8, 2023, at age 96.