Between a rock and the next thing, Brad Gushue reflects on his inner turmoil

A few weeks before Brad Gushue flew into Toronto to talk about his frank new memoir, his publicist sent along an apologetic e-mail: It seems the former champ hadn’t done any curling since taking a final, teary bow at the Brier last March – and besides, his last few seasons had been plagued with injuries. All of which was to say that he wouldn’t be able to throw any rocks for a Globe and Mail photo shoot following an interview.

But as Gushue, 46, stood in the chill of a Toronto curling pad the other day waiting for a photographer to set up some lights, he admitted the issue was more emotional than physical: After more than two decades as one of the world’s top curlers, he wasn’t ready to be confronted with what he suspected would be his own fading skill.

As a teenager, he explained, he’d won a number of golf competitions before giving up the game for curling. But when he hits the links now, “it gives me so much frustration, because I’m like, I should be able to do this and I can’t,” he said. How could he possibly join the ranks of casual curlers chucking the granite for fun once a week? “I’m going to expect to make the runback [shot] like I normally do and I’m gonna miss and be pissed off, and I’m gonna go home pissed off because I can’t do what I used to do.

“If you’re going to go back and not play at that [top] level, you’re probably going to have some resentment toward the game. So, it’s probably better just to stay away.”

That relentless drive was a superpower for Gushue (pronounced correctly, if rarely, “Goo-zhou”) ever since he burst out of his hometown of St. John’s in the early 2000s, a brash twentysomething from a province not much known, at the time, for its curling talent. In his new memoir, Gushue: The Making of a Champion, he acknowledges the approach came at significant cost.

“A few more rocks, a few more practices, a few more reps,” he writes. “That has always been my mentality – and sometimes back then there were times when I needed an intervention, needed someone to tell me to stop.”

So: He’s stopped now. Where does that obsessiveness go?

“Don’t know,” he replied, his hands clasped tightly in his lap, sitting in the club lounge prior to the photo shoot. Yes, he has plenty of things on the go – in fact he says, he’s too busy – but nothing that would qualify as a “new North Star in my life.”

“I know realistically I’m not going to find something like that, but if I can find something that I can have a little bit of passion with, that’s great. But then the other side of me says: ‘There’s something out there that you can go face and eyes into and devote your life to, that you have a passion about.’ So, there’s that battle.”

He pauses and points to his head, gives it a bit of a shake. “I’m a mess up here.”

In The Making of a Champion, which he wrote with journalist Stephen Brunt, Gushue offers up a forthright, emotional and surprisingly revealing look back at his 20-plus years in the spotlight. He takes readers behind the scenes and into his own anxious thoughts during some of his greatest triumphs, such as Team Gushue’s stunning gold-medal win at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.

He reveals that, during the tournament, his family had kept him in the dark about a health battle his mother was waging so that he wouldn’t be distracted.

Still, some news from back home did leak through: His teammate Jamie Korab logged on at an Internet café and learned that Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams had closed the schools so all of the children in the province could watch the gold-medal game. Feeling the weight of the province’s – in fact, the country’s – expectations, Gushue barely slept that night before turning in a dominant performance that won Canada its first Olympic gold in men’s curling.

When they returned home, the team received a thunderous, thronging airport welcome. But the joy soon curdled. In his memoir, Gushue writes that he went back to the gym three days later, fearful that if he didn’t repeat his triumph, “people would dismiss me as a fluke, a one-off.”

In fact, sitting here now, Gushue admits he was the one who feared his success was a fluke. At 25 years old, he didn’t feel he’d really earned the win or suffered enough hardship to deserve it. “I couldn’t enjoy the success,” he says. “It came too easy, to be quite honest.” He felt pressure to quickly win a Brier or two: In fact, it took another 11 years for him to finally raise the tankard for the first time.

And, sure enough, the hardships came. In the spring of 2007, after Gushue and his teammate Mark Nichols decided Korab wasn’t sufficiently focused, they cut him loose. Things got ugly. People across the province, and even in his home curling club, took sides, with many angrily blasting Gushue for what they felt was his disloyalty. He received hate mail.

The episode left him scarred and withdrawn, distrustful of others. “I became a much different person,” he says. “I’m very cautious in certain social settings.”

In time, he began to understand how he might have handled that incident and others differently. He’d grown up believing Mike Keenan, the famously gruff hockey boss known as Iron Mike who won the Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers, was the epitome of coaching. “You just had to push people to get the most out of them,” he says. “I thought that was normal. So, I took that mentality and approach into curling.”

But after his mentor, Toby McDonald – who had been a part of the rink that won Newfoundland’s first Brier, in 1976 – delivered some hard truths to Gushue about the bruising effects of his leadership style, he took the lesson to heart and changed. Though not overnight.

“I’d spent 15 years being an asshole and all of a sudden I have to be patient and empathetic and work with people,” he says.

He became a more understanding boss, both of his curling teams and the businesses he operates on the side. (Like many athletes involved in Olympic sports that are not hockey, basketball, baseball, or soccer, Gushue made a life in curling but he couldn’t make a living. As well as doing consulting and speeches, he currently co-owns a pair of Orangetheory Fitness franchises.)

Now he’s the one hoping for a bit of grace and understanding as he tries to find a new way of being around the sport that has given him so much.

He’d been mulling retirement for a few years, prodded toward the finish line by a couple of factors. Though he’d won a record six Briers, including three in a row from 2022 to 2024, he’d begun to feel more pressure to win – as if, in losing, he would be letting down his entire province. “I felt more weight and I felt the wins weren’t as big. I felt the losses were bigger.”

And with the game itself, he’d started to feel like the “grumpy old fart that didn’t want to change.” He remembered some of the older players he’d encountered when he first started playing, who had resisted the new rules that had improved the game. He didn’t want to be like them.

“I know the game needs to change,” Gushue says. “We’re in a world of short attention spans. So playing a three-and-a-half hour game is not going to keep people engaged. We’ve got to create those 30-second clips on social media. I get all that. I’m just not used to that and it’s not the sport that I grew up playing and loving,” he says.

Still, he’ll have a front-row seat to the sport’s continuing evolution, with a pair of new gigs – one that could make him a fixture in Canadian living rooms if things go well, and one a little controversial.

First, the controversial one. Last spring, he was named director of high performance for USA Curling. Some Canadians took it as a snub. “I could see how people would be disappointed,” he allows. “The political environment right now makes things much messier.”

But he pushes back gently, noting that there are very few jobs in curling. This one is fully remote, allowing him to continue to live in St. John’s with his wife and two daughters.

“This is an administrative job,” he says. “This is me allocating funds to the program and figuring out the best way to spend it, how the athletes should be training.

“You will not see me waving any flags or standing on the sidelines.”

It also allows him time off for his other new gig, doing play-by-play for the Grand Slam of Curling broadcasts on Sportsnet and CBC.

His first broadcast was last month. It was humbling. “Man, oh man, I was so stressed. I was more nervous than a Brier final,” he says.

“Being 46 years old and starting something from the ground level is tough when you’ve been the best in the world at something else for a long time,” he says. Still, if he can get past the initial anxiety, “I think it’s something that I could love to do.”