Extra! Extra! Hear All About It!

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I guess we're going to put out an emergency podcast for a couple of reasons um today.
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But one of them I think is important that I I get out there, and that's the uh the grand slam of curling first.
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I love the grand slam of curling.
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I was involved with it all right from the get-go, uh, back in the late 90s, uh, when the first was come out in 2001.
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But of course things have changed in the Grand Slam and uh with ownership and uh and production and all kinds of things.
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And uh so two things.
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I think it's important everybody know that I'm not going to be involved in the Grand Slam or Colonel Group or anything like that uh at all going forward.
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Um and to be quite honest, uh Nick Solskie and Company, he uh there was no room for me in that company anyways.
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But uh, just want everybody to know that it's summertime.
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Colonel will start here in a little bit, but uh I just want everybody to realize that because I think it's important that people know that because I've always been involved with Welcome to Up Ham in the Plast Podcast.
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This is your host, Bill Sheer Hart, Trigger Provisional Coach with Coaches of Canada coming to you from my home in Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada, on the ancestral end of the kettle and stone point first.
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Well, the title of the episode is Extra Extra Listen All About It.
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And of course, that comes from a time-honored phrase, extra extra read all about it.
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Every once in a while, a newspaper would put out a special edition about uh an event that uh has just taken place, and certainly in the curling world, Kevin Martin's announcement about uh the Grand Slam of Curling fits into that category.
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What do we do now?
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Well, I put on my teacher's hat and decided, well, let's do a little bit of research here, because although most of the listeners that will receive this podcast know all about the Grand Slam, there's a little bit more to it, and Kevin mentioned some names and uh mentioned the curling group.
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So let's delve into the history of the Grand Slam and the Curling Group, and then I will see you on the other side of that.
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So the Grand Slam of Curling is a series of elite invitational curling tournaments that has become one of the premier competitions in the sport.
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It was created to give the world's top teams more opportunities to compete against each other for significant prize money and television exposure.
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So here's how it all started.
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Well, it started in 2001.
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The Grand Slam of Curling was founded by Canadian sports promoter and broadcaster Mike Harris and partners.
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Not sure who all the partners were.
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At the time, many of the world's best curlers wanted more high-profile events outside of the traditional, national, and world championships.
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So here were the goals.
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There are four of them.
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First of all, bring together the top men's teams in the world, known as men's teams.
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Second, increase prize money for elite curlers.
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Third, create events that were attractive to television audiences.
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And lastly, raise the profile of professional curling.
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Expansion.
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Initially, the series consisted, as I indicated, of only men's events.
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But over the following decade, three things happened.
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Happily, number one, women's tournaments were added.
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Second, the number of slam events expanded and occasionally changed from season to season.
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And thirdly, qualification evolved from invitation only toward rankings-based entry rewarding consistent performance on the World Curling Tour.
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A major turning point came in that year when Canadian broadcaster Sportsnet purchased the Grand Slam of Curling.
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Under Sportsnet, first of all, television coverage expanded significantly.
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Second, prize money was increased significantly.
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Third, the events adopted more standardized formats.
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Fourth, men's and women's competitions received equal prominence.
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Yay for that.
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And lastly, new innovations such as the Tier 2 format, which was used for several seasons, which gave emerging teams a pathway into the top-level slams.
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So in the modern iteration of the Grand Slam, so leading up to recently, the Grand Slam of Curling consists of several annual events featuring many of the world's highest ranks men's and women's teams.
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While the lineup can change slightly over time, well-known slam events have included the Masters, the National, the Canadian Open, the Players Championship, the Tour Challenge, and the WFG Masters, depending on sponsorship.
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Each event awards ranking points and substantial prize money, and together they form one of the most prestigious series in curling outside of the World Championships and the Olympic Games.
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So, what was the impact on curling?
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According to my research, the Grand Slam has had a lasting influence by, first of all, helping professionalized elite curling, providing consistent high-level international competition, increased television exposure, particularly in Canada, introducing innovations in event presentation and broadcasting that have later been adopted elsewhere.
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Today, winning a Grand Slam title is considered one of the highest achievements in competitive curling, and many of the sport's greatest teams, including those skipped by people like Kevin Martin, Jennifer Jones, Brad Gushu, Rachel Holman, and have built their legacies through success on the Grand Slam circuit.
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In Kevin's announcement, he mentioned the Curling Group.
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So here's the research on the Curling Group.
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It's a Canadian sports and media company founded in 2024 with the goal of growing and modernizing the sport of curling.
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Rather than being a governing body like Curling Canada or World Curling, it's a private company that owns and operates major curling properties.
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And their biggest milestones include, well, obviously, acquiring the Grand Slam of Curling, and they did that from SportsNet, as I said, in 2024, taking over ownership and operations while SportsNet remained the Canadian broadcaster.
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They launched the Rock League.
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I talked about the Rock League on a previous episode.
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They did that in 2026, the world's first professional curling league with mixed gender franchises, operating additional curling focus media and fan products, including, well, the Rock Channel, a streaming service for curling events, The Rock Shop, which sells curling merchandise, and the Broom Brothers, a curling podcast.
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And in Kevin's announcement, he mentioned Nick Sulski.
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So the company was co-founded by sports executives Nick Sulski and Mike Cotton, with support from well-known figures in the curling world, including Olympic champions Jennifer Jones and John Morris.
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It has also raised outside investment to expand the sport internationally.
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The company's stated mission is to make curling more accessible and entertaining by investing in, first of all, professional competitions, television and streaming coverage, digital content, new fan experiences, and a greater global exposure for elite curlers.
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So if you are a curling fan, and I would think many of you who listen to my podcast are, you can think of the curling group as the organization that is trying to build a professional ecosystem for curling.
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Much like Formula One has done for auto racing or the PGA Tour is done for professional golf.
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They now own the Grand Slam of Curling and are expanding the sport to new events, media, and professional.
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Well, as promised, uh, here's my take on what I heard.
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And of course, I don't know anything more than you do.
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We only have Kevin's words to uh speculate upon and try to figure out what has happened, but clearly something has happened, especially when he uses the words there's no place for him in the curling group as uh that privately owned company Moons moves forward.
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And when there's no room for somebody like Kevin Martin, I don't think we have to be uh uh a detective sleuth of Sherlock Holmes to uh certainly surmise that uh there has been something of a falling out uh disagreement, but that's not necessarily what has happened.
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I don't know anything more right now than you do, so we'll just have to keep our ears and eyes open and find out uh more about it.
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So the grand style of growing is definitely going to look and sound very different.
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When I planned this episode, of course, with no knowledge of Kevin's announcement, I had a couple of sound bites, and I know how much you enjoy the sound bites, uh prepared.
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Uh, but I am going to leave one with you because it uh is somewhat topical in that it's the middle of the baseball season.
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We've just uh witnessed the all-star game, and I certainly enjoy the all-star game.
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Baseball's all-star game of all the major sports that attempt to have an all-star game.
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I think they all fall short, and certainly the baseball all-star game is not perfect, but it comes closest of any of them, so I always enjoy that.
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And I came across this interview with uh Bob Costas.
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Now, Bob Costis is a very well-known sportscaster in the United States, and he talked about uh Mickey Mann and Stan Museal.
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So, for those of you out there who are of a certain age, um, and those that want to do a little bit of research on your end, I think you're going to enjoy what you are about to hear because it talks about the best part, the the strength of character of athletes.
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And that's all I'm gonna say.
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Um great pleasure that I leave you with this sound bite of an interview with Bob Costas.
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Well, Mickey um was in St.
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Louis to do a charity event at my request, and he stayed at our home in in St.
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Louis.
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Um he's, you know, disarmingly uh vulnerable, you know.
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Um he's a giant icon, but a person who had regrets and and obvious demons, and we invited Stan Musewo and his wife Lil over for dinner because we thought Mickey should be around people he knew.
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So it was a wonderful evening, lots of stories and laughter and everything.
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And after Stan and Lil had left, and the kids had gone to bed, and everybody except me and Mickey was either had left or had gone to sleep.
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And Mickey and I are sitting talking well past midnight.
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And he just says something that in that Oklahoma twang was really eloquent in its own way.
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He said, You know, I was I shouldn't have been as good a player as Stan.
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Nobody had more power than me.
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Before I got hurt, nobody could run faster than me.
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But Stan was a better player than me because he's a better man than me.
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Because he got everything out of what God gave him that he could, so he doesn't have to live with all the regrets that I live with.
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He admired Stan, not just as a player, but as a person.
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And the life that Stan led, the long and happy life that Stan led.
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Um died in his early 90s, Mickey was gone at 63.
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And a measure of Stan's decency.
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Stan, no one would have marked absent, got on a plane that morning from St.
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Louis and unannounced, no one knew he was gonna be there.
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I'm doing doing the eulogy, I looked out over the the attendees, and there was Stan Museel halfway back by himself.
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Just a measure of the quiet decency of the man.
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Mickey Mandel was too humble and honest to believe that the whole truth about him could be found on a Wheaties box or a baseball card.
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I hadn't known about Costa's much.
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When he gave the eulogy of Mickey Mantle's funeral.
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I mean, I I listened to that so many times.
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I can't believe how we wrapped it up in the world.
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Uh thinking about this, I don't really know about it.
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I just have to tell you you have done great things in the past, and you will do great things in the future.
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The words you spoke of to make him mental are that's the best thing I've ever I've ever seen before.
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And then he did it again for seven years ago.
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Look at them, I'm not I'm just thinking about it.
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That this guy can sum up the life of a hero feels like that.
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That's not easy, you know.
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At an All-Star game in the 1950s, all the great black players, Frank Robinson, Hal Garren, Willie Mayors, Ernie Banks, were kind of gathered in a corner of the National League clubhouse playing cards.
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No white players anywhere near them.
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That was his way of letting those players know that they were welcome.
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You know, it it struck me though that um you got uh choked up in mutuals at the funeral and and not mental.
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Yeah, I I've come to understand this.
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Um Stan lived a full life, he's 92, 93 years old.
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Um it's sad in the sense that it's a passage, and he meant so much to so many people's lives, especially in St.
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Louis, but it's not tragic.
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Whereas there were some elements of tragedy to Mickey's life.
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But I've learned this about myself.
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What sometimes chokes me up involuntarily isn't stuff that's sad.
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Decency chokes me up.
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Something about that just saying that choked me up and actually threw me off.
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Because what I was gonna add live afterwards, I couldn't return to the script, wasn't in this room, was think of what that meant.
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And Hank Garon and Willie Mays both told me that story years before independently, that they remembered it all those years later and what it meant to them.
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Think of what that meant not only to those black players, but to the other white players in that clubhouse, many of them from the still Jim Crow South, to see the most accomplished and most respected among them make that simple gesture.
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That is more likely to choke me up, even a little bit now, than if you told me some story that somebody might regard as terribly sad.
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As you might have guessed, that sound bite was taken from an interview uh that was uh given with Bob Costas.
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And the female voice that you heard partway through was Mary Carrillo, who was a very well-known sportscaster in the United States.
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The personal story about Mickey Mantle, uh, when I was in high school, and there was a group of us that were uh Tiger fans, of course, there were no Blue Jays at that time.
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We would think nothing of jumping in my vehicle.
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I was usually the driver, and zip down the 401 to cross over the uh we went under the Detroit River.
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There was certainly no Gordi Hell Bridge, that's for sure.
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And we would go to Tiger Stadium and watch games.
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Well, this was the day of a doubleheader with the Yankees, and one of my friends, uh Dave Schley, was a huge Yankee fan, uh and especially uh Mickey Mantle.
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So we we watched the first game, but we knew something was happening uh in and around uh the the city of Detroit because we started to hear sirens uh more than usual, and there was the odd billow of smoke, and so we knew something was going on.
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We weren't exactly sure what, but it certainly couldn't be good if we were hearing so many sirens.
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Well, we started game number two, and by that time, over uh our transistor radio, some of you will wonder what's a transistor radio.
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Well, we would listen to the play-by-play uh uh with Ernie Harwell and Ray Lane at that time.
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And so we knew what was happening, that there was rioting.
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And uh four uh Canadian high school boys uh was probably not a very good idea to stay in Detroit, but my friend Dave wanted to see the uh Mickey Mantle hit one more time, so we did, and then we got in the car and went to the tunnel to the border.
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The uh customs agent uh saw that we were from Ontario.
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Yep, you're here for the baseball game, yep.
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Get out of here quickly because we're about to shut the border down.
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Like we just made it, or we would have been trapped for who knows how long, and that was not a place to be trapped uh that day of of the riots in Detroit.
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So we all turned around and said, Yeah, yeah, right, Dave.
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Let's watch Mickey hit one more time.
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So uh that was the one time that I saw Mickey play, and of course, in that environment, it was something I'll I will certainly remember.
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So I hope you enjoyed that sound bite.
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Um, Stan Musiel was uh was a giant uh in more ways than one.
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And uh when he went up to those black players and said, deal me in, uh you saw the uh the character of the man.
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Okay, I'm gonna do this, and I thought uh, well, not really long and hard, but I got uh an interesting email this past week from a group uh known as Million Podcasts, Top 20 Curling Podcast 2026 edition.
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Uh hi Bill, hope you're doing well.
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Well, I don't really know these people, but your podcast, a pain in the glass podcast, is featured in our 2026 edition of Top 20 Curling Podcasts.
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Well, we'd be grateful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning about the Top 20 Curling Podcast in any of your upcoming posts and sharing this with your listeners.
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Well, uh yes, I'm I will share it with uh you, the listeners.
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And um, well, I'm going to use first person plural.
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We're not number one, and it comes as no shock that that's Kevin's uh podcast, Inside Curling.
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And a series of uh editions on uh BroomGate uh came in at number two.
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Well, drumroll, we are number three, and wow, number three in the top 20 curling podcasts.
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So uh not much to do with me, all to do with you, and that you're interested to uh download the podcast.
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I I never worry about how many downloads, to be perfectly honest.
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Uh, if there's uh just a few of you out there that find it interesting, entertaining, educational, and informative, because those were the goals in the podcast right off the top.
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Those top three podcasts are all professional uh podcasts with uh uh certain uh resources from uh outside groups supporting them.
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Well, there's nobody outside the uh podcast that you know as a pain in the glass podcast.
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There's only one supporter, certainly from a financial perspective, and that's me.
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Uh and I pay all of the expenses to my podcast provider, Buzz Buzz, right?
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And they have been great providers, and so I just want to share that information with you, and thank you for being a listener to the podcast.
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I usually sign off with the words of a great North American philosopher Charlie Brown.
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And if you're a loyal listener, you know what those words are, but doesn't seem quite appropriate today, especially based on the soundbite with Bob Costas when he talked about Stan Museum.
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And we hear this a lot, that sport builds character.
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Well, I'll change that a little bit.
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I agree, sports can build character, but for sure, sport reveals character.
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Until next time.