The eighth inductee on the St. Albert Curling Club wall of fame was at a loss for words over the magnitude of the moment.
“I don’t know what to say,” an amazed Doug McLennan admitted during the ceremony Saturday night in the Hec Gervais Lounge. “When we put this wall together (in 2011) we were putting people on it that have really accomplished something. You have world champions and you’ve got multiple Brier champions on this wall so for me to be put on there is surreal.”
The St. Albert curler, past president and 14-year board member joins Hec Gervais, Jackie Rae Greening, Dan Holowaychuk, Cathy King, Marc Kennedy, Don McKenzie and Scott Pfeifer on the wall of distinction.
“This is a terrific honour for me. There are some incredible people up there,” McLennan said. “I’ve played the game a long time and tried to do the game justice and help out other players whenever I can but you don’t even think about stuff like this.”
McLennan, 58, is a two-time Alberta senior (50-plus) champion with rinks skipped by Wade White in 2013 and Glen Hansen last year. At nationals, White was awarded bronze and Hansen finished fourth with McLennan as their third.
“To win two provincials for me is kind of a big deal for me. I had to wait a long time but good on the guys who invited me,” said McLennan who was recruited by Holowaychuk to join the White rink and two years later was approached by Hansen to curl with Don Bartlett and George Parsons.
“It was the summer of 2012. I was enjoying a cold beverage and I got a call from some guy named Holowaychuk. He needed somebody to put a team together. He said, ‘Look, I need somebody to stand in the circles and yell at the sweepers.’ It sounded pretty easy to me. The next thing I knew Danny, myself and Wade and my good buddy George (Parsons) were heading to P.E.I. to the senior nationals so that worked out really well.
“I’ve never met Glen before but apparently we played against each other way back in the day but we played a lot of guys back then. We also had success so that worked out pretty good too.”
McLennan’s contribution was to keep things loose.
“Don’t take yourself so seriously, that kind of thing, just make shots and try and have a good time and I think we’ve done that with the two teams anyway. We’ve had a good time.”
This year McLennan scored a double by competing in the men’s and senior provincials with the Hansen foursome. It was McLennan’s second appearance at the men’s championship since moving to Alberta from Manitoba. He was Orv MacDonald’s third, with Dale Josvanger and Don Bezaire as the front-end, on the Grande Centre rink at the 1985 provincials.
At the club level, McLennan’s mixed rink with Allison Howes, Colin Jenkyns and Lauren Jenkyns are the four-time reigning President’s Cup champions as the St. Albert playoff winners eight of the last nine years. They also won the Edmonton and area Tournament of Champions in 2010 and 2015 and were finalists in 2013 and 2014.
“They are three of the best players I’ve ever played with and I mean that sincerely. I still think to this day that Colin is probably the purest thrower in this club,” McLennan said. “I’m just privileged they still want to play with an old guy like me. We do have a lot of fun. We don’t mean to beat everybody, we just kind of do.”
It all started in St. Albert for McLennan when three wise men – Husar, Hawken and Hartman – requested his services to skip a men’s team after a spell on the competitive circuit with the likes of MacDonald, Roger Comeau and Ken Hunka.
“They explained to me they we’re going to teach me the intricacies of the recreational game,” said McLennan, who fired his first takeout stone at age 10 in Manitoba and later curled in the Granite super league while in university in Winnipeg before heading west for fame and fortune.
“There wasn’t any touring that time, you just followed the money around and you just went to any spiel that had some money in it. I remember in Saskatchewan one time we won 10,000 in a bonspiel. That was huge money back then, 2,500 apiece. I don’t exactly remember how I spent it but I’m convinced I probably donated a large portion of it to charity.”
Off the ice, McLennan channeled his energies into the betterment of his beloved curling club in a variety of capacities, including the birth of the beginners’ league and at one time even filled in as the manager.
“I spent a long time on the board here and really that’s the thing I’m most proud of. We did some incredible things,” said the president from 2008 to 2011, who plans on stepping down from the board after this season. “It gave me the opportunity actually to meet the people that had been here before us and understand how much they contributed to the club.
“The people I got to work with during those 14 years were phenomenal. The building committee to build this (front end of the club), the Continental Cup, the list goes on and on.”
McLennan was a key player during the renovations to the front façade of the club, as the front end was expanded to 14,264 square feet over two floors. The multi-million-dollar facelift ushered in the club’s modern era at the same time as hosting the 2011 Continental Cup at Servus Credit Union Place.
“It was the most fun times I think anybody could ever have. We started out with zero. We knew we had to get a new front end on the building. It was practically condemned so we were putting lipstick on a pig for years,” said McLennan, who is on the wall of fame in the builder’s category with the building committee for the front-end renovations.
“I can remember we had the Dollars and Diamond dance to bring awareness to the fact that we might want to do this thing but we found out pretty early in the game, after we made maybe $20,000 on that event, you’re not building this thing on bake sales so you’ve got to go with something a little more aggressive,” McLennan said on the game plan to bring together the city, province and federal government for grant monies.
“I went to our MP, Brent Rathgeber, and said, ‘You’ve got to be in on this, right?’ He said, ‘Absolutely I do.’ As a matter of fact, Brent took our application personally to Canada Place to deliver it and the next thing you know we had about somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million dollars and then we had some sponsors that helped and other people that helped too.
“It was a ridiculous time. I remember sitting at a friend of mine’s place, there was a party going on and I’m in this guy’s office sucking on a red wine and I’ve got one guy on the phone here and I’ve got another guy on the phone here because we needed to build up enough of our sponsor guys to contribute the other part before the province would sign off on what we needed.
“It all came together and then we put a building committee together that was second to none. We had the most sophisticated group of guys that you could ever find and we’re standing here tonight in what that turned out to be.”
The Continental Cup also put St. Albert on the curling map.
“We were opening (the front end) in January of 2011 but we had decided to host the Continental Cup at the same time as if we hadn’t put our volunteers through enough stuff and it was a huge success. It was almost like whatever we touched sort of turned to gold and that was my four years of president so I got to walk away from that going, ‘Wow, was I lucky!’ But it was completely on the backs of all those great people.”
Today, the Taché Street facility is second to none.
“Our club is in the best shape of any club in the Edmonton area. We have a summer business that is second to none, our fees are the lowest in the area and we have worked very, very hard to do that. We also found ourselves an absolute gem for a manager in Nicole Bellamy. I don’t know anybody that works that hard,” McLennan said. “I’m just so proud of this club. I love it so much. They will have to carry me out of here in a box one day.”
