Junior curler dislocates shoulder playing ping-pong. Curls in a sling, rallies from 6-1 deficit to win
Wait. What? Say that again?
That might just be, of all the headlines I've ever written, my all-time favourite.
In what will surely be one of the more memorable stories of the 2016 Canadian Junior Curling Championships, Quebec skip Félix Asselin led his team to an 10-9 win over New Brunswick on Thursday afternoon at the Stratford Rotary Complex in Stratford, Ontario.
He did it a few hours after injuring himself - badly - in a ping-pong mishap.
According to the story on Curling Canada's website, Asselin dislocated his shoulder while playing ping-pong at the team's hotel, on Wednesday night. That was either one really heavy ping-pong ball that hit him or one hell of a wicked smash he was attempting.
“I’ve been playing (table tennis) every single day since we got here, and I was playing like I usually do,” Asselin told Curling Canada's Al Cameron. “Somehow it just happened. I went for a forehand and somehow it popped out.”
According to Cameron's story, the 21-year-old Asselin wore a sling on his throwing shoulder during the game against New Brunswick, getting it removed by a tournament volunteer just before he was to shoot, each end. This came after a midnight run to the hospital, some physio and a few practice slides just before the game.
Asselin couldn't sweep at all, which was only a slight loss as we all know that skips don't do the real sweeping, right?
Quebec, in a fight for its playoff life at the championships, fell behind 6-1 after three ends.
However, they caught fire after that and rallied for a crucial 10-9 victory, bumping their record to 5 and 3 and still in playoff contention.
“Sure, we had some excuses," Benoit Forget - the team's coach and Felix's father - told Curling Canada. “But there’s an old saying that losers find reasons. Winners find ways. That’s what we did.”
Yup, it's a typical, tough as nails, never say die, play through anything kind of story that we, as Canadians, love. It's just that we don't usually associate that kind of thing with ping-pong injuries.
Been a banner year for strange happenings in the sport of curling.
Back in October, Brad Gushue slipped and hit his head on the playing surface during a game at The Masters and was taken to hospital. He returned later during the game, with stitches and a ballooning black eye.
Unlike Asselin's team, however, Gushue's squad lost that game.