ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — Mike McEwen knew his Saskatoon-based squad would be walking into the lion’s den Thursday night at the Kioti National, so why not embrace the heel role?
McEwen faced St. John’s own Brad Gushue, who brought along roughly 6,000 of his closest friends to pack the Mary Brown’s Centre.
The crowd was already fired up, clapping and stomping along during practice as traditional Newfoundland folk songs played while they waited to watch their modern-day folk hero play. Once the warmups commenced, that was McEwen and his teammates’ cue to duck off the ice. As the glass shattered and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s theme music hit, Team McEwen returned with Colton Flasch draped in the Saskatchewan flag and twins Kevin and Dan Marsh raising their decorated ugly sticks.
It was all played to laughs as attention then turned to the team that needed no introduction — although there was one, you just couldn’t hear MC Robbie Doherty through the roar of the capacity crowd.
That more than set the tone for an electric evening and one that McEwen emerged victorious over the home side in an intense 4-3 battle.
“We did a bit of planning and wanted to kinda come out as the bad boys,” McEwen said with a laugh. “Team Gushue were good sports. They knew we were going to do something a little fun.
“We’ve got to do more of that. There are tons of rivalries out here and obviously, Brad and us have a pretty good one going on. Hey, if we go back to Saskatchewan for a Slam, they can come out to something to taunt us. That was just fun to do that, and oh, what a building to win in and it’s only going to build come the weekend. This was a big win for us.”
McEwen knew what to expect as he had faced Gushue on home ice during the 2017 Brier and won that game as well.
“Honestly, Thursday night at a Slam, it felt like a national championship playoff game in there,” McEwen said. “When we were practising, I was like, oh boy. The East Coast songs are playing and the crowd is into it. I was like, if we let the crowd get into this, we’re in trouble.”
The two skips have faced off since they were teenagers in juniors and Thursday’s contest was their 61st meeting in men’s play. McEwen holds the advantage 34-27 all-time and has had Gushue’s number this season at 4-0.
Gushue’s most recent win over McEwen was a big one, though last season in the Brier final to win a third consecutive Canadian men’s championship and a record sixth as a skip.
“For a lot of the fans in the building, I think we’re a close second to Brad, as close as you can, because I’ve been a guy my entire career who keeps getting knocked out, keeps getting back up, knocked down, back up, back up, back up and I’m not going away,” McEwen said. “Maybe Brad’s like: ‘Why won’t this guy go away?’ I’m here, I’m just an annoying buzzing bee or wasp. I won’t go away and it’s fun for fans who really give us some love too, because they see how hard we’re working.
“We’re going to try and challenge him as hard as we can and there are some other Canadian teams doing the same thing. I think this is awesome. This is going to build as we head to March and April for the Players’ Championship. We’ve got some really good things going on with the heated battles of the best Canadian teams. Never mind the world stuff. We’ve got a lot of cool things going on, let’s keep that going, let’s build the intensity as we go through the season.”
Winning the draw-to-the-button shootout to start proved to be key for McEwen as it allowed him to dictate the play and never trail in the match.
After three consecutive blanks to start, the crowd started to dial back and grow a bit restless for some offence. Gushue ensured there wouldn’t be a fourth set of bagels on the board as he sat at least two counters, with a third one too close enough for comfort, that forced McEwen into making an angle raise bump for one point.
“It wasn’t my intention to get a bunch of blanks in a row, but I was thinking maybe we can lull the crowd a little bit, just kind of take the air out of the building, so that was actually nice,” McEwen said. “Not that I don’t want a rowdy crowd, because that’s fun to play in, but it was nice to let things settle and control the game for a while.
“I think if the crowd was getting into Brad’s team making a whole bunch of shots early, we were going to be in trouble. They’re a team that can feed off of that too, so that was nice. Let them settle, lull them not to sleep but just let things die down a bit. I thought we executed our game plan really well and we could do that because we had hammer.”
The tables were turned in the fifth end after Gushue rubbed off a guard with his first skip stone. That allowed McEwen to add another log to the fire, drawing in to sit four and Gushue had to make a raise of his own to score the equalizing single.
McEwen scored a deuce in the sixth to pull ahead 3-1 as his raise takeout just grazed his stone as the back end of the 12-foot circle to remain in the rings.
A couple of mistakes in the seventh had McEwen in trouble until he bailed his team out with a clutch cross-house double to limit the damage.
Gushue drew for a tying two points, and landed on the lid to boot, as the crowd erupted and even a hockey horn went off.
Still, that put McEwen right where he wanted to be — holding the hammer coming home — and he just had to chip out Gushue’s shot rock while avoiding his stone right behind it in the house to score the winning point.
“We played well, but we also got some breaks and made some uncharacteristic misses,” McEwen said. “We didn’t string enough shots together that I would have liked to see. We had to grind pretty hard. There were opportunities out there and I would like to see us string a few more together because Brad had us sweating, especially in the seventh end. If he makes a really good one, I’m going to have a hard time. He’s probably going to get three and take the lead then the building erupts.
“We can do better. We did get fortunate a handful of times, got lucky and made something, maybe a half shot the other way that we didn’t call, so we can be better. We’ll take the win, played well enough to win, but if we play Brad later in the week, we’re going to have to be even sharper.”
The crowd has shown its support for all curlers this week and McEwen remained at ice level long after the game had finished, even after Team Gushue had left, to sign autographs and take selfies with fans.
McEwen moved to a 3-0 record in the tournament to punch a playoff ticket and handed Gushue his first loss of the week. After falling in the tiebreaker stage during the Co-op Canadian Open earlier this month, McEwen was relieved he wouldn’t have to worry about that route.
“Thank goodness. We didn’t fare so well last time in that, so that was a great feeling,” McEwen said. “We kind of had, I don’t want to say a slump, but we had a two-event (lull) in Penticton and the last Grand Slam in Nisku we didn’t make it through. We just had to sit down and really get back to how we plan out games, sticking to more of a system. We got going with the flow and maybe just not being the team we can be and sticking to our style. We were getting caught in some stuff and we weren’t performing.
“This is nice. This is a reset for us and I think it shows. … We got hammer in all three games and were able to put our game plan into play versus us chasing. I think it’s fair to say in the last Grand Slam, we were doing some chasing. It was a little bit ugly. These are three really solid games for us.”
Gushue (2-1) will have another chance to qualify Friday when he takes on Switzerland’s Team Marco Hösli (1-2). McEwen will look to fine-tune things against former teammate and longtime friend Reid Carruthers (1-2).
“I think the crowd is going to be really into it because Brad’s going to need to win tomorrow night,” McEwen said. “It’s going to be loud and now you’re not going to know when the building is going to erupt necessarily. You could be in the hack, so it’s going to be a whole other challenge. I lived through that through the St. John’s Brier. We’ll have to have hand signals and things ready.
“Just to be able to play in a Friday night building in the environment tomorrow, it doesn’t get much better than that. I’m excited.”
Hösli will be hungry for another win to stay in contention after defeating Carruthers’s Winnipeg club 8-3 on the adjacent sheet.
Team Michael Brunner (1-2) also got in the win column with a 6-5 decision against Switzerland’s Team Yannick Schwaller (0-3) in an all-Swiss showdown.
Yannick Schwaller is out of the lineup after undergoing knee surgery. His brother, Kim Schwaller, is filling in at second with Sven Michel moving up to throw third and skip the squad.
Scotland’s Team Ross Whyte (3-0) also qualified for the quarterfinals with a 9-5 victory over Team Marc Muskatewitz of Germany. Muskatewitz is making his top-tier Grand Slam of Curling debut this week. However, his team is entering on a high, having won the gold medal at the European Championships last week.
“That was a tough game out there,” Whyte said. “Those boys have been in good form all the last two weeks. They’ve been having a great year and then these last two weeks have really turned on, so we knew with a great crowd they’d come out firing and they certainly did.”
Whyte kept pace though, and held the hammer tied coming home as he made a sizzling raise double takeout to score four points.
“We could see just enough, we just had to curl a touch by the guard to make that run double,” Whyte said. “It was always there for two but to get the four points was a big boost to close out the game.”
The final four round-robin draws are set for Friday beginning with Draw 13 at 8:30 a.m. NT / 7 a.m. ET.
Broadcast coverage resumes on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+ resumes at noon NT / 10:30 a.m. ET.
The Kioti National is the third Grand Slam of Curling event of the season featuring 16 of the top men’s teams and 16 of the top women’s teams from around the world. … Round-robin play runs through to Friday. The top eight teams in both divisions advance to Saturday’s quarterfinals. If necessary, one tiebreaker draw will be played Saturday morning to determine the final playoff spots. … The semifinals are also scheduled for Saturday with both finals on tap Sunday.