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SPECIAL SECTION/CANADA'S TEAM/CURLING | FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4 |
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Heavy Weight Mike Harris, new at winning big, looks to take a historic gold medal By ALLAN MAKI
Now a golf pro from Toronto has to deal with the pressure of being the premier curler in the land. He has even received a letter from his political namesake saying, "Thanks for all the great publicity. I haven't had any for a while." Can Harris (the curler) handle it? "This isn't a problem," he says. "It's fun." Canadians, who have seen their teams win nine men's and women's world titles in the 1990s, are expecting everything to be golden. This might be no problem in the women's event. Regina's Sandra Schmirler, just nine weeks after giving birth to her first child Sara, entered the trials as the favorite and won in convincing fashion. Schmirler, 34, is a three-time Brier and world champion who may be the best women's skip Canada has ever produced. At the Olympics, she says, "there's pressure. But all the teams we'll face we've played before at the Worlds. That helps our preparation." Harris, 30, has experience too--mostly at losing in the clutch. He skipped for Ontario at the 1986 Canadian juniors and the 1989 mixed championship and won neither. He eventually joined forces with Richard Hart, Collin Mitchell and George Karrys to form a quartet that twice made it to the Ontario championship (in 1992 and 1993), only to lose. Harris grew up in Toronto and went to high school in Brampton, where he spent his winters curling and his summers playing golf. His father Bob, a flight planner with Air Canada, and his three younger brothers would sometimes face one another as rivals. "I just loved the game, the strategy," says Harris, who is quiet and analytical by nature. "You have to assume your opponents make their shots. Then you have to make yours." Harris made enough of his shots to take his game to the bonspiel circuit. Then a friend told him about an opening for a golf pro at the GC Invertel, north of Salzburg, and Harris began dividing his time between Canada and Austria. Harris and his teammates had been reunited for only a year when they qualified for the Olympic trials. The team unraveled in 1994, when Harris thought the on-ice tension, especially after the bitter loss in the Ontario championship the year before, was ruining friendships. After two years of curling on different teams, they regrouped. The Olympic trials seemed as good a spot as any for rebonding, especially with attention focused on 1997 Brier champion Kevin Martin of Edmonton. A sportswriter listed the odds on Harris' winning at 100 to 1. After finishing first in round-robin play, Harris faced Martin in the final and beat him 6-5 in 10 ends. He told a national TV audience, "There is a curling God." Reaching the medal round at Nagano will be easy: four of the eight competing teams advance to the play-offs. Winning a medal, let alone gold, will be tougher. Sweden's Peter Lindholm is the defending world champ, and Switzerland's Patrick Huerlimann has made it to a world-championship final (he lost). But Canada will be the country to beat. Harris & Co. have joked that they'd love to claim gold, then retire without ever winning a Brier. If they do, their skip might think of running for political office himself.
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irtually overnight, Mike Harris--no, not the premier of
Ontario--has gone from being the skip who couldn't win the big
one to being the skip who has to win the big one. The big one is
the historic first Olympic gold medal awarded in men's curling,
as well as the defense of Canada's honor as a world power in
sliding 40-lb. stones down a 126-ft. sheet of pebbled ice. This
is a lot to expect from a guy who never won a major event
outside his province until he went to the Olympic trials in
Brandon, Man., last November and beat the best group of entries
his country had ever seen.