Grand Slam of Curling: Brad Gushue rebounds with a sensational win at The Canadian Open

Brad Gushue really stepped it up when he needed to. Stepped it up after a game filled with frustration and struggles.

With a superb two shots in the eighth end, the veteran skip led his team to its second Grand Slam of Curling championship of the season, beating Team Steve Laycock, 6-5, to win the Canadian Open.

After wrestling with draw weight and line for most of the game, Gushue found an exacting balance of both with his final stone, parking a wonderful draw on a piece of the button, cozied up against his own shot stone, to score the decisive two. A pound lighter and it comes up short. A pound heavier and it rolls off and settles too far, sending the game into an extra end. That Laycock had a counter just inches away made the shot that much more spectacular.

"The guys gave me a shot to win and they swept that perfect. Boy, oh boy, it feels good," said Gushue, in his post game interview on CBC.

In a game that featured struggles and missed opportunities by many of the players on the ice, Gushue followed form. Booking a dismal 21% on his draws when the game reached the midway point, he brought that number up to 53% before his last shot of the game, a perfect throw that bumped his draw numbers up again. He'd preceded the winning draw with a run-back double that set the stage for his final rock heroics.

Gushue's history against Laycock had been a sparkling one, with a 10 and 2 won/lost career record heading into the final.

Wonder of wonders, these two actually engaged right away as opposed to what has become just too much of a norm these days - the cooperatively, boringly, blanked first end. While it as an aggressively played end, it was a nervous one as well, with plenty of misses until Gushue's final shot - a down weight double to lie two - was answered in turn by a Laycock double for a two-nothing lead.

Gushue, whose team was ranked 3rd in the Order of Merit Standings going into this event, bounced back with a deuce in the second against Laycock's 10th-ranked team.

Gushue, who knocked off Mike McEwen in the final of The Masters, in early November, had to scramble back in this one, a theme for he and his teammates this week. Poor execution was a big part why Team Gushue found itself down, 4-2, at the break.

"We've come back in the last three games so we're pretty confident we can do it again," Gushue said during his mid-game interview on CBC. "But we've gotta turn around our execution a little bit."

That they did, holding Laycock to a blank in 6 and a single in 7, while chipping away with a deuce of their own in the 5th.

Laycock had already improved on his best finish of the season, by making it into the final. Although he had skipped his team to a win in the lower-tier Weatherford Classic earlier in the season, he'd failed to advance past the quarter-finals at either The Masters or The National, competitions that featured many of the best curling teams in the world. Here, he lost early in the week to McEwen, but was not forced to meet the hottest men's team again in the semi-finals when young Brendan Bottcher knocked off McEwen in the quarters.

Laycock's crew continues to emerge on the men's stage with its high velocity abilities. As well, the skip has shown he is definitley not afraid to plot a plan and play it out, even if it raises an eyebrow or two. Against Bottcher, he purposely gave up a steal in the seventh end of their semi-final, when he could have easily scored one to take a two rock lead into the final end. Instead, he felt more comfortable retaining hammer in a tie game. That's unusual. But, as was pointed out by commentators Mike Harris and Kevin Martin, it's a type of decison that might prevail more often in competitions that are using the five rock rule, as opposed to four.

For Gushue, it's another sign that he may, at long last, have the right combination of players to take him all the way to what has eluded him; A Brier Championship. The 11 time Newfoundland and Labrador champion scrambled from behind to beat both Brad Jacobs in the quarters and Kevin Koe in the semi's. "It was a struggle this week but we really battled," Gushue told CBC. "We feel we're a team that can just hang in there. And we did that all week. Vice Mark Nichols, like Gushue, struggled badly in this game, it's true. But there's little doubt his re-addition to Gushue's rink has been and will continue to be a plus.

"We don't quit anymore," said Gushue.

That sentence speaks volumes. It may well signal that the right intangible ingredients have been added to Team Gushue's game. A big, comeback win at The Canadian Open gives them  - and curling fans - reason to believe.

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