1999 Brier
SLAM! Sports
SLAM! Curling
1999 BRIER
ON THE ROCKS
INTERACTIVE
ALSO ON SLAM!
B.C. boys out of steam
Loss to P.E.I. drops Gretzinger rink to 5-4
Coulda used some sleep. Shoulda counted five in the seventh. Woulda been sitting pretty at 6-3 heading to today's final two draws of the 1999 Labatt Brier.
Alas, it was not to be for Bert Gretzinger and his British Columbia rink.
Gretzinger's gang was ambushed 6-5 by Robert Campbell of Prince Edward Island in Draw 13 yesterday afternoon. The loss dropped B.C.'s record to 5-4 while the win upped P.E.I.'s round-robin log to 3-6.
Tied 5-5 heading home, Campbell used his final rock of the 10th to seal the deal.
Late nights and early mornings are beginning to take their toll on the B.C. skip.
"That's four draws in a row on six hours sleep,'' Gertzinger said. "I guess maybe it kind of caught up to me a little bit. I had a couple of tired throws.
"The boys played not too bad. It definitely wasn't our best effort. Robert's guys played pretty good and Robert himself made just about everything he had to.
"We may not have beat them anyways. He's a good player and he's had a rough Brier. He came out to play and you saw the result.
"(Campbell) was looking at five in the seventh end. He was drawing against five and puts it in the four-foot. If he misses that, the game's over.''
TALKED OUT OF RETIREMENT
After calling it a career two years ago, Gretzinger had barely hung up his slider when former Rick Folk rinkmate Rob Koffski talked him out of retirement.
"Rob used to play for me and played second for us at the '89 Brier,'' Gretzinger related. "He talked me out of retirement a couple of years ago, played with us for a year and then retired. It seemed a bit cruel, actually, but I did pretty good for a sub.''
Pretty good may be an understatement.
Gretzinger waltzed through the Safeway Select with a 6-1 record and defeated defending B.C. champ Greg McAulay in the final to advance to the Brier.
Gretzinger's rink has had trouble getting on a roll this week.
COSTLY LOSSES
The B.C. foursome dropped games to Quebec and New Brunswick to open the round-robin 0-2.
The Lotuslanders then rattled off four straight victories before bowing to Northern Ontario's Scott Patterson in Tuesday's evening draw and watching their record slip to 5-3.
"We fought back from 0-2 and we're playing fine,'' Gretzinger sighed.
"I've always said there's no team out here you can take lightly. If you do, it's suicide.
"We didn't take these guys lightly. We made some sweeping errors that were probably just not sharp on my part. Who knows?
"Robert made a ton of good shots. If you look at the stats, I'm hard pressed to think of more than a half of a shot he might have missed that would have cost him anything.''
With a log jam in the standings, it's crunch time for Gretzinger and Co.
"It's either two wins tomorrow or we go home,'' said Gretzinger, who is making his sixth Brier appearance and first as a skip.
"I thought the ice was a little flatter. We were tracking wide and got off a couple of times.''
It'll be yet another early morning as Gretzinger faces Nova Scotia this morning and Saskatchewan in the afternoon draw.
Gretzinger has his fingers crossed there's no more overnight technical problems with the computerized ice plant at Skyreach Centre like the one which delayed the start of yesterday morning's draw by 45 minutes.
"Getting here early this morning, waiting, playing and not really having time to unwind between games and have something to eat was tough,'' he said.
"My stomach was just churning and gurgling out there from about the seventh end on. It was going 'Feed me! Feed me!' It's going to happen. It just might be something liquid first.''