By JAMIE SHANKS, of the Weyburn Review
"I am 86 today so I think it would be a good day to start writing my curling history"
So begins the autobiography of Elbert "Shorty" Cottingham, composed at the table of his Weyburn home during his birthday on March 4 at the behest of his daughter Lorraine Debusschere.
"She'd been at me to do it for a year or two," says Cottingham, who has committed to paper the most notable highlights and memories of a curling career that has lasted an amazing 72 years - and still counting.
The year was 1927 and Cottingham was just 13 when he started his lifelong pastime by subbing on teams while attending school in Milestone. The curling rink and skating rink were in the same building back then, separated only by a sidewalk and an open partition.
"If they were short of curlers, they'd come over and grab some of us kids off the skating ice," he recalls.
And it was serious business.
"In those days, that's about all there was. Curling was the thing," Cottingham says. During bonspiels, he adds, that could mean normal everyday activities would temporarily grind to a halt.
"Everyone curled. They shut down the damn grocery store and everything else."
Cottingham soon began to play third instead of leading and in 1934 he and three companions went to Gray for the neighbouring town's bonspiel. They didn't compete as a rink, however, curling instead with whomever they were drawn with. Bonspiels were structured differently then: teams curled in each event until they lost in that event, which made for a lot of curling if you were winning, he adds.
Staying several miles north of Gray with his uncle, who was the local club's secretary, Cottingham would arrive at the rink before 9 a.m. and stay all day. "I don't know how many games we curled," Cottingham says, shaking his head.
On the last day, he subbed for someone in the first draw and then curled four consecutive 12-end games until midnight with his own team and won four prizes, one in each event: a second, two thirds and a fourth, his best performance before or since.
When it was all over, the roads were blocked with snow and Cottingham was forced to run a final gauntlet by taking the train down the CNR to Weyburn and then all the way back up the Soo Line to get home to Milestone!
Such feats of endurance were not uncommon in those times. After warm temperatures interrupted a weekend farmers' bonspiel in Ernfold in 1954, Cottingham was having his Sunday supper with a neighbour when a phone call came asking if he was ready to curl. After heading home to do chores and returning to town by horse-drawn bobsleigh, he and his team began curling at midnight. He won two games by dawn, broke for chores back at home, was curling again by 8 a.m. and went on to win the first event that day with two more victories.
"People have changed a little bit. I don't know if anyone would do that now," Cottingham muses.
Another bonspiel in Ernfold took six weeks to complete due to another warm spell - and the fact that 41 rinks were using a single sheet of ice. The following winter another sheet was flooded in an old lumberyard to improve the situation.
"Somebody got the idea we could use that," he recalls, adding that the new sheet was considerably shorter than regulation ice.
"It was all right. It was just like curling on a pool table."
It was a far cry from the highly-refined game of today. "You can't realize how different it was," says Cottingham, who never saw anyone slide out of the hack until the mid-'50s and weathered some ferociously cold bonspiels in the days before indoor climate control. "I was probably 60 years old before I ever curled on artificial ice."
Strategy was even more important in the old days on natural ice, he points out, and whoever was the best skip generally won. Equipment was quite different too. Before the narrow straw types were introduced, curling brooms were more like ordinary house brooms, which proved useful in sweeping snow off the ice during stormy weather, and rocks - which had detachable screw-in handles - were another story altogether.
"When I started curling, you didn't have matched rocks. I threw a set of 36-pounders one year another guy had 46-pounders and you really had to hit 'em."
Many competitors wore leather-soled shoes while curling, although most people simply wore a pair of rubber boots or even four-buckle overshoes adorned with manure. All games were originally 12 ends and finals were a whopping 14 using chalkboards and later buttons strung along wires to keep score.
The house itself was laid out using a board with spikes driven through it, anchored on one end and spun around to dig circular ridges in the ice, which were then filled with ink or coloured yarn and flooded over.
Many of these and other artifacts from this nostalgic era can be seen at Weyburn's one-of-a-kind Turner Curling Museum, although Cottingham wonders if young curlers today fully appreciate the history of the sport as much as they should.
As for himself, he has never stopped loving the game.
"I loved to skip. I could beat the best curler in town and the next day the poorest one could beat me. That's about how good I was," he laughs.
Over the years he has curled in many of the towns in the district, including Carlyle, Kisbey, Arcola and Manor, just to name a few. In all that time, fellowship has been the greatest prize he ever earned, and Cottingham can still walk down the street in any of these towns today and share memories with former teammates.
Above all, however, it's built good character.
"I think any sport teaches a person to be a good loser. If he's not a good loser, he probably quits."
That's one thing Shorty Cottingham hasn't done.
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