One of Canada’s most successful curlers decided his final competitive season was the ‘write’ time to compose his memoir. Brad Gushue started working on his book, Gushue: The Making of a Champion, which hits bookstore shelves Nov. 3, soon after announcing last September that he would retire at the end of the curling season. “It was almost therapeutic for me going through last year,” the 46-year-old from St. John’s, N.L., told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday of the process of writing it with journalist Stephen Brunt. “I was struggling with retirement. I knew it was time to do it, but I’ve been curling for so long that the decision was tough.” Gushue has spent much of the past three-plus decades in competitive curling, starting in the junior ranks, where he claimed five provincial titles as a skip and won national and world titles in 2001. He skipped Canada to its first Olympic gold medal in men’s curling in 2006 and, after years of coming up short, won the first of his six national men’s Brier championships in 2017, adding a world title that year. Gushue is the only skip to win six Briers. Much of Gushue’s book explores his pursuit of excellence and leadership, as well as the difficult decisions he made in his drive for success. He told CTV News Edmonton that approach left him with both pride and regret over some of his career choices. “Any time you go through the journey that I went through, you’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to make good moves,” Gushue said. “At the end of the day, I don’t have too much regret because I’m pretty proud of what we did in our career. Whenever you look back at a journey, you know there are different paths you could have taken and probably some mistakes that were made, and I identify some of those in the book, but overall, it’s made me who I am. “I’m proud of who I am, so the journey that I’ve been on has been a positive one.” Gushue is slated to visit 15 Canadian communities this fall to promote the book, starting Oct. 27 in Gander, N.L., with a stop at West Edmonton Mall’s Indigo on Nov. 9. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Kent Morrison
