They’re Happy And You Know It

There’s been some crazy sports scores on this Easter holiday weekend.

On Good Friday night, the woeful Toronto Raptors decimated the Golden State Warriors 130-77.

On Saturday, Chelsea were thrashed 5-2—at home—by lowly West Bromwich Albion in the English Premier League.

On Sunday in Major League Baseball … well, nevermind. We were going to highlight the Reds beating the Cardinals 12-1 and the Orioles whipping the Red Sox 11-3 but baseball teams beat the heck out of each other all the time.

Easter Monday is a partial holiday in Canada, which meant hundreds of thousands of Canuck curling fans were watching when their new favorite son in red and white, Brendan Bottcher, soundly pummelled USA skip John Shuster by the unflattering score of 10-1. In only six ends of play.

The boys from Duluth just didn’t have it on the day. Consecutive missed double-takeouts in the second end saw Canada score three, followed by single steals in the third and fourth frames to see the Yanks go down 5-0. Then came the fateful fifth end, where Shuster faced a crazy angle hit-tap while facing five Canadian stones, and missed.

A draw for a single American point in the sixth end brought out the fist-bumps.

(It used to be illegal for teams to concede before the eighth end of play, but officials tended to not enforce such rules when they existed—particularly early in round-robin play. Now it’s okay to concede after six ends are played.)

So what’s our point?

This result should be considered no big deal, least of all to the competitors. These things happen all the time. Everyone gets kicked.

In past curling eras—when games lasted 14 ends, before being shortened to 12—some of the linescores at the Brier, one of the world’s toughest curling competitions, had to be seen to be believed. Imagine being up 8-0 after five ends only to drop 11 consecutive points en route to a 13-9 defeat?

Even in today’s modern curling era, scoring at another World Curling Federation event—the Pacific-Asia Curling Championship—is often out of control, particularly as rookie curling nations find their feet in an attempt to be competitive.

At the 2015 championship, the minnow Hong Kong team dropped an eight-ender—the curling hole in one, if you will, where all eight of a team’s stones count—in the very first end of their match against Australia. Team HK were so jazzed to even be at the competition—they sang “Happy And You Know It” at the opening banquet—their skip proudly barged in to join the Australian team’s official eight-ender photograph.

The final score was 16-2 in six ends.

One of Shuster’s teammates suffered a huge loss at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics, a few days before the men’s competition started.

Matt Hamilton was competing in the mixed doubles competition with his sister Becca, and dropped that discipline’s version of the eight-ender—a six-ender—against the eventual silver medal Swiss team. The Hamiltons were leading 4-3 heading into the final end, and lost 9-4.

Some curling teams that have been kicked, sometimes badly, have gone on to win championships. Look no further than Shuster’s 2018 men’s Olympic team. They lost to teams like Italy (10-9) and Japan (8-2) and were thumped by Niklas Edin’s Swedes 10-4 to sit at 2-3 before they had to face mighty Canada, Switzerland and Scotland.

They knew they had to win all three of those games to have a sniff at the playoffs. They did it. The rest is history.

Team USA coach Phill Drobnick spoke to the media after today’s debacle.

“It’s a long week with a lot of ups and downs,” he said. “The team that handles those downs the best will be playing for a medal. That’s one thing this team has prided itself on over the past few years.”

That’s not just spin, that’s curling truthiness. Another truth is that a world curling championship is taking place in a bubble during a pandemic, against all odds—including the blizzard of COVID-19 variants now assailing Alberta and neighboring provinces and states—and all 14 teams are just happy to be here. 

Happy and you know it.