Left: Ron Gervais Sr. is pictured here warming up for his 5,999th match. As remarkable as his game total is, what might be more remarkable is his never missing a league game in his 50 years of curling.
For the past 50 years Ron Gervais Sr. has spent his winters indoors on ice mastering the sport of curling. He figures he has driven his car the equivalent of around the world three or four times. “I’ve got it all written down in my journals. The first four of five years I only kept track of whether I won or lost and where I played. Later I included who my opponents were and the score of the matches and where the events were,” Gervais said.
It was this attention to detail that made Gervais aware that he was coming up on his 6,000th game played.
Gervais has logged those games in books that he has stored in a safety deposit box. He is compiling his statistics to share with fellow curlers. When asked if he will submit his records to the Guinness Book Of World Records, he wasn’t sure yet.
Rocking on the road
Three nights each week Gervais is in his car heading from his Tofte home to Grand Marais or down the shore to Two Harbors or Duluth, dodging deer and steering through inclement weather in the pursuit of mastering a sport some compare to shuffleboard on ice, but as he noted (and curling enthusiasts would attest), “Curling is more like chess on ice. I’m often not the best shot maker, but I rarely get out-thought out there. At least that’s what my competitors have told me.”
Above: On Monday, January 14, Ron Gervais Sr. celebrated a milestone when he curled in his 6,000th game at the Cook County Curling Club. Ron holds the cake and card that curling club members presented to him.
On any given winter weekend Gervais is off to bonspiels where his teams play for pride and money.
“I play in 13 to 15 bonspiels a year. I have played in 599 bonspiels so far,” he said, adding that he was hoping to play in his 600th bonspiel this weekend in Duluth but, “Petey Gresczyk [local curler and his friend] and I couldn’t find two more guys for our team, so I guess number 600 will have to come later.”
The competitive edge
He almost didn’t make it very far in the sport.
“The first five or six years I didn’t like to lose. I didn’t have the best attitude. In 1972 I decided to adjust my attitude or I was going to have to quit. I decided I liked to curl so I changed. I toned it down and started to enjoy myself,” explained Gervais.
Although he readjusted his attitude, it doesn’t mean he isn’t competitive, as anyone who has curled against him knows.
Off the ice, Gervais spends a good deal of his time watching Canadian professional curling league matches on TV. A friend from Duluth tapes them for him. It’s a good way to learn new strategy and pick-up new trends in the sport.
“I like to watch and guess what the skip is going to call. I’m usually right. Not always, but usually,” Gervais said with a smile.
And Gervais spends every second on the ice thinking of a winning strategy. Make no mistake, he plays to win. It doesn’t matter if it’s curling, softball, golf, cards or bingo. Playing to lose isn’t in his vocabulary. “What do they call a good loser?” he asked rhetorically. “A loser.”
That said, Gervais has been responsible—whether he knows it or not—for teaching more people curling in Cook County then anyone else.
A unique milestone
In his pursuit of his passion Gervais has curled about 120 games a year over the past half-decade, and on Monday, January 14 he played in his 6,000 game, a milestone reached by few Americans—if any—and maybe reached only by a handful of Canadians and a smattering of Scandinavians.
Or maybe he is the only one to reach this lofty number.
“I’ve talked to some of my Canadian friends and they can’t think of anyone who has curled in 6,000 games,” Gervais said.
An Internet search or Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark couldn’t turn up any curlers with 6,000 matches played, so Gervais might stand alone with this mark.
“Usually guys go at it hard for 10-15 years and then they back off. They get tired of it or get hurt,” he said.
When asked what he attributed his longevity to, Gervais, age 76, said, “Well, I haven’t gotten sick or injured and I love the game. I guess I have been very fortunate.”
Gervais was always athletic, playing football and running track for Cook County High (called Grand Marais High School back then). “I ran a 10.9 for the 100 -yard dash. I wasn’t the fastest kid, but I wasn’t the slowest, either. I weighed maybe 120 pounds playing football. Back then, if you weighed 150 pounds you had to play in the line, because you were a big kid.”
A rock solid record
Out of the all of the curling games he has participated in— mostly as “skip”— he has been on the winning team more then 4,200 times, “Which is a pretty good percentage for a journeyman curler,” he quipped.
Calling himself a “journeyman” is a bit of an understatement. Gervais has played on teams that have won 11 state titles and 4 national titles. Some of Gervais’s bigger tournaments meant traveling to Madison, Winnipeg, St Paul, or Fargo. At one bonspiel in Winnipeg there were 464 teams entered.
“That’s a lot of teams, but then I found out that as many as 1,000 teams had played in that bonspiel in the past. We played there four of five years ago to get ready for senior nationals. We did pretty good, winning six or seven matches against some stiff competition,” said Gervais.
“I curled against one team in Duluth for seven straight years and their team only scored one point,” he said with delighted chuckle.
Perhaps the biggest honor Gervais received occurred in 1980 when he was selected to represent the U.S.A. and compete for the Harris Maxwell Trophy.
“Every five years America sends a team to Scotland and then five years later they send a team here,” Gervais said.
Gervais’s team played in every curling facility in Scotland, he said, adding, and “We played 18 to 20 matches They keep total points for the games so it was just brutal.”
While in Scotland Gervais’s team scored the only perfect 8-ender in the history of international play. That means every rock his team threw was in the circle and none of the rocks the other team threw were close enough to even knock one of their rocks out of scoring. This is a feat that might never be duplicated at the elite level.
Memories on ice
Over this incredible stretch Gervais has never missed a league game. He has hit 16 deer on his curling travels and narrowly missed many, many more, but none of the accidents or near misses has caused him to miss a match.
“Finland [Minnesota] had the coldest curling club I have ever played in in my life. It was 40 below zero on the ice,” recalled Gervais. “Dick Eckel was curling with me and he bought a rum and coke and set it on the ice. We played one end and he went to pick it up and it had ice skimming across the top of his drink. Imagine that. A drink with alcohol in it freezing that quick! ‘Now I know we shouldn’t be out here,’ I said to Dick.
Early on, in 1965, Ron teamed up with Floyd Johnson, George NaGorski and Dale Olson to win the Commanders Open bonspiel in Finland, Minnesota.
“We were the first team from Cook County to win a bonspiel out of the county,” Gervais said.
He has made lifelong friends and he considers twotime world champion Bud Sommerville to be his mentor.
“Bud was a great curler and a great guy. You don’t always find that. Some of the best curlers are condescending. Not the best people,” Gervais said.
Curling into the future
As passionate as he is about curling Gervais worries about the growth of the sport. He says that Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin are the hotbeds of U.S. curling, but he’s seeing fewer young people on the ice.
“It’s expensive for young people to curl. I pay $175 to curl in Grand Marais, $175 to curl in Two Harbors and then $360 to curl in Duluth. Then there are the travel expense and further expense if you play in bonspiels. It’s a lot out of a young person’s entertainment fund,” he said.
As far as retiring his broom and his slider, Gervais said, “My body is like a car. How far is it going to take me before it can’t go anymore? We’ll just have to wait and see.”
As this interview wrapped up, Gervais was preparing to play his 5,999 match on his home ice in Grand Marais. He followed that with his 6,000th match at home with friends, fans and family on Monday, January 14.
“This is where it began, so it’s fitting that I will curl my 6,000 game here,” Gervais said.
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