Second chance has Colleen Jones seeing life, curling in a different light

An illness that nearly killed her motivated Colleen Jones to write about her full-to-the-brim life and a curling career unmatched in breadth.

Her close call is the lens through which she tells her story, co-written with fellow journalist Perry Lefko, in “Throwing Rocks At Houses: My Life In and Out of Curling.”

“The life lessons I learned, I learned on the curling ice and then through bacterial meningitis, the idea of stop and smell the roses more,” Jones said.

The 55-year-old from Halifax skipped teams to six Canadian women’s curling championships, including a record four in a row, as well as a pair of world championships.

Much of her curling success happened in the years she was at work before dawn for her job as a morning sports and weather reporter on CBC Newsworld.

She and her husband Scott were also raising two young sons at the time. Jones lived life at a seemingly breakneck pace.

But on Dec. 10, 2010, Jones was coaching a junior team in Halifax when she felt extremely ill. She drove home vomiting and her husband summoned an ambulance.

Bacterial meningitis can be fatal within hours if untreated. Jones feels lucky that hospital emergency staff in Halifax had been trained just days earlier to identify the disease.

“Different people will get different things out of the book,” Jones said. “I was blessed with energy, but I also compartmentalize my life. The only three things I did in life were curl, family and work. I never confused the three.

“Striking the balance is one of the hardest things for curlers to do. I hope there’s a teenage curler that can look and say ‘Boy, if that Colleen Jones who just fell off the turnip truck was able to win six Canadian championships on no superman ability, just hard work’ they might also be inspired to chase the dream.

“Anyone who is suffering from a disease or who came through something with these epiphanies of savour the moment, be grateful for your health, stop the multi-tasking madness and be in the present moment, for some people that’s the message they’ll get out of it.”

Jones appeared in her first national women’s championship in 1979 and her most recent in 2013. She’s played in 21 over a span of 34 years.

Jones is still curling competitively, reaching the Canadian senior women’s final last year. So she is a walking history book of curling’s many innovations over her more than three decades in the game.

At 22, she was the youngest skip to win a Canadian championship in 1982. But Jones didn’t win another Scotties Tournament of Hearts again until 1999.

Jones, Kim Kelly, Mary-Anne Arsenault and Nancy Delahunt went on a run of five titles in six years, including four straight from 2001 to 2004.

Jones tells her story in her upbeat, wise-cracking style, but she doesn’t shy away from hard places in her life.

The chapter about her father’s death and the move of her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, to a memory care home in 2013 took the longest to write, she said.

When her team broke up in 2006, Jones was bewildered when Kelly, Arsenault and Delahunt formed a new squad without her. Fences were mended as she now skips a team that includes Kelly and Delahunt.

Hyper-competitive on the ice, the highs and lows she felt early in her curling career took their toll. Jones was among the first in her sport to work with a sports psychologist and credits Ken Bagnell for flattening her emotional roller-coaster.

“There is no doubt that for many years, my whole sense of self was tied to winning and losing,” Jones said. “When you won you were great, when you lost, you were as low as you could go.”

She intends to enter the Nova Scotia playdowns in 2016 and chase a 22nd appearance at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts.

“Do I still dream I can get back there and have that Tom Watson moment when he almost won the British Open? Yeah, I do, but the body’s not willing or sometimes the body is willing and the brain is not there,” she said.

“I’m way more realistic about everything about the game, but still the passion is there.

“It’s almost wired into my body, as soon as I smell the smell of a curling club, it’s like “OK, here we go, here we go.’ It’s like a dog going out for a walk.”

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“Throwing Rocks at Houses. My Life In and Out of Curling,” by Colleen Jones with Perry Lefko, Viking Canada, $30.00, 229 pages.