Gold-medal curler attributes win to being the only one who understood the rules
BRANDON, MB—Mark Gallant, who is the skip (I think that's what it's called) of the gold medal–winning squad out of New Brunswick who took the Pulley Barron Cup this past weekend in Manitoba, says that he believes that in the end the difference in the match lay in the fact that his team was the only one who knew all of the rules.
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"Curling's not easy. If you're watching at home, you think, oh sure, yeah, you just throw it into the middle, or maybe you try and hit the other ones, or maybe both. But when you figure out which one you're doing, it's huge. And that paid off for us. Me learning all the rules. I think."
"And don't quote me on this," he said, "But I think I might even be the only one on my team who knows all of them? Like ALL-all of them."
Sven Grosbard, the Swedish captain, who flew a long way for this past weekend's bonspiel (is that what it is? Was it just a tournament? Or is bonspiel actually the word for tournament, the curling word for it?), says that the main difference was that his team never figured out whether there was any difference between the blue circle and the red circle, besides one of them being bigger—he couldn't remember which one.
"At the end of the day it comes down to where you have an edge. My team worked hard for years, don't get me wrong. I'm happy to say we got to the point every team tries to reach, which is that we know what the heck curling is. We're proud of that, and eventually we reached even beyond that level. But when you're up against a team who knows why the guys are sweeping—I mean come on. How do you compete with that? Hats off to them."
At press time, are the circles at one end worth more than the ones at the other end?
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