Be a Curling Goldfish

Excuse my rambling, but my brain is addled from a night of self-loathing skip-sleep, where a ridiculously dumb curling shot that cost you a game haunts your dreams and leaves you staring at a darkened ceiling.

We are in Brantford, Ont., wrapping up what has been a decent cashspiel season. We have qualified for Ontario provincials in January on the strength of our results, which means another crack at Trillium Glory.

But few sports can rob you of any joy and send you into a pit of self-doubt and loathing as curling.

It just took one abysmal call by me, one WTF moment that resulted in the other team taking a three in the seventh end to tie. They would of course steal the eighth end to win, making my dumb call all the more difficult to accept.

I’m going to guess that I’m not the only skip to have lost sleep over a bad call. While skipping is the most rewarding position in curling (after all they name the team after you) it is also the most soul-crushing. I think the feelings are amplified by the knowledge you are not only losing for yourself, but also the teammates counting on you.

This has been my greatest challenge in curling to overcome. As a skip, inevitably the blame of a tough loss usually falls on you, and I have spent way too much time in my life thinking about what could have/should have been.

I never had the good fortune to have a coach in my younger days, because I surely could have used the help then. If anything, the culture of curling when I was younger was to use “Dr. Bacardi” as our team coach/therapist to forget a bad loss, which usually left me feeling drunk, then hung-over and self-doubting the next day.

I am sure I was not alone in employing that strategy, and is surely not the best way to cope.

Nowadays I like to believe I am better at coping with loss—although I did consume of couple of rye and cokes last night—but probably only because I have built up enough scar tissue to know better. But it still hurts.

The Ted Lasso “Be a Goldfish” theme that came up in a few episodes really spoke to me. For those of you who have not seen it (and if you haven’t you should), soccer coach Ted Lasso tells his players to be a goldfish—as they have the shortest memories in the animal kingdom—as a metaphor to not be imprisoned by your thoughts.

Imagine if Ted had coached curling.

I have written about what curling has given me in the past. But one of the strongest lessons is how to deal with failure and bounce back. Winning is easy. But dealing with loss, with failure, with self-doubt has been by far the hardest and most rewarding lesson to learn. We are not our failures, and they only define us if we allow them.

For any of you new, young skips out there, take this advice: don’t let dark thoughts get the better of you. You will fail. You will do stupid things. You will make dumb calls. Damn—I am 52, and like to think of myself as somewhat wise, but I can still make dumb calls and fail.

But do not let it define you. Your greatest opponent in a curling game is usually yourself. And don’t be afraid to talk about it.

Excuse me, I now have to try to be a goldfish in time for my 4:00 p.m. game.