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Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, Episode 4: Rumble at High Park

Host: John Cullen

JOHN CULLEN: In the 2014 15 curling season, Mike McEwen and his Hardline team were killing it. They were consistently beating players sponsored by a rival broom manufacturer called BalancePlus, like John Epping.

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JOHN EPPING: I think it was the first three spiels that season. We actually played Mike McEwen in the final, and they were the first to kind of come out with Hardline. Because we had such a hot start to the season, we were in literally almost every final that we played in the first three events, and they would beat us. And then we would play them three or four weeks later in another final, and it happened again.

JOHN CULLEN: Once they put the pieces together that the Hardline broom was helping them win, they called the president of BalancePlus, Scott Taylor, to see if there was anything he could do.

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JOHN EPPING: I was putting the calls in to BalancePlus and talking to Scott to say, hey, like, you know, we feel like we're getting, you know, beat up a bit here.

GLENN HOWARD: We're getting carved up here. The material they're using on these brooms is much better than what we have. You know, can you find something similar?

JOHN CULLEN: If anyone was going to find a solution to this problem, it was going to be Scott.

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GLENN HOWARD: He ain't going to mess around. Someone's doing something better than him, you know, he'll find something, right?

JOHN CULLEN: Scott was also noticing the impact these Hardline brooms were having.

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SCOTT TAYLOR: Yeah, it was definitely stressful.

JOHN CULLEN: If Archie, Harach and Hardline are considered outsiders in curling, Scott Taylor and BalancePlus are the establishment. Scott has been with the company for over 25 years. He's coached top teams, and that hands on work with curlers has led him to being known as an innovator in the sport. As he's seeing these events unfold, Scott quickly starts to experiment with different fabrics.

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SCOTT TAYLOR: Just hand me that piece of fabric.

JOHN CULLEN: Myself and my producer, Kathleen Goldhar, are at the BalancePlus headquarters, and Scott has laid out three pieces of fabric on the table.

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SCOTT TAYLOR: This is a Black Magic right here. I mean, it's a crazy fabric.

JOHN CULLEN: Yes. I don't think I've ever held it. The Black Magic.

JOHN CULLEN: Remember when Glenn Howard described playing against Hardline’s Ice Pad as bringing a knife to a gunfight? Well, Scott leaned in and turned their knives into bazookas and created a broom that became known as the Black Magic.

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GLENN HOWARD: They come out and find this black material. It was just like, looked identical to the Hardline stuff, just a different material. It was ridiculous. You could sweep and the rock would go out the sheet. It would back up six feet. It would. You could curl it. It was stupid.

SCOTT TAYLOR: We thought this type of technology is going to ruin the sport.

JOHN CULLEN: So why'd you do it?

SCOTT TAYLOR: Because we want the technology race to stop. It had to stop. I mean, it just didn't make sense. If the sport was allowed to continue on this way, it would not be of interest anymore.

JOHN CULLEN: So that was your kind of goal. It wasn't, okay, they're letting teams use the Ice Pad, so we're going to come up with a competing fabric. Your idea was let's go as far as we possibly can to point out that like we're going too far.

SCOTT TAYLOR: Yeah.

JOHN CULLEN: So you kind of knew, like going into high park, this is going to cause a shitstorm.

SCOTT TAYLOR: Oh yeah. Because just when we did our testing, we thought, okay, this is what we're looking for, because it will just do crazy things.

JOHN CULLEN: And a shit storm is exactly what happened when the Black Magic made its debut on Thanksgiving weekend of 2015 at a bonspiel at the High Park Curling Club in Toronto.

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SCOTT TAYLOR: Well, one of two thing’s going to happen. We would have a better broom and teams would like to use it, or it was just going to be ridiculous.

JOHN CULLEN: The stage was set for an all-out broom bath between two super brooms. I'm John Cullen, and this is Broomgate, how a broom almost killed curling.

JOHN CULLEN: Curling is not played on a flat sheet of ice. If you've been listening to this podcast and picturing hockey ice, stop doing that. Curling ice starts out like hockey ice, but then is transformed through a process we call pebbling. At every club, there's an expert ice maker whose job is to spray tiny water droplets over the surface, which become pebbles when they freeze. And when you sweep, it temporarily heats up these pebbles, reducing the friction between the rock and the ice, allowing the rock to travel farther and stay straighter. Before the Ice Pad, I thought, like most curlers did, that brooms would ever so slightly heat these pebbles, and then once the rock passed over them, the pebbles would restore their form. The Ice Pad, well, it was actually able to create little grooves or scratches in the pebbles, so the rock would follow the grooves almost like a trough. And the Black Magic head, well, I'll let Glenn Howard explain that.

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GLENN HOWARD: Well, the Hardline brooms were scratching the ice just at a limited amount. The Black was probably 10 times, call it more effective, drastic, whatever.

JOHN CULLEN: The Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, 2015, 7:45 a.m., the Ice Pad and Black Magic make their way to the ice of the High Park Curling Club in Toronto for the annual Stu Sells Toronto Tankard. It's got a $53,000 purse, 15,000 going to the winner. The Ice Pad is travelling in the trunk of Mike McEwen’s car. The broom was key to Mike's stellar season, and he knows he has a good shot of taking home the top prize. The other broom, Black Magic, belongs to Glenn Howard and his BalancePlus sponsored team. They stride into the curling club wearing their matching white jackets with black trim, their secret weapon hidden in their broom bags. Other teams enter the rink with these controversial brooms too. John Epping’s calls to Scott Taylor were answered, and he files into the club with the Black Magic in his bag. And Brad Gushue, despite all the controversy he stirred up about the Ice Pad, has one in his hands. For those in the know, there is a palpable tension in the air.

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GLENN HOWARD: So High Park was really, I think, the peak of the animosity in the whole situation.

JOHN CULLEN: 8:30 a.m., the tournament kicks off. Curlers across the five sheets play their first round matches. Rumours are swirling that things are going to come to a head this weekend. The club quickly fills with the sounds of granite rocks sailing down the ice and skips yelling at their sweepers. And after a few rounds of games, we get to the A-side semi-finals. And all eyes are on John Epping and Brad Gushue, who are about to face off. This will be the first time that the Black Magic and Ice Pad do battle.

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JOHN EPPING: So we were playing Brad Gushue, and we were actually, you know, beating Gushue early.

JOHN CULLEN: John Epping was leading one nothing. Brad tied it up. Then it happened, the ridiculous advantage of the Black Magic. Brad went to make a straightforward shot. Super easy. One that he shouldn't miss.

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JOHN EPPING: And I remember Brad had about a peel out for the blank.

JOHN CULLEN: All Brad had to do was get his rock to hit a piece of the other team's rock and push it out of the rings at the end of the sheet.

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JOHN EPPING: And he threw it down the same path.

JOHN CULLEN: The rock sailed down the path that the Black Magic had just swept, hit a spot, and then veered off course. That is not normal. As Brad stood there in disbelief, a teammate went over to check out what might have happened.

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BRAD GUSHUE: He could actually feel a different texture to the ice where this Black Magic had hit the ice. And you could walk and you could see the scrapes.

JOHN CULLEN: Now Brad understood what was happening. These new BalancePlus brooms, the Black Magic, weren't magic at all. They were just destructive.

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BRAD GUSHUE: When they actually went to sweep, you could hear a squeaking noise like when the fabric would hit the ice.

JOHN CULLEN: Curling is called the roaring game because the rocks make a loud, dull roar as they make their way down the ice. But hearing the brooms, that was new. If the Hardline Ice Pads were making scrapes in the ice, the Black Magic were making gouges.

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JOHN CULLEN: What was Brad's initial reaction? Like did he also realize what had happened?

JOHN EPPING: I think so. Yeah. I mean, he kind of just… I remember him throwing his hands up in the air with like, oh my gosh, what just happened?

BRAD GUSHUE: You know, you're trying to keep up or get a stronger equipment, but we're actually damage in the ice. It's gone too far.

JOHN CULLEN: John actually agreed with Brad. It had gone too far.

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JOHN EPPING: And to me, at that point, I was sick to my stomach because that was never what I would want to happen, that we affect the ice like that and that… I just remember, I wonder, I don't know, I would think Brad remembers this, and I just said, you know, I'm really sorry, Brad.

JOHN CULLEN: This right here is what I love about curling. Imagine an F1 driver having a faster engine and then apologizing to his fellow competitors for winning races.

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BRAD GUSHUE: John was extremely reasonable in the whole situation, more reasonable than a lot of others.

JOHN CULLEN: While Epping wanted to show everyone the unfair advantage of these new brooms, even he was surprised at what Black Magic could do, and it wasn't good for the sport. At its core, curling has always been about sportsmanship. These brooms were changing all that.

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JOHN EPPING: I felt horrible that that never was my intent, and I would never want that to happen. I mean, that's not what our game is about. It's not what, you know, what, you know, the people that have played the game before us, and that's just not what curling is about to me.

JOHN CULLEN: Then John made what might have been one of the most sportsmanlike decisions in curling history. He walked off the ice, put the Black Magic back in his bag and pulled out his old broom.

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JOHN EPPING: Yeah, that was, that was a big moment.

JOHN CULLEN: It was a big moment. But what would happen later that weekend in High Park would be even bigger and much more destructive.

JOHN CULLEN: As the tournament headed into the weekend and more games between the Ice Pad and the Black Magic were played, the ice got more and more ripped up. Tensions ramped up, and the event organizers were starting to hear complaints from both sides.

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MIKE MCEWEN: They showed up what is now named the Black Magic hat.

JOHN CULLEN: From Mike McEwen on the Ice Pad side, who couldn't believe what he was seeing.

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MIKE MCEWEN: This would have been the most abrasive material that anyone has ever seen touch the ice.

JOHN CULLEN: And Rich Hart on the Black Magic side, who couldn't believe that Mike, of all people, would speak up.

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RICH HART: And Mike's like, well, this isn't fair. And I say, well, last year wasn't fair either. So what… like what's fair, Mike? Oh, your broom is the only fair one.

JOHN CULLEN: As the poster boy for Hardline, Mike felt like a lot of this animosity was being unfairly directed his way.

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MIKE MCEWEN: The messaging was harsh. I think the overall tone and messaging was, do you guys think it's right what you're using? Like that implication that we had full understanding of what these brooms were doing and we knew for a long time. That was the implication.

JOHN CULLEN: Players were starting to ask for action, but no one knew who to turn to. And the tournament, and maybe the game itself was threatening to be destroyed by this arms race.

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MIKE MCEWEN: And there was some altercations that happened. Like it was just toxic. It was so toxic.

JOHN CULLEN: Something had to give to avoid a massive fight. The players had been complaining to the closest thing they had to an official, Gerry Geurts of the World Curling Tour. Gerry eventually couldn't take it anymore, so he stopped the games. Everyone needed to put down their brooms. The skips of nearly a dozen teams followed Gerry down the stairs and into a cramped locker room in the basement of the High Park Curling Club, and what happened there has since become part of curling lore.

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MIKE MCEWEN: It was chaos, and there was a meeting downstairs at the high park. Not a big curling club, so packing everybody into the downstairs change room to have an emergency meeting.

JOHN CULLEN: Mike says it was extremely tense.

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MIKE MCEWEN: And what was happening is that the teams with the Black Magic were threatening to use it against teams specifically that were Hardline.

JOHN CULLEN: This meeting happened in secret, so most people have no idea what was actually said. I was worried that we'd never find out, except it just so happens that underneath the cover of night, a secret source provided me with a copy of the meeting minutes. Just kidding. The meeting minutes got sent to every competitive curler at the time, including me. Here's my producer, Kathleen, reading them.

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KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Gerry Geurts opened the meeting by informing the attendees that a formal complaint had been made about the use of BalancePlus broom heads. He informed the room that a counter complaint had been subsequently made about the Hardline Ice Pad.

MIKE MCEWEN: There was some sort of rule in the books. Like you can't knowingly damage the ice. So if you have a super abrasive head and you know you're scratching, damaging the ice, that's wrong. So I was very upset with what these teams were doing because that was wrong, you know, that they knew they were damaging the ice to make a point.

JOHN CULLEN: It didn't sit well with BalancePlus player Glenn Howard that Hardline curlers were now complaining about brooms.

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GLENN HOWARD: This is where I struggle a bit. Hardline teams got really upset with the Black heads. Sorry, you've got a very, very effective head that was way better than everybody else that was doing stuff to the ice, and now you're complaining about the Black head? Yeah, we got a problem.

JOHN CULLEN: And the problem with that is curling doesn't have referees.

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GLENN HOWARD: What was the penalty? We don't have a penalty. You can't do that. Oh, okay, we'll stop doing that. Okay. And then what ends up happening then was that's where the players started to police themselves.

JOHN CULLEN: The curlers had no one but themselves to solve this issue. As the skips sat facing each other, arms crossed, they felt the weight of centuries of curling history and tradition on their shoulders.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Curling, like love, is a disease of the mind.

JOHN CULLEN: The rules of the game, its customs and norms, have been passed down from generation to generation.

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FIRST SPEAKER: One needs a cardigan, a comfortable cap, rubbers, a broom and stones.

SECOND SPEAKER: Stones? A broom?

JOHN CULLEN: Glenn, Brad, Mike and John grew up throwing stones at neighbourhood rinks and sweeping with brooms no one ever had a second thought about. For centuries, the beauty of the sport lay in sliding out with the precise speed, releasing the stone with a graceful touch, striking an opponent's rock nearly 200 feet away in just the right spot, the Newtonian physics required to predict how a rock might curl, and what type of sweeping is required to get it there. Anyone who tries curling will tell you, mastering the physical aspects of the sport takes years and thousands of slides to get right. And now, within a month, all it took to be good was knowing how to use a goddamn broom.

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GERRY GEURTS: I did manage to see the electron microscope view of the pebbles. And you could see that a curling stone over a pebble would have small little scratches. We'll call it kittens scratches.

JOHN CULLEN: This is World Curling Tour president Gerry Geurts.

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GERRY GEURTS: But then when these fabric brooms with the insert in them were put over, it looked like a tiger claw over that same pebble. So the scratch that the rock left behind on the pebble was just absolutely dominated by the broom left behind. So now, the rock’s natural movement has no effect on the play.

JOHN CULLEN: Glenn Howard puts it more simply.

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GLENN HOWARD: You needed zero skill to throw a rock. We've taken all the talent out of the thrower and put it into a guy sweeping.

JOHN CULLEN: According to the minutes, they all agreed that technology was having a negative effect on the sport. Like the laser swimsuit by Speedo or the corked bat in baseball, curling was colliding with modernity. The problem was where to draw the line. What kind of brooms should be banned, just the Ice Pad or Black Magic as well? Should everyone have to play with the same brooms? This is what they decided.

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KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Since each team did not have identical equipment or multiple hair heads, it was agreed that a gentlemen's agreement would be made between the teams prior to the game on what broom technologies and heads were acceptable.

JOHN CULLEN: Anyone with a super broom promised they would not use them. They'd use their old hair brooms instead.

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MIKE MCEWEN: So that's what came out of that meeting. I think we had a couple in the bag for sure to begin with, so we were willing to do that.

JOHN CULLEN: So with this gentleman's agreement in place, Gerry Geurts and the curlers filed out of the basement, climbed back up the stairs and back onto the ice. And as fate would have it, the two teams who made the complaints that forced the meeting in the basement would meet in the final, Mike McEwen versus Glenn Howard. It was like the curling universe was conspiring. And so on Thanksgiving Monday at 5 p.m., when most Canadian families were settling in to a turkey dinner with their loved ones, Mike and Glenn stepped out onto the ice for the ultimate showdown.

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MIKE MCEWEN: We do what everybody had suggested to do and we're like, okay, like we're in the final. We're playing team Howard, BalancePlus team. We wanted just hair versus hair and we'll just play.

JOHN CULLEN: But that is not what Glenn had in mind. Despite taking part in that basement meeting, despite seeming to be onside with the gentleman's agreement to only use hair brooms, Glenn had a different plan.

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MIKE MCEWEN: To this day, I don't know why.

JOHN CULLEN: Glenn Howard and his team stepped out onto the ice with their Black Magic brooms in their hands. With no officials, gentleman's agreements had been a part of curling since the very start of the game, and they had always been upheld until now. Glenn, he wasn't interested in temporary solutions. He wanted this mess solved for good.

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GLENN HOWARD: You know, come on, guys. This was to prove a point, to say this is how stupid we are. Let's take this to the next level. I'll burn this right now if you burn yours for good. End of story. And we knew that wasn’t going to happen. So no, we're going to use these brooms just to make sure everybody understands this is stupid.

JOHN CULLEN: That's the bargain Glenn Howard wanted to make. Right now in this final, after four straight days of curling and fighting and more curling, he was willing to stop using the Black Magic on one condition: Mike stops using the Ice Pad forever. They don't call three time world champion Glenn Howard the Wizard of Winter because he spends three months of the year in Boca Raton. Glenn wanted change and he wanted it now.

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GLENN HOWARD: We want to prove a point.

MIKE MCEWEN: And so we played and we still played with hair, and we went up and down the ice and took out every big gouge that the Black Magic made.

JOHN CULLEN: The game took 3.5 hours. That's an hour longer than normal, by the way.

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MIKE MCEWEN: And it was one of the longest eight end games probably on record.

JOHN CULLEN: So back and forth they went, Mike's team cleaning up the mess Glenn's team was making with their broom. The game was as cold as the ice. After the two teams settled in and blanked the first end, Mike McEwen drew first blood, scoring two in the second end to make it two nothing. The game had none of the camaraderie, fraternity or sportsmanship of a curling final. Mike McEwen stole a point in the fourth end to lead three nothing. Glenn Howard would get the game to three one before a critical mistake in the seventh end.

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MIKE MCEWEN: One time, we didn't clean it up, and they threw down that track and hit their own marks. So it was just… it was a spectacle.

JOHN CULLEN: When the dust settled, the Black Magic had banged up the ice so much it would cost Team Howard the game. That mistake gave Mike two points and a five to one win.

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MIKE MCEWEN: We won that game. We won the event.

JOHN CULLEN: Mike was the winner again, but this time, without the help of the Ice Pad. Gerry Geurts was there and remembered the moment well.

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GERRY GEURTS: It got down to the degree where Glenn Howard actually lost the final because of a pathway that they cratered into the ice at the beginning of an end, that he had to throw a stone down and ended up tracking straight. You know, it was kind of a little bit of an interesting karma deal back in return.

JOHN CULLEN: It was a David versus Goliath match. And in true Canadian style, David won, but it made David sad. Everything that transpired over the weekend robbed the win of any sense of victory for Mike.

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MIKE MCEWEN: I went home just… I don't know. I was gutted. I was mentally shot.

JOHN CULLEN: As the players packed up and headed home, there was a real sense that something had changed. Usually, the two teams would stick around and the winners would buy the losers a beer, as is curling tradition. But as you might imagine, team McEwen was in no mood to buy Tim Howard a beer. The walk to the parking lot was quiet and subdued, and everyone went home with a pit in their stomach.

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MIKE MCEWEN: Such a stressful weekend. Like I got home and I was absolutely bagged. Like just mentally shot.

JOHN CULLEN: News of what happened at High Park spread quickly among curlers across the country. People were looking back on the previous season and targeting Mike for having such a great year while using the Ice Pad.

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MIKE MCEWEN: Teams accusing us of knowing before we knew or somehow being involved in the cover material that was, you know, doing the magic. That was a dark year. Very dark. Like just tons of stress.

JOHN CULLEN: For the first time ever, teams and players were being divided across a line: Who uses witch equipment?

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MIKE MCEWEN: Teams that maybe were close to you but didn't use the same product were now distancing. And that's when really that tight knit fabric, that curling culture community amongst the top competitive teams started to fracture and started to be ripped apart. I just remember being huddled in hotel rooms, like not hanging out, only hanging out with just Hardline teams only.

JOHN CULLEN: Yeah.

MIKE MCEWEN: And there being just… your circle really closed down. That's what I felt. Why am I dedicating so much time on the road to play this stupid sport?

JOHN CULLEN: So all this stuff is happening obviously off the ice. How is it affecting you on the ice? Is it bleeding into your game at all?

MIKE MCEWEN: Well, it had to be. I remember that season being extremely tumultuous. Not just as like the, well, in part, the temperature on the ice. Like the rivalries all of a sudden. There's definitely some teams that hated, I'll use that word, other teams for a period of time there.

JOHN CULLEN: The tension wasn't just at the bar or on the ice.

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MIKE MCEWEN: And this is one of the things that Don and I really battled over is, you know, she didn't want our team demonized because she knew how much we put into the game. We just had our first born daughter, Vienna, and she was breech, and Don had to have a C-section and basically didn't move off the chair, off the couch or the chair for 10 days. Like she felt awful that we were being cast in that light, demonized. And I think she just didn't want us to step into that scene, where I wanted to stick up for ourselves and stick up for Hardline, that they hadn't done anything wrong. I didn't want to take the high road. I didn't want to. No, I didn't. I didn't want to stay silent. But I mean, she's a smart lady, though, and maybe it was best for me to just stay in the shadows and let everything play out. But it was a contentious point in my house.

JOHN CULLEN: Even Archie at Hardline started to feel the animosity. What was happening at the professional level was now trickling down to the amateurs, and he was hearing about it.

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ARCHIE MANAVIAN: One of my lowest points at Hardline had to be that time I got a call from a 65-year-old lady who had been curling for 40 years, and she said, I've been curling for 40 years, and some second year curler called me a cheater for using your broom.

JOHN CULLEN: Who knew that what Archie and Harach had created in a suburb of Montreal would turn the entire curling community upside down? Archie and Hardline just wanted to make a nice looking, easy to use and longer lasting broom. Clearly, they did a lot more than that. With things going from bad to worse, and with the fate of curling on the brink, everyone agreed that this situation needed to be solved. But how? Well, you hold a sweeping summit. That's how. Next time on Broomgate.

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We had a significant issue on our hands because now, every curling club in Canada wants to know what to do. You know, looming on the horizon was our Olympic qualification process, the Briers, the Scotties, the worlds. It's all sitting in the background. So I mean, obviously, I saw this whole thing coming and I knew it was going to be… it had the potential to be a nightmare.

JOHN CULLEN: Broomgate is a production of USG Audio and CBC, in association with Pacific Electric and Kelly & Kelly, hosted by me, John Cullen, and concept devised by John Cullen and Kelly & Kelly. Showrunner is Kathleen Goldhar. Executive producers are Josh Bloch from USG Audio, Mike Falbo, Ed Helms and Brett Harris from Pacific Electric, Chris Kelly, Lauren Berkovich and Pat Kelly from Kelly & Kelly, Chris Oke and Cesil Fernandes from CBC, and John Cullen. Assistant editor is Max Collins. Editor is Mitchell Stewart. Production support from Josh Lalongi at USG Audio. Veronica Simmons is our senior producer. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. Tanya Springer is senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

JOHN CULLEN: Thanks for listening to Broomgate. If you want to hear the next episode right now, subscribe to our channel on Apple Podcasts. Just click on the link in the show description.

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Transcript: Broomgate, Episode 4

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