SPORTS FLASHBACK 1988: SPORTOPICS — Give it the inturrrn, Rrrrobbie

I told my wife I may be late, for I was curling in Morris as part of a media team upholding a tradition of excellence against a rink that included a couple of Scottish curlers.

When I got home, Anne asked if we had won. Are you kidding, I says, they kilt us…get it? Kilt Us.

The reception to that remark led me to draw two conclusions. Firstly, jokes about men in skirts aren’t funny, or secondly, you need more than a sample of Scottish jam made especially for Her Majesty to justify a trip to Morris for a four-end curling game.

It wasn’t my fault we lost. The team was equally represented by press and radio and it was the radio people who let us down.

Laura Rance from the Western Producer did an admirable job as skip and only modesty prevents me from saying the same thing about the third, representing The Carillon. It was the front end of the rink that caused all our problems.

Les When do we eat? Kletke from Radio Southern Manitoba was busy explaining the finer points of the game to Rob Is this a broom or a brush? Mitchell of CKWG. The media foursome was in trouble before we even got on the ice.

Then we met the other team. Nobody bothered to tell me that the other team would have a former Brier champion on it. Nobody bothered to tell me that one of the Scottish curlers was a television colour commentator, who had retired from competitive curling.

Willie Jamieson was on the Scottish junior championship rink in 1976, and was third on the foursome that won the Scottish men’s title in 1977 and played in the world championships in Sweden that year.

Apparently, they needed practise for the upcoming Manitoba Curling Association’s 100th Bonspiel in Winnipeg. A friendly pre-bonspiel game in the brand new Morris facility would be a good way to welcome Willie Jamieson and Mike Wood to Canada, the curling people at Morris thought.

So they added John Helston, a member of Mike Riley’s 1984 Brier champs, and got Bob Swain, a pretty fair curler in his own right, to skip the rink at the MCA.

Not wanting to appear uncooperative, or worse yet, unfriendly, the media foursome did its best not to embarrass the visitors. I think we may have gone slightly overboard.

While Jamieson and Wood got a great deal of practise working on their draw game, they may not have minded if we had put a couple of rocks in the house to let them practise a takeout or two.

The final result was 6-0 and our visitors were not embarrassed.

I have often considered taking a week off to curl in the MCA, just so I can say I’ve been there. Now, I don’t think I’ll bother.

After all, I can already boast about having curled against one Brier winner and a Scottish champion.

What more could a curler ask?