MacDuff hopes Gushue joins him in exclusive curling club

Bob Weeks

TSN Senior Reporter

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Talking with Jack MacDuff is a bit like having a conversation with blender set on pulse. He comes at you with high bursts of energy, laughing, joking and mixing the end of one story into the start of the next.

You don’t so much talk with MacDuff as you do listen, perhaps sneaking a few words in edgewise just to allow him time to reset. It’s always enjoyable and an experience. When you manage to break away, you often do so with sore cheeks from laughing and smiling.

He’s beyond bubbly. Well past cheerful. He’s in a constant state of vivaciousness. There may be some who enjoy life more than he does, but there wouldn’t be many. He is a true bon vivant.

Most of MacDuff’s tales revolve around curling and rightly so. In the long history of the Tim Hortons Brier, there is only one man who knows what it’s like to skip a team from Newfoundland and Labrador to the title.

In 1976, he led his rink of Toby McDonald, Doug Hudson and Ken Templeton to what is still the event’s biggest upset, knocking off the likes of Jim Ursel, Rick Lang and Bernie Sparkes to win the title and set off a celebration like the Rock had never seen before.

When it returned home, the MacDuff squad was toasted, honoured and praised at every turn, with half the celebrants not knowing an in-turn from an out-turn. The skip even had his curling shoes bronzed and put on display at his home club.

“It was quite a time, quite a time,” reflected the skip from his home in Moncton, N.B., where he just celebrated his 67th birthday. “I think everyone in Newfoundland shook my hand at some point.”

With the grand championship headed back to St. John’s for the first time in 45 years, there is a renewed focus on MacDuff, the province’s favourite curling son. Fans in the province are hoping that perhaps MacDuff will finally get some company; that Brad Gushue and his rink of third Mark Nichols, second Brett Gallant and lead Geoff Walker might break through and win a Brier on home ice.

With that possibility tantalizingly close, you would think that MacDuff would be front and centre at the Mile One Centre when the opening rock is thrown. Instead, he’ll be at home, perched in his living room, watching the action on television.

In a cruel twist of fate, one of the most fun-loving, positive people you’ll ever meet, a guy whose slide was as smooth as warm honey, has been suffering with multiple sclerosis. His form of the disease is classified as primary progressive, meaning it hits the body harder as the years advance.

“I’ve had it 25 years so I don’t walk at all,” he said, still sounding cheery. “I have a scooter chair and a wheelchair. I get along and my wife gives me a hand. I get in the car and I go here and there.”

Organizers invited him to attend and play a role in the event that made him a household name in Canada’s most easterly province. But to travel there and take part just isn’t going to happen.

“I just don’t feel good enough to go,” he said of his invitation. “I sound a lot better than I really am. I’d be lucky to be up for three or four hours. They were going to give me tickets and hotel rooms and everything.”

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Newfoundland joined the field at the Brier in 1951 with Tom Hallett’s foursome going 1-9. Over the next 25 years, no team from the Rock won more than four games. On four occasions, they went winless. Most years, they were hapless bottom feeders in the standings.

Perhaps the only claim to fame for the province was that the Newfoundland entry was twice skipped by Bob Cole, the legendary hockey play-by-play man. In 1971, he went a very impressive 4-6, while in 1975, he finished 1-10.

MacDuff made his first appearance at the Brier in 1972, the only other time it was held in Newfoundland. The team had a first-round bye and sat in the stands watching the opening draw. That’s when the university student suddenly felt the fear that he was in way over his head.

“Everywhere I looked someone was making a shot,” MacDuff remembered. “I was 22 years old and nervous as hell. I turned to [my friend] next to me and said, ‘Roger, do you think I can go out there and miss every shot?’ I was scared to death.”

The rink won three games that year and faded back into the tiny curling community in St. John’s to regroup and lick their wounds.

Four years later, MacDuff was back at the Brier, a little more confident but still far from a favourite in the field but that’s when the stars aligned.

The Brier was in Regina that year and each team was assigned a volunteer driver for the week who would chauffeur the boys around in a van. The MacDuff team met its driver at the airport.

“Hi,” he introduced himself. “I’m Sam Richardson.”

This was Sam Richardson of the famed Richardson family that had won four Briers in five years. For the rest of that week, he not only drove the four kids from the Rock, he coached them, cajoled them, pushed them and inspired them.

When they were nervous Richardson calmed them down. When they were feeling low after a loss, he pumped them up. As the week went on, the burly prairie man guided the four east coasters into the final draw, one game away from a miracle (there were no playoffs at that time, the winner of the round robin was declared the champion).

Back in Newfoundland, the province was about to explode. Premier Frank Moores, who was in Montreal on business, called MacDuff and told him: “A lot of people in the province don’t know a thing about curling, but they’re going crazy too.”

The final game was set for Saturday afternoon and there was no way Cole was going to miss it, even though he was preparing for that night’s Montreal Canadiens hockey game.

“I was in Montreal to call a game and I was with the premier, Frank Moores,” recalled Cole, who played with MacDuff at a Canadian Mixed Championship. “We somehow watched the game together.”

The game was against Ontario, a tough matchup but after 10 ends of the scheduled 12, the Newfoundland and Labrador team led by a 9-3 margin. Two ends later, they were Brier champs.

Back on the Rock, the party exploded at the news of the victory. In Montreal, Cole was ecstatic.

“When they won, it was a huge celebration,” he said. “I was handing out cigars at the Forum that night.”

For the unheralded rink from the Atlantic to make it through that field and do what had never been done before – or since – was nothing short of stunning.

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These days, MacDuff spends a great deal of his time fundraising for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. He is consistently the group’s top money man, bringing in more than $66,000 in just the last three years. He even started his own raffle, Ticket for a Cure, which generates about $20,000 a year.

This summer, he’s also planning to raise more money by pushing himself in a wheelchair along the five-kilometre route that is part of The MS Walk. While his own situation isn’t great, he is determined to stay positive. That, says his old third Toby McDonald, is nothing surprising.

“I’m not amazed at his outlook at life,” says McDonald, a lawyer in St. John’s and one of the organizers of this year’s Brier. “He’s always been like that. He makes everybody smile around him. I’m sure in the privacy of his mind it might be different, but you’d never know when you meet him or talk to him.”

“He’s just a remarkable man,” added Cole.

While MacDuff may not be there to cheer on Gushue and his rink in person, he will be pulling hard for another Newfoundland and Labrador team to join him and his rink as winners.

Over the years, he’s chatted with Gushue and the two have talked about a Brier win. But MacDuff knows all he can really offer up are words of encouragement.

“He plays in so many big games, there’s really not a lot I can say to the guy that he hasn’t heard or seen already,” admitted MacDuff. “It’s not like back in the day when we played.”

But for Gushue, who will play in his 14th Brier, those words are important. MacDuff is still as inspirational as ever.

“I’d love to be in that position,” said Gushue, who rocked the Rock himself by winning the 2006 Olympic gold medal in curling. “That’s really what goes through my mind. To win the Brier and obviously it’s a whole lot different now than it was then but still, them winning the Brier and what they experienced when they got home. We got to experience that after the Olympics and to have that again, that would be pretty awesome.”

If Gushue does manage to finally get to the top step of the Brier podium, there’s little doubt it would set off a celebration as only those in that province can do. And somewhere to the west, in his Moncton home, Jack MacDuff will applaud, smile and know exactly what he’s feeling.