Marc Kennedy has a called time out in the hall of fame career as a competitive curler.
The three-time Brier winner, two-time world champion and 2010 Olympic gold medallist will not return to the Kevin Koe rink next season.
The announcement was made March 3 on the team’s Twitter account after the fourth-place finishers at PyeongChang Winter Games in South Korea wrapped up a promotional appearance at the Brier in Regina.
“To be completely honest with you, the priority here is a physical break. There are some injuries just from that repetitive stress I’ve never been able to recover from in such a short off-season so the body needs a break,” Kennedy told the Gazette on Monday while busy organizing the third annual Marc Kennedy Junior Classic next weekend at the St. Albert Curling Club.
“And part of me too is just tired, an overall exhaustion from the effort that’s needed to get to where we got to (at the Olympics). Those four years is a lot of highs and a lot of lows. It’s emotionally exhausting, it’s mentally exhausting and at my age it’s really important to get refreshed every once in a while otherwise you’re always going to be at that 50 percent level and you’re not at your best but it was important for me to take a break and hopefully come back at my best.”
Kennedy, 36, cited lower body wear and tear (“I’ve been at this level for 16 years now”) as the main health issues.
“It’s just been years of throwing and I don’t exactly have a slide that’s easy on the body. Getting that low it puts a lot of strain on joints so I’ve got some tears and stuff that needs to be dealt with and hopefully it comes back great but on the other side of the coin if I don’t, if I enjoy the time away and I do well in the realty career (with Sarasota Homes & Realty) and I enjoy my family, then I’m at peace with my career,” said the Paul Kane High School alumnus.
“I’ve been so fortunate. I’ve gotten more opportunities than most curlers and I’ve been so lucky that if I walk away from curling for good at this point I'm completely at peace. I think that’s all you can ever ask for, right?” Kennedy added. “I think if my body was healthy I might still keep going but I don’t know if it's entirely on my own terms but at least it was at a time when I know it was right for me to just take a step back.”
Olympics
The aftermath of the Olympics has been interesting experience for Kennedy since returning home without an expected medal for Team Canada. At times, people talk to him about the Olympics in hushed tones like there was a death in the family.“There’s a little bit of that but for the most part people have been extremely polite and kind and they say the right things like we’re still proud of you,” Kennedy said. “Some of them don’t know what to say but that’s OK. I don’t blame them. It’s an unusual situation for us to be in so we’re still kind of trying to wade our way through it but it’s been interesting. It’s sport and we lost and it is what it is.
“We went to Regina for the opening weekend of the Brier. It was meant to be a celebration of a medal hopefully. It wasn’t but we still went and people were great. They still had a lot of support for us. They understood. It wasn’t an easy task to go over there to win and we’re still just kind of trying to learn how we feel about it.”
Canada had never failed to medal in men’s or women’s curling (five gold, three silvers, two bronze since traditional curling became part of the Olympics in 1998) before the PyeongChang Winter Games.
The Koe foursome, with Kennedy at third, Brent Laing at second and Ben Hebert at lead – as well as alternate Scott Pfeifer of St. Albert and coach John Dunn – started off the Olympics with four wins in a row, then lost the next three before rebounding with two victories to finish in second place at 6-3 but in the playoffs lost 5-3 to John Shuster of the United Sates in the semifinals and 7-5 to Peter de Cruz of Switzerland in the bronze-medal game.
While those would argue other countries have caught up to Canada in the roaring game, “I don’t entirely agree with on par,” said Kennedy, who won Olympic gold with Hebert on the Kevin Martin rink at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. “Canada is still the better country. We’ve still got the more depth, we’ve still got some incredible players and if we were playing our best we still win that event so we weren’t at our best but a couple of the other teams were at their best so we were getting their best and not quite having ours and it made a really fair fight.
“It honestly came down to a couple of shots, a line call here and a shot there, and you and I are talking about how heavy my big shiny medal is. It’s a slippery sport and it doesn’t take much these days so you really have to be playing your best and we just didn’t quite have it.
“But to add to that, sometimes good teams find a way even when they don’t have their absolute best and that’s what it felt like in the middle of the week. We were still going to find a way with our experience and our leadership and the effort we were putting. We were fighting for every point and every inch and we were going to find a way so there was no lack of belief. We laid it all out there and got really close.”
Kennedy shot 80 percent in the semifinal, 75 per cent in the bronze-medal game and 87 per cent overall in the tournament as Canada finished 85 percent as a team.
As well, when Canada was 4-1, the decision was made to sandpaper the running face of the rocks to add curl and the Koe rink had to adjust and adapt but were never at the same level of play before the rocks were sanded.
“If anything people are a little critical of that semifinal against the USA but I thought, and I’ve said this to a few people, we did a really good job of managing the scoreboard which is what you do in big games. We kept that last rock tied up (at two after six and seven were blanked) playing the eight end and in most big games I’d give us an 80 percent chance of winning every time tied up with last rock in the eight and that end just got away from us towards the end (as the United States stole two points) and that was the biggest difference for the whole week,” Kennedy said.
There was no place to hide for the Canadian curlers after the medal round while constantly being asked, “What went wrong?”
“There was a little bit of that feeling of digging a hole but the thing is we can’t. There are no regrets with the effort we put in. We did the absolute best we could,” Kennedy said. “We just got beat so there is nothing really to hang our heads about. We had to own it and say it like it is and not hide in a corner and that was the big reason why we went to Regina five days after we lost. It was just to show people there is no reason to hide our faces or anything like that. We gave it all we could. We represented Canada really well in the past and you know what? The sun comes up, we all go home to terrific families and we’ll live to fight again.”
Junior Classic
Kennedy’s attention is now focused on the upcoming junior bonspiel consisting of 46 teams in the recreation, intermediate, U18 and U21 divisions.Two U18 entries, a women’s team from Norway and a men’s team from Sweden, are also competing through the Over The Pond Junior Curling Exchange, a joint initiative by Kennedy and the Nordic Junior Curling Tour.
“We’ve got six families involved in taking these Scandinavian kids in for a week and are willing to drive them and feed them,” Kennedy said. “We had an unreal response for billets so a big shout out to the St. Albert community.”
Also new this year is the U21 men’s and women’s events.
“We’ve had so many good kids come though our event in the last two years and some of them have aged out and we wanted them around really. Curling has some of the best young adults you could ever meet. They’re kind and they’ve got manners and they’re so polite and we were going to miss them if they weren’t there so we wanted to gave them the opportunity to still play,” Kennedy said. “The winner of those events are also going to play each other in a Battle of the Sexes final.”
Interested volunteers can visit the bonspiel’s Facebook page for more information.
