Crushed by the king
Martin shakes hands with Ferbey after 7 ends
By TERRY JONES -- Edmonton Sun
HINTON -- We waited 1,096 days for this?
It was every bit the event it was expected to be. And then it started.
Then a team which has only lost seven games on the Brier trail in the last four seasons kicked the bejabers out of a team which has already lost six this season.
They locked the doors 20 minutes before the first stone was thrown in the Rumble in the Rockies between Randy Ferbey and Kevin Martin. The main parking lot was full at 8 a.m. Only a few seats were empty for the 8:45 opening ceremonies. Fire marshal regulations forced them to close the doors to late-comers long before the 9:45 start.
But less than two hours later, when all the smoke had cleared except for the stuff coming out of the pulp mill, it looked like what maybe the stats suggest it should look like.
"It was wonderful," said Martin of the environment. "Too bad about the game."
Ferbey's rink, the first team to ever win three Briers in a row, thumped two-time Brier winner and Olympic silver medallist Kevin Martin 7-2 in the highly hyped opener of the Alberta curling Championships here yesterday.
"It's like you said, 'We waited three years for this?' " Ferbey quoted my line to a passing team-mate as they headed to the locker-room after the match we waited three years to watch turned into a mismatch.
The last time Ferbey played Martin on the Brier trail was in the provincial final on the way to his first Brier win in 2001.
A PERFECT DAY
With a 7-4 win over Trenton McQuarrie in the second draw here yesterday, Ferbey goes into today with a 2-0 record in the eight-team round-robin event.
Ferbey and his rink of Dave Nedohin, Scott Pfeifer and Marcel Rocque now have a 21-game winning streak at the provincials and an overall record of 23-1 in the last four years. Ferbey was 10-1 to get here, while Martin was 15-5.
Ferbey and mates were enjoying the moment after all the "asterisk" talk from Martin and the bunch who boycotted the Brier the last two years, although making sure to let everybody know they weren't making much of it in terms of the big picture. If this is about validation for Ferbey, who won his last two Briers without having to take on Martin, that won't come until the final Sunday. There, and at the Brier in Saskatoon.
"We don't have any illusions that this game did anything but get us off on the right foot. We've been here before," said Ferbey.
Martin, who came up seriously short on a draw in the third end to allow Ferbey to steal one, shook hands after giving up four more in the seventh.
"We didn't want to show them up," Martin said, trying to make fun of what happened. "We didn't. My mistake on three turned out to be huge," he said of failing to bite on the eight-foot.
After that he was chasing the game.
"When you're down 3-2 and they have hammer, you have to gamble. And when you gamble, that's the way it goes."
Martin said the loss doesn't bother him but the way they played does.
"You need to go 5-2 to get through to the playoffs, so that's there. But curling better would be good," said Martin who won his second game 9-1 over Gene Hammon, the Red Willow farmer who was bombed 15-1 in a five-end laugher for openers.
Nedohin, who outcurled Martin 85% to 83%, said his three-in-a-row Brier glory gang came in believing it was theirs to win.
YA GOTTA BELIEVE
"We believed if we played well we'd win the game," he said. "It was a very relaxed game. We were very much at ease."
It was not the case the night before when the two rinks, who don't much like each other at the best of times, ended up chirping at each other.
"It was a mixup when we started throwing for the hammer," Nedohin said of who would have last-rock advantage in the opener.
"Kevin said 'let's start now' and Don Bartlett threw to the back of the 12-foot. But Bartlett, Carter Rycroft and Don Walchuk hadn't heard him say it was starting and ... well, they took the rock away and Kevin asked, 'Do you think we're cheating?' It was something that should have been in the hands of the officials, not the curlers."
Martin ended up with last-rock advantage for the game and the two rinks showed up with the incident behind them.
"We have lots of problems off the ice, but we have a lot of respect on the ice," said Ferbey. "They were a little off today. Our front end beat up on their front end pretty good. But they'll rebound."
There'll be another round.
