1982 BRIER — Part 5: Event leaves lasting legacy

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This article was published 13/08/2022 (1330 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It doesn’t take long for things to get back to normal in a local sports scene once a major event wraps up.

Other than a column by Brandon Sun sports editor Jack Gibson where he saluted those involved in the host committee on a job well done, there wasn’t much mention of the Labatt Brier in the Tuesday, March 16 edition of the paper.

Instead, the focus had switched to the return of a Brandon Wheat Kings side that was trying to snap a six-game losing skid that night against the Calgary Wranglers, the start of the junior high school basketball playoffs and Dave Price scoring 32 points for Curly MacKay’s in their win over the ACC Cougars in the opening game of the city senior men’s hoops final.

As people in the Wheat City returned to their regular activities, the rink that had stood on the top of the podium as Canada’s top men’s curling team was preparing for their next big challenge.

Conquering the World

When Al Hackner and Rick Lang arrived in the town of Garmish-Partenkirchen, Germany for the 1982 Air Canada Silver Broom with their teammates Bob Nicol and Bruce Kennedy, the Bavarian countryside was a far cry from their home in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“It was a magical place,” said Hackner, who skipped the team that had beaten Brent Giles of British Columbia in the Labatt Brier final a couple of weeks earlier at the Keystone Centre. “The hotel that we were staying in was way over our heads and we were just in awe of the entire area.”

“It was almost dream-like,” added Lang, who was the third for the rink from the Fort William Curling Club. “You have four kids from Thunder Bay who were used to travelling on their own without a lot of money finding themselves in the German Alps and staying in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

“We also had about 1,200 Canadians come over to see the whole thing, so it was almost like we were in a fantasy world.”

While they were in awe of their surroundings, the Northern Ontario quartet also had a job to do, which was to win a world championship.

Although Hackner, Nicol and Kennedy were all new to the international stage, the trip to Germany marked a chance at redemption for Lang.

Seven years earlier in Perth, Scotland, he was the third for Bill Tetley’s Thunder Bay rink that was the top seed for the playoffs but was upset 6-5 by eventual champion Otto Danieli of Switzerland in the semifinal round.

“I can say it now, but that was a bit of a fluke deal,” Lang said. “The shot that he made in the last end (which set up a steal of one) wasn’t even the shot that he called. He knocked us out and for the rest of that summer all anyone on the team heard was, ‘What happened?’”

“You were expected to win a world title then as the Canadian champions. Even though we had won the Brier in Brandon and we had finally accomplished that goal, there was a sense that the job wasn’t done. We may have crossed off that one dream, but it doesn’t mean a lot if you don’t win the worlds.”

The Hackner rink was two wins clear of the pack in the round-robin as they locked up the first seed with a 7-2 record, with their only blemishes coming against Norway’s Sjur Loen and Italy’s Andrea Pavani.

“We were pretty lackadaisical in that part of the tournament,” Hackner said. “It wasn’t like it is now at the worlds where every opponent is going to be tough. Back then, we knew for half our matchups that all we had to do was show up, play our game and we were going to win.

“It was a lot like the Brier in a way where we tuned up our game for the big teams and keyed in on the playoffs.”

The team did just that in the semifinal with a 5-3 win over Sweden’s Sören Grahan, who had just won the world junior curling championship two weeks earlier in Fredericton, N.B.

In the final, they raced out to a 5-1 lead through four ends and withstood a late rally from defending champion Jürg Tanner of Switzerland on their way to a 9-7 triumph and the 14th world title for Canada.

“We had played the greatest game of our lives in the semifinal to beat Sweden but we almost let it slip away there in the final against Tanner,” Lang said. “Al made a real nice draw to the button to win it and it was a moment that I’ll never forget.”

While they had received a hero’s welcome when they returned home after winning the Brier, it was nothing compared to what the people of Thunder Bay had in store for the rink when they came back as world champions.

“There had been a good-sized gathering at the airport when we got back from Brandon and there was a nice reception at the (Fort William) Curling Club, so we were expecting more of the same after winning the Silver Broom,” Hackner said.

“We were blown away by the reception that we got. You couldn’t squeeze another person into the airport. Then we went into a limo that had an open roof on it and we all took turns waving to the people at every single intersection. The police were stopping traffic and there must have been 200 to 300 people at every stop waving back at us.

“We thought that winning a world championship was pretty cool, but when we saw the response from everyone in Thunder Bay … we all realized that this was something pretty big.”

Post-Brier Hangover

Unlike today, when the Tim Hortons Brier and Scotties Tournament of Hearts champions automatically return to the following year’s event at Team Canada, the Hackner rink went straight back to the provincial playdowns process.

However, they didn’t even get a chance to defend their Northern Ontario crown.

In fact, the reigning world champions were knocked out in the club playdowns, which came after they had spent the first half of the season travelling all over North America and Europe to compete in events.

“There was a little bit of burnout for sure,” Lang said. “In those days, you didn’t win anything from the Brier … certainly not a penny, but what we did get out of it was invitations to so many great competitions where the host curling clubs would pay your way over.

“It was really hard to say no to those things, but we weren’t ready for it. We were exhausted after five weeks because we didn’t realize how tough it was to be away from home and trying to catch up on everything. By the time we got back for playdowns, we were done.”

The same fate befell Giles in British Columbia as the 1982 Brier runner-up was eliminated from the provincial hunt early.

“I guess it might have been a bit of a post-Brier hangover,” Giles said. “We might have won the odd bonspiel or something that year, but that was about it.”

The only member of the podium at the Keystone Centre to even make it to the provincials was Mel Logan and his rink from Souris.

Logan — who curled with Doug Armour at third, Lloyd Lang at second and Allan Granger at lead — was the third overall seed for 1983 Labatt Tankard in Winnipeg but saw his run at a repeat end early following back-to-back losses to Marcel Rivard and Orest Meleschuk.

“I had heard some people say ‘Well, those guys won’t win much next year because everyone will be laying and waiting for them,’ but we started off just as strong as ever in the fall of 1982,” Logan said. “In fact, I think we won three of the first four cashspiels that we entered.”

“We just didn’t curl that well at the provincials and we didn’t last long as a result,” Armour added. “We played three games and that was it.”

While Giles and Logan wouldn’t skip another rink to the Brier, the experience they had in Brandon was one they’ll never forget.

“Several people have come up to me and said ‘Well, you didn’t get a trip out of it,’” Logan said. “I tell them, ‘I don’t care about that. I can go on a trip anytime. You don’t get to play in the Brier very often.’”

“It still brings a lot of good feelings to this day,” added Giles, who is having a 40th-anniversary get-together this summer with teammates Greg Monkman, Al Roemer and his brother Brad.

“The purple heart meant everything. It’s a lot like the Green Jacket in golf (which is given to the winner of The Masters). Getting to the Brier back then was an incredible opportunity as it was a true Canadian championship. You got to meet so many great people from across the country.”

The Iceman Cometh Again

The 1983-84 season brought the same results for Hackner’s quartet, as they missed out on a spot in the Northern Ontario provincials following a lopsided 11-4 loss to Brian Aplund’s Kenora rink at the regional playdowns.

Soon after, Hackner, Lang, Nicol and Kennedy went their separate ways.

“We had reached that pinnacle and there wasn’t a lot of heart to get back there with that crew,” Lang said. “It just became more work than pleasure and it was hard personally to make that commitment to do it again. The desire with that team wasn’t there.”

During the spring of 1984, Hackner and Lang attended the Air Canada Silver Broom in Duluth, Minn., and started talking about making another run at the top.

“I remember us saying ‘You know, we might be able to do this again,’” Lang said. “Our careers weren’t necessarily over by any means.

“So we threw together a new lineup with Pat (Perroud at lead) and Ian (Tetley at second) for the next season. We thought it was going to be a project where it would take a few years to get going.”

Instead, the first-year rink would reach the top of the mountain as they captured the Labatt Brier in Moncton, N.B. and followed that up with a world title in Glasgow, Scotland.

That run was highlighted by a shot made by Hackner in the 10th end of the Brier final against Pat Ryan’s Alberta rink, which had run the table to that point of the tournament.

Down 5-3 and facing two with his last, Hackner made a very thin in-off double takeout to tie things up and force an extra end, where he stole another point when Ryan’s final draw was heavy.

His game-tying heroics would later be known as ‘The Hackner Double’ and is still considered to be one of the greatest shots in the history of curling.

“That year was tough,” Hackner said. “There were at least 10 times when we walked out on the ice and if we had lost that game … we were done. We just kept pulling out those do-or-die games.

“It was only fitting that the Brier final was like that. We felt like we were the second-best team that week and we had only gotten to the semifinal with a 7-4 record. That doesn’t even get you in the playoffs some years.

“Then in that game against Pat … well everyone knows about that one.”

Although Hackner and Lang were unable to capture another national men’s title — Lang got the closest in 1993 when he skipped a Northern Ontario squad to the semifinal — their place in curling history had long been secured.

“Everything changes when you win a Brier, though it didn’t change my job as a switchman with CN, ” Hackner joked. “They didn’t care if I had won or not.

“Being a two-time Brier and world champion has opened up some doors here and there and I’m still getting opportunities from it. In fact, I was down in Las Vegas earlier this year (with winners of the Everest Curling Club and Senior Championships) with Randy Ferbey, Jennifer Jones and that whole gang. It’s pretty cool to still be included in things like that.”

The feelings that came with the 1982 Brier triumph came rushing back to Lang in 2016 when he returned to Brandon for the Canada Cup of Curling as a member of Curling Canada’s high-performance coaching program.

“I became a rink rat when I was in Grade 9 and it quickly became my goal in life to do well in this game,” Lang said. “At that point, I never dreamed about winning a Brier … I just wanted the chance to play in it.

“To be able to win a Brier was just extraordinary and my memories of Brandon are something that I always cherish. Not everyone gets to experience that and I’m extremely fortunate and thankful to have done that with my teammates. We had a darn good team.”

A Centre of Curling

By all accounts, the city of Brandon did an outstanding job as the host of the 1982 Labatt Brier.

Not only did the event turn a profit, but it became the first-ever Canadian men’s curling championship to record an attendance figure of over 100,000.

A total of 106,394 fans made their way into the Keystone Centre during the week, which broke the previous mark of 93,185 that had been set in Calgary two years earlier.

That record stood until 1989 when Saskatoon had 151,538 spectators file into the recently opened Saskatchewan Place.

When asked what made the event such a success, host committee chairman Don Pottinger pointed to the people of Western Manitoba.

“The rink only held 5,000, but we had 1,000 volunteers,” Pottinger said. “They each had a job to do and they liked what they did. There was a lack of bickering in the group and the harmony among everyone was impressive to see.

“All of us behind the scenes loved curling and we were so focussed on making this the best Brier ever. We didn’t get to see as many games as we otherwise would have … but we sure didn’t miss much.”

The 1982 Brier also set the stage for a bevy of national curling events to come to Brandon.

From 1988 to 2003, the Keystone Centre hosted a pair of Scott Tournament of Hearts, the TSN Skins Game, the Canadian Mixed Curling Championship, the World Curling Championships, the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials and the Grand Slam of Curling’s Canadian Open.

“From a straight pragmatic standpoint, it’s a great place to have a curling event,” Pottinger said. “If you announce that a big competition is going to be in Brandon, it’s going to get a lot of support, no matter what sport it is.”

Surprisingly, the Brier itself didn’t come back to Brandon until 2019, when Kevin Koe captured his fourth title by defeating Brendan Bottcher in the final.

Resby Coutts, who is the vice president of the Manitoba Curling Hall of Fame, thinks there are a couple of reasons why it took so long for the event to return.

“I think it’s fair to say that when you have three major events (the Scott Tournament of Hearts in 1993, the World Curling Championships in 1995 and the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials in 1997) over the course of a five-year span, it’s going to create some burnout among those that are involved in organizing those events locally,” Coutts said.

“Plus, there was also a time where the Brier was going to major arenas only. There was a stretch where you’d get over 200,000 people in Saskatoon for a week and nearly 250,000 people in Edmonton or Calgary. As a result of that, an arena the size of Brandon’s was not going to be considered.”

While it’s been 40 years since the Keystone Centre was jammed to watch Al Hackner’s rink lift the Labatt Brier tankard, the week is one that still stands out for those that were a part of it.

“That Brier is right up there for anything the Wheat Kings and the Bobcats men’s basketball team have accomplished,” said Saskatoon Blades announcer Les Lazaruk, who was the sports director at CKLQ at the time.

“Brandon turned out to be the little town that proved they could host a major event like that and I’m sure they’ll do it again whenever it comes back there.”

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