Curling, Etcetera_ A Whole Bunch of Stuff About the Roaring Game - Bob Weeks [22]
• Ferbey’s team holds the record for scoring the most points in a single end at the world championship—five, a mark he achieved twice during the 2005 world final.
• His team of Nedohin, Scott Pfeifer, and Marcel Rocque became the first to win four Briers with the same lineup. The famed Richardsons of Saskatchewan also won four, but on one occasion had a different lead.
• His team was the first to have a book written about it. The Ferbey Four was written by Edmonton sportswriter Terry Jones.
• He was one of the few high-profile curlers not to join a 2001 movement of teams that elected to play in the Grand Slam of Curling instead of the Brier. That set him apart from many of his peers, but he said at the time: “Maybe to some of the players [the Grand Slam is] right up there but let’s be honest. To the paying public the Brier is the event of the year. I don’t care what anybody else says.”
• He appeared, along with lead Marcel Rocque, on the television program Celebrity Chefs, where he showed off his prowess in the kitchen by preparing shrimp canapés with homemade mayo and dill, smoked goose breast canapés, pork loin chops (brined) with a port/maple/nut reduction, lightly steamed vegetables in garlic /olive oil sauce. Rocque did most of the cooking.
• Along with teammate Dave Nedohin, he made a cameo appearance on the television program Corner Gas, playing himself.
ROARING ALONG
Curling is known at “the roaring game.” This moniker was given to the sport for the sound the stones made as they travelled down the ice. While rocks don’t particularly roar these days on artificial playing surfaces in clubs, there was a definite hum when the sport was played outdoors on the frozen lochs of Scotland, and that’s where the name originated.
PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES
Curlers are certainly a determined bunch, but Rob Whalen and his rink from Sioux Lookout, Ontario, took that to extremes en route to the 1996 northwestern Ontario playdowns.
They had originally booked seats on a flight from their hometown to Thunder Bay, hoping to arrive the morning of the start of the competition. However, that morning, a massive snowstorm hit the area, closing the airport. Undaunted, the team piled into a four-by-four and started off on the 250-kilometre trek. At Ignace, Ontario, about halfway to their destination, police had closed the road, forcing the team to find yet another way.
Whalen, who worked on the railway, headed to the rail yards and managed to convince the crew of a freight train headed to Thunder Bay to let them board. But that didn’t work either, as the blizzard forced the train to stop and back up to Ignace to wait out the weather.
Back into the four-by-four the team members went, and this time, Whalen drove an hour southwest to Fort Frances and then finally on to Thunder Bay, arriving at 4:30 a.m., having missed his first two games in the triple-knockout competition. To add to the disaster, after winning their first two games, the team lost in its third contest, one victory short of qualifying for the provincial final.
HOLEY SLIDER
It may have been inexperience, it could have been just a case of being naive, but Lino Di Iorio changed the way people slide just two years after taking up the sport.
Di Iorio is the creator of the BalancePlus Slider, an invention that stopped an age-old problem with Teflon sliders.
After taking up the sport at 45, Di Iorio noticed that the slider on his curling shoe had curled up so the edges weren’t on the ice surface. Looking at other players’ shoes, he noticed it was a common problem. “To me, it showed that although the foot is about four inches wide, people were only sliding on about two inches of that.”
Combining his background in physics with an affinity for solving problems, he created the new slider, which has a shallow hole in the centre of it.
“Most people just slide on the ball of their foot,” Di Iorio said. “By adding the hole, that part of the slider doesn’t come into contact with the ice. In essence, the person’s weight is spread out over