Northern Ontario’s Brad Jacobs, centre back, directs his sweepers as Newfoundland’s Brad Gushue looks on in Ottawa on Friday.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Laser focus versus laissez-faire.
Northern Ontario against Newfoundland and Labrador, the two Brads going head-to-head, Sault Ste. Marie battling St. John's, the two cities that fought over the 2017 Brier – the big curling event of the Canadian sesquicentennial – duelling it out in the 2016 Brier.
Irony such as that you don't find every day.
St. John's won the right to hold the 2017 Brier, but so far the story of the 2016 Brier has been all Soo – Brad Jacobs' 2014 Olympic champion rink from Northern Ontario finishing the round-robin on Friday with a perfect 11-0 record.
Accomplished, rather fittingly, by defeating Brad Gushue's rink from Newfoundland and Labrador, the second-best team in the tournament with a 9-2 record.
Meaning the two teams would meet Friday night in the "one-two" Page playoff match pitting the first-place finisher against the second-place finisher, the winner to gain a bye into the championship match Sunday evening.
The loser of the Friday evening match, however, will play the winner of the "three-four" playoff, with a second chance of reaching the Sunday final with a victory Saturday.
It is conceivable, then, that the Jacobs-Gushue showdown could take place three times in three days – something that would absolutely delight the large crowds that have been packing TD Place to watch the best curlers in the country decide who is, truly, the very best.
Friday morning's first meeting of the two top teams was, in many ways, like the feinting early rounds of a boxing match, both sides avoiding risk. Incredibly, they deliberately blanked the first five ends, refusing to leave any rocks in play.
It was surgically precise but also predictable – curling's "neutral-zone trap" where absolutely nothing happens.
Finally, in the sixth, Jacobs, with the last rock (hammer), counted one.
Then, in the seventh, came a small error that would loom large. Gushue, now with the hammer, missed what should have been a simple draw to the button, allowing the Jacobs rink to steal a second point and go up 2-0. Newfoundland and Labrador would later count their own point but, with two more in the 10th and final end, Northern Ontario claimed a 4-1 win.
"The first five ends, first six ends, were very well played by both teams," Gushue said. "I don't think we would have been much below 100 [per cent] at that point. I thought in the seventh and eighth our team got a little sloppy."
Certainly they did in the seventh when Gushue failed on his draw attempt. "We under-swept it," he said. And from that point on they were "chasing" Northern Ontario with little chance of catching.
Gushue and Jacobs have met many times. Jacobs's vice-skip, Ryan Fry, once curled on Gushue's team. While Gushue and his teammates tend to be laid back and relaxed, Jacobs and his rink are hyper-focused from first stone to last. "We're all Type-A personalities," Fry says.
And yet, curiously, between ends and even during pauses, the players often joke and compliment each other, something rarely, if ever, seen in equally competitive sports.
"We're all buddies, especially off the ice," Jacobs says. "On the ice is a little different story, but everybody has a great deal of respect for each other. You have three minutes between ends and guys just get a little bit bored and you might want to have a little chit chat between teams. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
"But our team in the playoffs will be 'laser-focused' and there won't be too much chitchat."
Gushue has had luck against Jacobs in previous encounters, but concedes there is something about the Northern Ontario rink and high-stress competition – the Brier, the Olympic trials – that brings something extra out of the Jacobs rink.
"They've had a huge amount of success at these big events in the last couple of years," Gushue says. "We seem to beat them more on the circuit. They've kind of had our number in these types of events."
Jacobs agrees: "I think it's pretty obvious we do bring a different game, a different mentality to these big events. We're really, really focused for these big events. That's one of the things that our team tries to work really hard on – bringing the same effort, the same intensity and focus to the ice leading to events such as the Brier playdowns. It's a struggle for us at times, but this is the Brier – the premier event. You want to come here and give it all you've got."
"I find our team just goes to a different level when we know how steep the competition is," says E.J. Harnden, who plays second on the Northern Ontario rink. "It's something that we've been working on for a number of years now: How high do we set the bar? Not just at the Brier. Not just at the [Olympic] trials. But do that in the grand slams and in every event we play in – keeping that emotion, that intensity, each and every event."
For Gushue, the challenge is to match the Jacobs rink in ability even if they may never do so in intensity. They may all be friends, but there could be only one winner when the two teams again met in Friday's playoff and, potentially, all over again in Sunday's final.
"I like them," Gushue says of the Northern Ontario rink. "No sense not to like them. We like to give our beatings more with our shots than with our fists or our words.
"They played a near-perfect game [Friday morning]. But that's hard to do back to back.
"We're going to get mistakes [from them], but we've just got to make sure that we're going to take advantage of them and put a near-perfect performance ourselves, which were perfectly capable of doing.
"We've just got to sharpen up a bit."
Roy MacGregor