Bad Hack vs Good Hack!

SUBMITTED BY BERNIE KREWSKI

The current popular term “hack” is often associated with disruption and terror for those of us who use computers (it has happened to me!). But in the world of curling, the hack is a wonderful tool that conveys skill, joy, and excitement. Imagine curling before it was modified into its current form. As noted in “Captured Memories,” Alsask’s history book (p. 111): “Holes were cut into the ice at each end to provide the hacks.” The invention of the rubber hack, many readers of this newspaper may not know, has a local connection.

A century ago, as reported in the Calgary Daily Herald (January 21, 1924), Oyen was hosting its Annual Bonspiel on January 29-31, expecting many neighboring rinks to be attending. By then, after a slow start and many meetings, curling clubs had been formed throughout this district – Oyen in 1916 (not 1912 as recorded in Many Trails Crossed Here, p. 316}; Alsask 1916; Chinook 1917; and Empress 1918. Interest was suddenly high - “The Kindersley Club have challenged the Oyen rink for the Beaver Cup” was a brief notice published in The Oyen News on February 21, 1917.

E.B. ‘Ole’ Olson, an avid curler, owned farmland near Alsask and Kindersley, represented their curling clubs, and participated in many bonspiels in Saskatoon and elsewhere during the 1930s and 40s, despite moving to Edmonton in 1935. During a bonspiel in Saskatoon in 1939, Olson carefully prepared the “perfect shot” and slipped. Irritated by his bad luck, he set out to solve the problem by baking heavy rubber into a thick set platform and embedding it into the ice.

Soon the rubberized hack was adopted by clubs in Lashburn, North Battleford, Marengo and Flaxcombe, and twenty others in Alberta. His hack was displayed at the Northern Alberta Curling Club Association  in April 1940 and at the Brier playoffs in Quebec in March 1942, eventually becoming an essential aspect of curling in Canada.

Olson was also responsible for developing the measuring device, the pebbling can, the ice shaver, and the painting of rings. He also refined methods of ice-making, travelling across Canada marketing his rock-sharpening business which he established in 1947.

He died in 1964 and posthumously was inducted into the Canadian Curling Hall of Fame in 2000.