After returning home from four days in Florida chasing Tiger Woods around Doral, I’m home and writing this during the early ends of the Ontario-Alberta matchup and it’s already proving to be a sensational contest. (yes, for the first time since 1990, I'm not in attendance at the Brier -- the facial ticks are really taking hold about now.)
And the fact that this game is happening on Thursday night in front of a packed Saddledome is huge. I’d like to think that the CCA, in its wisdom, recognized that the possibility of such a gigantic matchup was possible when it made the draw. If you’re a reader of this blog (or my other columns in print) you know that I’ve railed for years about how the CCA had to seed the draw. How, for marketing and ticket sales, it needed to set the draw after the provincial/territorial champions had been decided to provide for the maximum sales/viewership.
I’ve been told for years that it simply wasn’t possible to do it that late and was given all sorts of reasons why. I still don’t buy any of those, and I hope that the CCA now sees that it needs to schedule marquee matchups at premium times. Having Alberta play Ontario in the final game of the round robin, on a Thursday night, in prime time, is simply magic. I’m predicting a television audience in excess of one million (I will post the overnights tomorrow at some point). Heck, as I was taping some stuff with Mike Weir in Doral yesterday, some guy yelled over at us, asking who I thought would win tonight. Obviously, he was some transplanted Canuck, but even Weir wanted to know what was going on, not that he’d been following it, just what all the hype was about.
Time to sit back and watch this game, which has all the makings of a classic.
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