(By Allen Cameron, Calgary Herald)
Skip Brad Gushue will lose long-time third Mark Nichols, left, at the end of this season. “I just need to take a break,” said Nichols.
CHARLOTTETOWN-On the eve of the Tim Hortons Brier, one of curling’s most enduring back-end partnerships will split up after this season.
Mark Nichols has told Brad Gushue and the rest of his Newfoundland teammates he will be leaving the quartet at the end of this season, ending a 13-year partnership with Gushue that produced an Olympic gold medal, a world junior championship and a runner-up finish at the 2007 Brier.
The two will play their final Brier together – for the foreseeable future, anyway; this is, after all, curling, and breakups are never permanent – beginning Saturday at the John Labatt Centre in London, Ont.
“I guess it’s been something I’ve thought about for a little while now,” said Nichols, 31. “We put so much time into the game, and I think right now, where I am in my life, I just need to take a break from the competitive side of the game, spend some time focusing on family (including his longtime girlfriend Colette Lemon), career and trying to make a living instead of travelling for 10, 11, 12 weeks of the year and putting everything else off.
“I still think I can compete at the top level, so that makes it hard. But I need to recharge the batteries. Who knows how long I’m going to be away? We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Nichols had thought about making the same decision prior to this season, but Gushue talked him out of it, hoping his competitive fires would be stoked playing on a team with Randy Ferbey calling the shots, along with regular front-ender Ryan Fry.
That, as has been well-chronicled recently, didn’t go so well, and while the team rallied to win the Newfoundland title with lead Jamie Danbrook, Nichols knew early on this season it would be his last at the elite level for a while. And so, for that matter, did Gushue.
“It was no surprise,” said Gushue, who will be the last holdover from the 2006 Olympic gold-medal team. “Throughout the year, you could just tell that his heart really wasn’t into it as much as he would probably want. Last year, he was thinking about taking a year off, and we convinced him to play one more year and see if he could get that drive back. And it just didn’t happen.”