The Canadian Curling Association has made available film footage of past Canadian Men’s Curling Championships on the CCA website. This past weekend I enjoyed viewing the highlights of the 1960 Brier, held in Port Arthur, Ontario (now Thunder Bay), won by the famous Ernie Richardson rink from Regina with a 9-1 round-robin record (in those days, there were no playoffs).
Viewing these films is a great way to gain some appreciation for the history of curling and its evolution from a game to an Olympic sport. If you’re viewing the 1960 championship highlights, for example, note the following:
- Note the sweeping. A significant difference from curling 50 years ago and today’s game is the style of sweeping. 50 years ago, brooms made of corn straw were used to sweep stones, which in the right hands were effective tools but had the drawback of leaving bits of straw on the ice that could affect any subsequently-delivered stones.
- Note how most teams have two sweepers that sweep on the same side of the stone. That’s because sweeping with a corn broom required use of the slider on the slide foot, and since most people are right-handed, it is natural to see two sweepers on the left side of the stone.
- Notice that the team from Quebec are wearing shirts and ties while on the ice. What style!
- Note that the games are 12 ends (!).
- Note the slides used by the players. The slide delivery was introduced to the game only twenty years earlier – around 1940 – by Ken Watson of Winnipeg. Delivering a stone involved a backswing, and usually players used a “tuck” position with their slide foot – which is why many of the sliders you see in the film are only half-foot sliders.
- Note the style of play – in particular, note how wide-open the ends are during play, and contrast it with the number of rocks in play in a given end that we often see in Championship curling today. There are two reasons for this: one, ice-making technology has improved significantly in the past 50 years, permitting much more uniform and predictable ice, and two, the universal adoption of the Free Guard Zone rule in the early 1990’s.
Pick a video from another Brier championship – perhaps the earliest one available from 1948 – and see what other differences in the game that you can spot!