Brad Gushue ready to put ‘forgettable’ 2016 behind him
NORTH BATTLEFORD, Sask. — Brad Gushue is looking forward to putting the past 14 months in his rear-view mirror as he revs up for an action-packed 2017.
It’s been a rollercoaster of highs and lows for the St. John’s, N.L., native. Gushue sustained a head injury when he accidentally fell face-first onto the ice at the Masters in late 2015 and charged right back to win the National in his next event. In 2016 he sustained a heartbreaking loss in the Brier final, captured the Elite 10 and the Players’ Championship titles and earned the Rogers Grand Slam Cup, missed the first-half of this season due to a hip/groin issue and finally returned to the ice last month at the Boost National.
Gushue said the best word to describe the stretch has been “forgettable.”
“There’s some positive things winning the Elite 10 and the Players’ Championship but some forgettable moments obviously with the fall and really the last eight months dealing with this hip and groin issue,” Gushue said Tuesday before the start of the Meridian Canadian Open. “The highs were nice but the lows have certainly been low. In the last 14 months I’ve probably had some of the more low points in my curling career.
“Not being able to curl this fall was really tough and not knowing when I’d get back on the ice. Even now trying to get stronger it’s a frustrating process. I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be but it is improving just at a snail’s pace. It’s been tough and when you go back to the fall that messed me up for quite a while and I’m looking forward to actually getting back and curling 100 percent healthy and 100 percent comfortable. I miss that.”
It’s shaping up for a potentially huge year for Gushue with his hometown hosting the Brier in March and the Olympic Trials — to determine Canada’s reps at the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea — closing out the calendar in December in Ottawa.
Gushue admitted the thrill of a hometown Brier hasn’t really sunk in too much as he’s been a little preoccupied with his own rehab process.
“It’s an exciting opportunity to have a Brier in your hometown. It’s really nice and something I’ve never experienced so it’s new to me,” Gushue said. “I haven’t really had an opportunity to enjoy the fact that it is coming because I’ve been so focused on getting stronger and getting back to where I need to be.”
Gushue isn’t getting too far ahead of himself taking it one step at a time as his team still has to win their provincial playdowns later this month in order to represent Newfoundland and Labrador on home ice.
“I want to get there so if we’re fortunate enough to win our provincials in a few weeks time I think then I can reflect back and look forward to it but right now we still don’t know if we’re even going to be there,” Gushue said. “It’s hard to look forward to it as much as you’d like to because I don’t know if we’re going to be playing in it. If I’m not playing then I’m not going to be looking forward to it at all; it’s going to be a pretty frustrating week. Certainly if we get the chance to play it’s going to be a week I’ll probably never forget.”
With Gushue on the DL earlier this season, the team relied on spares Adam Spencer, Charley Thomas and Pat Simmons to fill in at third while regular vice skip Mark Nichols moved up to skip. Second Brett Gallant and lead Geoff Walker remained in their spots.
Team Gushue never missed the playoffs during their skip’s absence and is ranked No. 2 on the Canadian Team Ranking System (CTRS) behind Winnipeg’s Reid Carruthers, who has already qualified for the Olympic Trials by winning the Canada Cup. Gushue believes his team is in good standing to clinch an Olympic Trials spot via CTRS points either based on this season or an accumulation of the past two.
“We’re fortunate enough we can look forward to the Trials because I think from a points perspective I’m not sure we can get caught in the two-year spot now that Reid has won his spot through the Canada Cup. We can look forward to that and that’s going to be exciting,” Gushue said. “I’m a whole lot more confident after this season with the summer I can get this back to where it needs to be and hopefully next season be 100 percent ready and strong to play and get back to where I said I wanted to be, which is healthy and comfortable. I certainly have an optimistic view of 2017 and really happy to put 2016 behind me.”
You can’t blame Gushue, the 2006 Olympic gold medallist, for being a bit cautious in his approach as he came up short qualifying for the past two Olympic Trials.
“We would have to finish the season not earning any points and someone like John Epping would have to go on a crazy run for the rest of the season,” Gushue said. “It can certainly happen but even with that I think we would probably have enough to even get one of the one-year spots.
“It really would have to be something crazy for us not to get a spot but I’ve been through this before and I’ve been on the outside looking in a couple times where we probably should have been in there and we weren’t so you don’t want to take it for granted. I feel a whole lot more comfortable about that than I do looking ahead to the Brier and playing in that because that could come down to one game on what could be questionable ice so you never know. I don’t want to look too far ahead to the Brier.”