McEwen: I’m really proud of how we turned this around
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Mike McEwen is heading back to his home in Winnipeg with his head held high after a trying season that gave him doubts at times about his ability to compete with the game’s best.
The Ontario skip and his team of third Ryan Fry, second Brent Laing and lead Joey Hart were ousted from the Tim Hortons Brier Saturday afternoon after a 6-3 loss to Wild Card 1’s Team Brendan Bottcher in the 3 vs. 4-page playoff.
“I’m proud of us,” McEwen told the media following the loss at Budweiser Gardens. “We let it all hang out there and played well. Nothing to be ashamed about.”
Bottcher’s team out of The Glencoe Club in Calgary – also featuring third Marc Kennedy, second Brett Gallant and lead Ben Hebert – were a well-oiled machine in the game, shooting a collective 89 per cent with their skip throwing 91 per cent.
“I really feel like in the last couple days we’ve been ramping up, playing great,” said Bottcher, who won the first and only Brier of his career in 2021. “Even in the game last night, that was one of our best games of the week. So, keep that up and hopefully play a couple good games tomorrow and we’ll see how we do.”
Wild Card 1 scored the game’s lone deuce in the sixth end, proving to be the difference.
Team McEwen shot 87 per cent in the loss and were outplayed in three of the four positions, aside from the veteran Laing, who shot 94 per cent.
McEwen, 42, always seemed to have his back against the wall on Saturday as he constantly faced difficult shots just to stay in the game. Ontario almost scored a game-tying deuce in the seventh when McEwen just missed executing on a long angle raise.
“If I’m a millimetre thicker or thinner, I make that kind of crazy one to tie the game,” said McEwen of the shot attempt. “Where I hit it, it just popped enough that it wasn’t for two. But they put on a hitting clinic. Not too often you see a team convert that many runs and doubles.”
They were forced to settle for another single and were never able to catch up to Team Bottcher with the nail in the coffin coming with a steal of one in the ninth end.
McEwen shot a game-low 76 per cent in the loss.
“We didn’t quite have the crazy ending that we would have liked, but just to play in this atmosphere and put on a show for the crowd this week,” remarked McEwen. “We were entertaining. I loved the atmosphere and everything and about it.”
The story of Team McEwen’s 2022-23 curling season and their improbable run at the London Brier is somewhat remarkable.
McEwen, a lifelong Manitoba resident and curler, found a team in Ontario this season as an import after his previous rink from his home province disbanded.
The early returns in the fall were not promising as Team McEwen found themselves with a 17-19 record heading into the Christmas break.
A bold move was made just over a week before the Ontario Tankard in January with the team making the difficult decision to cut lead Jonathan Beuk in favour of Hart. They also brought aboard Hart’s father, Richard, who won a Brier Tankard, world championship and an Olympic silver medal in his playing career, as the team’s coach.
The rink out of Royal Canadian Curling Club in Toronto managed to find a spark at playdowns to win the provincial crown and advance to the Canadian men’s curling championship as the home team.
At the Brier, Team McEwen posted a strong 6-2 round robin record before beating Alberta’s Team Kevin Koe in a page-qualifier thriller Friday afternoon that came down to the very last shot.
“You’ve got to put things in perspective. We were in the grave before Christmas. [We] pretty much wrote ourselves off and everybody else had wrote us off and here we are, final four in Canada,” McEwen said on Saturday. “I’m really proud of how we turned this around. That’s a story in itself.”
McEwen says he questioned whether he still “had it” at some low points during this curling campaign, but has regained his confidence, thanks in part to his vice’s support.
“I really thought that I didn’t have it anymore,” McEwen said earlier this week on the team’s early season struggles. “I didn’t have that fire in me to execute at this level. Ryan [Fry] was always in my corner. He was unwavering and it just feels good to have that belief again.”
This was McEwen’s first appearance in the page playoffs at the Brier since 2017 in St. John’s, Nfld.
Bottcher and company advanced to Sunday afternoon’s semi-final with the win and will play Manitoba's Team Matt Dunstone, who lost to Canada's Team Brad Gushue in the 1 vs. 2-page playoff Saturday night.