By John Cullen

Mercenaries have been around since Greek and Roman times, as far back as 450 B.C. They were soldiers who, rather than fight for any national or political cause, fought as a private entity for whoever would pay them the most money. We believe curling in some form has been around for over 500 years and in the last century, once curlers were able to compete for national and world championships and Olympic medals, they stayed within their national lines. They competed for themselves, sure, but they also competed for their country, and money didn’t always matter.

Now, for the first time ever, that might be changing. Since the introduction of curling at the Winter Olympics in 1998, the end of an Olympic quadrennial in curling has marked a massive shift. Curlers scramble to form new lineups. Aging curlers retire. Even young ones do, too. It’s an inflection point, but one that has always seen curlers form within certain boundaries.

For many curlers, that has meant staying and competing within one’s country. In Canada, it often means having to stay within — or move to — a singular province or territory.

For Cameron Bryce and his new fivesome of curlers from across the globe, those boundaries won’t matter to them for the upcoming season, and they’ll become perhaps curling’s first-ever “mercenary” team. If they’re not the first, they’re certainly the most accomplished, with plans to play as busy a schedule as anyone else, to climb the World Curling Tour rankings, and to earn as much money as possible.

Bryce and his new team, made up of Karsten Sturmay, Kerr Drummond, Scott Hyslop and Robin McCall, all come to the team with pretty solid curling resumés. Bryce was ranked as high as 15th in the world just two seasons ago, and finished this year 26th, winning two events in Basel, Switzerland, and Jönköping, Sweden. He’s also a former Scottish junior champion. Sturmay won a silver medal at the Winter Universiade for Canada in 2019 and competed in a Brier as a skip. Drummond has played at the last three Briers, representing Alberta and the Yukon, and won a world junior silver medal back in 2010. Hyslop is a former world junior champion.

We have never seen a team of curlers this accomplished join forces across national borders, and for Bryce, he sees it as an opportunity to expand both what is possible for himself and what is possible within curling.

“We haven’t been in the British Curling program for a few years now, which has allowed us free rein to do what we want with regards to training and team set-up,” Bryce said via telephone. “It allows us 100 per cent control of the team, but the downside of that is being outside of the program means we get no funding from British Curling and essentially guarantees that we’ve given up any potential of representing Scotland internationally.

"Without that option, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

While Bryce has played in several Grand Slams and won his fair share of World Curling Tour events, he has long been stuck behind a two-headed dragon in Scotland, with reigning Olympic silver medallist Bruce Mouat spending a good portion of this quadrennial ranked No. 1 in the world, and world bronze medallist Ross Whyte just behind. With Kyle Waddell’s emergence this season as the clear No. 3 in Scotland, Bryce could see the writing on the wall, and something he had off-handedly mentioned to a few curlers over the last year began to come into focus.

“It was actually Kerr who called me and pitched me on the idea after I was joking with him at the Red Deer event this past fall that we should do it,” Bryce explained. “He was exploring some options in Canada, and once some of those didn’t work out, we started talking more seriously about this.”

Bryce also knew that Duncan Menzies, a Scot he played with for the past few seasons, was thinking about stepping back from competitive play, and they had an ace in the hole in Sturmay, who left Canada for England several years ago and spared for Bryce’s team a few times over the last two seasons. That got them to a place where a five-man team across country lines made sense.

Bryce said that when Sturmay first moved across the pond, he was only looking to play a couple of European events per season and reached out as a potential spare. Now, Bryce says that Sturmay “has fully caught the bug again” and will be playing the full complement of events with Team Bryce this season.

Having Drummond based in Canada and able to play Canadian events will allow either Hyslop or McCall to sit out some transatlantic flights, and with Drummond having two young children and his wife at home in Alberta, it allows him to not have to travel the other way either.

While Drummond lives in Canada, he is Scottish by birth and would be available to play in Scottish nationals if he so chose, as Sturmay is the only team member of the five without Scottish citizenship. However, Bryce explained that the Scottish nationals would essentially function as an “open tournament” for the team, as even winning it would have no impact on their ability to represent Scotland at a world championship. Thus, the team hasn’t yet decided if they will play in it.

They’ve also checked and if they did play in the Scottish nationals, they believe it wouldn’t affect Drummond’s ability to still play in the Brier and represent Canada were he to win it. Bryce said that while Drummond doesn’t have any immediate plans to join up with a Canadian team, keeping that eligibility certainly helped to make this mercenary team a reality.

And with a bit of a grin audible in his voice, Bryce also noted that having a couple of Canadians on the team might not hurt from a sponsorship perspective either.

“It’s been a bit difficult in Scotland to get sponsors, but you add a couple Canadians and maybe that changes who could be interested in working with the team," he said. "It’s definitely something we’ve talked about.”

So why is now the right time for the team to strike out on their own, unbound by regional borders? Bryce believes it’s a combination of factors.

“Seeing Rock League get off the ground this season, it definitely made the idea grow in the minds of me and the guys," he said. "The idea that you could put a great team together to compete on tour, maybe win some events, win some money, and then potentially catch the eye of Rock League and start curling professionally made the idea a bit more realistic.

“But I don’t think it’s just Rock League. I think there have been curlers over the years who have thought about doing something like this, but they were either too tied into a national curling federation with funding, or they were just afraid of change. But I believe that sometimes if you close one door, others might open.”

As an example of this, the 30-year-old Bryce pointed to his 24-year-old teammate, Hyslop. While Bryce has, at least for now, given up on the idea that he will represent Scotland again, he thinks this could be a path back to recognition for his younger teammate, who won the world juniors in 2022 representing Scotland but has had a hard time cracking the lineups of the top men’s teams in the country.

“There’s nothing to say that Scott couldn’t eventually represent Scotland again,” Bryce said. “It’s not just about money or getting noticed by Rock League. What if we have a great season or couple of seasons and then British Curling thinks, 'Hey, we have a great young player here,' and bring him back into the fold? Anything is possible.”

Bryce has also thought about how this could potentially be a positive change for players who are playing in some of the countries with fewer curlers. Even though his team is made up of players from curling powers like Canada and Scotland, it could also be a model to follow as some of the less traditional curling powers with small player pools gain a footing on the world stage.

“I think Harri Lill is a great example,” Bryce pointed out. “He’s a great mixed doubles player in Estonia, but that’s a smaller curling country. You might not be able to find three other great players there to make up a competitive men’s team. Could this be a path for him, where he plays mixed doubles for Estonia, but then plays on the tour with a team made up of players from four different countries?

"In other sports, we don’t think twice about players joining up from different national backgrounds on club teams, and I don’t know why curling would be any different.”

Before Bryce had even announced his team, with the changing nature of the game, and hearing some whispers behind the scenes this might happen, I spoke to several top curlers from different countries about the likelihood of a mercenary team forming. None said they would be surprised if it happened. Some even expressed to me that perhaps they’d consider it down the line.

Bryce told me himself that when he started telling curlers about his idea, a few told him they wished they could do it.

“People are always hesitant to be the first to do something," he said. "Hopefully, we can be the guinea pig.”

Does he think this will eventually lead to players copying him and mercenary teams becoming more common?

“I think it’ll depend on how well we do,” Bryce said with a laugh.