'Let's just empty the tank': Jacobs on finishing season with Rock League title victory

TORONTO — Brad Jacobs wasn’t sure if he could bring the Rock League trophy back home with him, but let’s face it, his trophy case is getting a little crowded. 

The 40-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., became the first skip to win two Olympic gold medals in men’s curling when he guided Canada to the top of the podium at Milano Cortina in February. 

Less than a week later, Jacobs and his crew were back on the ice in St. John’s, N.L., looking to defend their Montana’s Brier title. Although Manitoba’s Matt Dunstone won the Canadian men’s curling championship, Jacobs added a bronze medal to his haul after losing to Dunstone in the semifinal. 

Jacobs then served as captain for Shield Curling Club during the debut season of Rock League, which took place last week at TMU Mattamy Athletic Centre. After qualifying for the playoffs as the fourth and final seed, Jacobs rallied the troops on Sunday, defeating top-ranked Alpine Curling Club 2-0 in the semifinals and Typhoon Curling Club 2-1 in the final in back-to-back matches to capture the inaugural championship.

All in all, not a bad way to end the season, eh? 

“Yeah, it was fantastic,” Jacobs said. “I mean, nothing's going to compare to the Olympic gold. My gosh, that was a dream come true all over again. To have two of those is mind blowing to me. Certainly going into the summer, it's nice to be the team that wins the last game. 

“There's only one team that gets to be the ones declared champions before the season's over, and that's us, and that's always nice. You can go into the summer with a big smile on your face and pat yourself on the back and be proud of the way you finished the year.” 

Jacobs has experienced that feeling before. Flashback to 2015, when he ended the season on a high note by winning his first Grand Slam of Curling title at the Players’ Championship. 

The venue? TMU Mattamy Athletic Centre. The day? April 12. Exactly 11 years later, Jacobs was back in victory lane at historic Maple Leaf Gardens.

“I'm getting old, that's all that that says,” Jacobs said with a chuckle, “but I've always been fond of this building. Yes, it is where we won our first Grand Slam, but I love coming to Toronto and being down here at this time of year is always really nice. There's lots of other things to do, so when you have one game a day, you can do a lot of good things together as a team. It really makes for a fun week. 

“The fans have been great. They always are down here in Toronto. They're crazy for curling, the ones that do come out, and it was just overall, a fantastic week for our squad.”

Things almost went sideways for Shield Curling Club. After the franchise got out to a 1-2 start in the round robin, Jacobs took it upon himself to step up as captain to lead the charge. Shield won its next two matches, including a 3-0 sweep over Maple United, and Jacobs explained to The Curling Group’s Devin Heroux what led to the turnaround. 

“We have coffee before our games, about two hours before. I hadn’t been to one of those sessions. I was fighting my emotions a little bit earlier in the week, and I had to let the team know that that was happening, that it wasn’t going to happen anymore and that I hadn’t been a good captain to that point,” Jacobs said. “They were all supporting me, and I said, ‘You’re going to see a different me moving forward.’ Since that meeting, we’ve played awesome.”

Jacobs faced a familiar foe in the final in Niklas Edin, who skipped Typhoon’s men’s team. Although Edin opened the game with the hammer, Jacobs poured on the pressure early and jumped out to a 5-0 advantage. Edin’s runback in the first missed everything to give up a steal of three and a tricky angle raise in the third went sideways to surrender another pair of points. 

After tapping his own stone back in the third end to sit three, Jacobs quipped, “I feel like I’m in Olympic form.” 

Edin took two in the fourth, but hit and rolled out on his last in the fifth to give Jacobs an opportunity to draw for three more points and put the game out of reach. Jacobs went on to win 8-7. 

“Honestly, going into that game, I was 100 per cent confident we were going to win that game,” Jacobs said. “We beat Niklas a million times in the last two years. I just felt like we had a better squad than them. We just had to go out and play like we could and prove that and we did, so I felt really comfortable going into that game and throughout the entire thing.”

With Anna Hasselborg skipping Typhoon’s women’s team to a 7-5 win over Kerri Einarson’s Shield crew, it all came down to the mixed doubles game and a shootout. Typhoon’s Tori Koana and Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi went first and were a little heavy, drawing to the back of the four-foot circle. That gave Benoit Schwarz-van Berkel and Marlee Powers a bit of breathing room, but no sweat. Schwarz-van Berkel placed his rock right on top of the lid. 

The captain gave full credit to his team for getting the job done.

“You know what? They made it really easy. I think one of the strengths of this entire squad, like all 11 of us, is we've got really great people on this team,” he said. “I think everyone's very cooperative, genuinely good people and when you combine that with the athleticism, the hard work everyone puts in, and just seeing the personalities and everyone getting along really well, I wasn't surprised to see that we were doing well this week, and I'm not surprised to see us come out with the win because of that.”

Jacobs said he brought more intensity to the final than he had all week given that this was it for the season.

“I think the entire team did that as well because we wanted to win. We wanted to be crowned champions and be the first ones to win in this league, so our theme of going into today was, 'Let's just empty the tank,'” he said. “I think we did do that. We knew that at the end of today we had 14 ends in us. We were going to be tired by the end, and it's great to be tired and to be a winner.”