Jones does it again

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This article was published 30/01/2012 (5244 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE — Jennifer Jones did what Jennifer Jones has always done best — better than any other women’s curler in the game today and maybe even better than any other women’s curler, period — Sunday afternoon.

With her hair on fire and her back to the wall — a condition Jones has always seemed to prefer at major curling events — Jones cooly stepped into the hack for the final rock of the 10th end at Portage’s PCU Centre and played an exceptionally difficult, exceptionally delicate tapback to the button for her fifth Manitoba women’s curling championship.

She made it, of course. Because Jones, who curls with Kaitlyn Lawes, former Brandon resident Jill Officer and Dawn Askin, always makes it.

There was no one who should have been too surprised when Jones’s tapped rock slid perfectly between two opponents stones nestled on either side of the button and came to rest atop the pinhole for the winning point in a 6-5 victory over Chelsea Carey in the 2012 Manitoba Scotties Tournament of Hearts final, including the victorious skip.

“It’s just crazy,” Jones said. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I can’t believe we get to do all these wonderful things.”

If former Manitoba curling great Connie Laliberte was the Ice Queen, then Jones is the Drama Queen.

This is a woman who first became a household name in 2005 when she authored what many still regard as the greatest single walk-off shot to win a Canadian curling championship in history — an in-off for four against Ontario’s Jenn Hanna to win the 2005 Scotties final in St. John’s, N.L.

And so it has gone ever since as Jones proceeded in the intervening years to win three more Manitoba titles, three more Canadian titles and a world title using that same formula of high drama, almost without exception.

It is what Jones does — maddeningly and remarkably without fail — and it’d be hard to blame an opponent like Carey if she was a bit frustrated Sunday to be on the wrong end of all that drama.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” said Carey, who had her heart broken in similar fashion in last year’s Manitoba final by Cathy Overton-Clapham. “It’s the second year in a row we put everything out on the ice, we played a really good game, we made two absolute pistols in 10 and we still didn’t win. I mean, I don’t know what else to do …

“We lost the final to the best team in the world and we made her make a hell of a shot to do it. Do I feel any of that right now? Absolutely not. And I bet I won’t for a long time. I probably won’t until I finally win one of these damn things.”

Jones’ appearance at the national Scotties Tournament of Hearts in Red Deer next month will be her eighth consecutive — four times as Team Manitoba and four times as Team Canada. That matches a run of eight straight national Scotties appearances in a row by the legendary Colleen Jones foursome of the late ’90s and early 2000s.

None of Jones’ foursome was named a Scotties all-star. Barb Spencer and her third Karen Klein and second Ainsley Champagne were named all-stars along with Carey’s lead Lindsay Titheridge.

» Winnipeg Free Press