People often raise their brows when, in the course of the major professional sports, a free agent will sign with a different team.
One of their favourites will sign with a different team in the offseason and fans will be disappointed. Players don’t have the kind of loyalty they used to, they’ll say, shaking their heads and then going to watch their own favourite team trying to do the exact same thing to someone else’s favourite player.
It’s a cyclical thing.
But team loyalty — and the chance of a bigger payday — largely isn’t what motivates the curlers at the SaskTel Tankard this week. The fact is, curling for most of these players isn’t what pays most of the bills. Sure, a few thousand dollars every couple of cash bonspiels is nice, but curling isn’t the only thing going on in their lives.
Some of them are starting families and don’t have the desire to go to Alberta or Thunder Bay every couple of weeks to get a few World Curling Tour points to allow them the chance to be in the Olympic qualifying or the tour’s Grand Slam events.
Most of them simply can’t afford to go, or feel the lure of the steady paycheque rather than the pressure of having to curl for your earnings for four months a year. Others can’t find the right level of sponsorship that allows for leaps of faith like going steady on the Saskatchewan Curling Tour.
This semi-professionalism isn’t a bad thing. It’s part of the allure of the curling community that’s taken a lot of licks over the years. The fact is, these men have full time employment elsewhere and this Tankard is for most of them the top of the line when it comes to where their curling careers will take them. Or, at the very least, a continuation of the level of curling they’ve been at for years.
You’re not going to find, very often at least, Jose Bautista having a beverage after a Major League Baseball playoff game with fans and fellow ballplayers just offsite. You will, however, find nearly all the curlers and their friends and family afterwards.
In researching the various teams that are at the Tankard this year, it struck me as to how many of them are completely new to each other. That’s okay, because not many of them are total strangers to each other.
Take the Scott Bitz rink for example. He won the Tankard as a skip in 2003 in his hometown of Regina with three completely different guys than he won the Tankard with as Joel Jordison’s third in 2006. One of the guys he curled with in 2006 was Aryn Schmidt, who’s on his team this year. The lead from the Bruce Korte 2000 Tankard winner, Rory Golanowski, is his lead and Bitz’ third is Warren Jackson, a former skip out of Yorkton who has been curling with Bitz for a few years. This is Golanowski’s third straight Tankard appearance with a different team, which may be some sort of obscure record.
Teams switch players every now and then, and sometimes they don’t even feel comfortable calling skip stones. Former Tankard winner (and this week attempting to win the Manitoba provincial title) Pat Simmons started winning with a team at the Tankard in 2005. By the time he won his fifth title in 2011, the deck had been reshuffled so much that all of the players were either in new positions (Steve Laycock as third instead of lead) or were entirely new to the team. These were completely new players than when he won three provincial junior titles in the mid 1990s. One of those was with Scott Bitz.
Anyway, not satisfied with coming so close at the Brier, he joined Kevin Koe’s team in Alberta, where he finally won a Brier in 2014. Then Simmons and Koe split, with Simmons skipping Team Canada in 2015 to his second Brier with former Olympic gold medalist John Morris as his third. Guess what happened within a year of that team winning? Morris will once again represent Canada at the Olympics this year in the first-ever mixed curling medal event.
It’s worth noting that for some of these teams, just getting to the Tankard is the pinnacle of their achievements. At least, until they come back with a slightly different team.
