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HALIFAX — Most great athletes know their statistics.
Many pretend they don’t. But most do.
There’s no pretending with Glenn Howard.
“How many finals you been in now, anyway?” a scribe asked the Ontario skip after practice Saturday preparing for Sunday’s Brier final against Kevin Koe of Alberta.
“Nine,” he said.
“My percentage is not good,” he volunteered.
When it comes to the Brier final, Howard has won three and lost five. No. 9 will be Sunday’s final.
Not good.
And then there was that loss in the Roar of the Rings Olympic trials in Edmonton back in December to Kevin Martin.
Hard to let go
“I don’t think I’ll be over that for over a year. It was devastating not to go to Vancouver,” said the beer store manager from Coldwater, Ont., who won two Briers throwing third rocks for his brother Russ and won the 2007 title as a skip.
Lose this one and he could get labelled.
Which is ridiculous. Three wins in nine trips to the Brier final would only be one half of the stat.
The other is that he’s been to the final nine times out of 12 trips to the grand celebration of Canadiana.
That’s one whale of a percentage.
But imagine if he lost this one?
Would that be a double whammy or what?
“Coming second is not fun,” said Howard. “If we lost this one ... We would not be happy.”
Third Richard Hart hasn’t got the same stats as his skip, although he’s been on board for the last five Briers.
He’s haunted by his own ghosts.
“I definitely have one,” he said.
Hart lost the gold-medal game on Mike Harris’s team at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.
“I felt so sad watching Cheryl Bernard losing the gold-medal game at the Olympics. She’ll end up being like us. In 1998, Sandra Schmirler won the gold and we ended up with the silver. This year Kevin Martin wins the gold and Bernard ended up with the silver. It’s like, ‘And oh, and here they are, too.’ Her girls are going to be similar to our guys.”
Hart also remembers four losses in the provincial finals, and the two finals and a semifinal lost in the last five years at this thing.
“It’s easier losing to Kevin Martin,” he said of what happened at the Brier final two years ago. “But we lost two years before that to Jean-Michel Menard in the final when we were heavily favoured. That was tougher.
“We just have to make sure we don’t go into the game thinking ‘Oh (crap), I don’t want to lose another one.’ But I think it is an advantage that we know how much it hurts to lose one and that we don’t want to lose another one.
“And maybe the guys we play will be happy to be there.
“I think we have an advantage in having a great record against them,” he said of Koe’s rink.
“It’s good for us that we’ve beat them a lot and they haven’t figured out how to beat us yet.”
Inspiration
Howard is in position to become the third consecutive skip to go through the Brier undefeated. Martin did it with back-to-back 13-0 runs in the last two years before going undefeated yet again to win the gold medal at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
Losing that fuelled the fire not to lose a game on the Brier path this year for Howard.
“That was such a tough loss in Edmonton. Craig Savill kind of inspired us to go through the province undefeated,” said Howard of the 12-0 record which was required to win Ontario, matching his run in 2007 when he won the Brier and followed with it up with the world championship, again, in Edmonton.
“I put it to the guys to do the same thing here,” he said of not losing a game from start to finish.
Better to aim at being undefeated than to worry about losing another final.
terry.jones@sunmedia.ca