Content Creator Tony is back this week with another installment of TonySPN, a recurring series covering the weird wide world of sports!

October is here, and that means that we’re nearing the season for Canada’s best winter sport: Curling. Longtime readers of the Friday Know-It-All might know that I’m a not-particularly accomplished curler, having won as many as one (1) game in my Tuesday night league at the Frogtown Curling Club last year.

What are my strategies to improve this year? There’s only one way that I can ensure I’ll hit the ice running, and that’s writing about curling for the newest FKIA. I wanted to learn about the sport’s history, so I sought out some of the biggest scandals over its first five centuries.

And readers, it’s light. Like, kind of absurdly light. A 2014 list by Hannah Keyser of Mental Floss lists four of them, and one of them amounts to “A crowd was too loud once.” Aside from two doping cases, there wasn’t much juice to the sport — at least, not when it comes to the fun stuff. Where’s the Black Sox Scandals in curling history? The Deflategates? You’re telling me we didn’t get one Malice at the Palace in 500 years? Come on.

Did Keyser manifest a scandal into reality when she searched in vain for one in 2014? Who can say? But starting in the 2014–15 season, we finally got a scandal big enough to make a bunch of Canadians downright peeved: Broomgate.

Curling is a simple sport, at least when it comes to equipment. In terms of variable equipment that could make an impact in your performance, your shoes help you slide, and your broom helps you sweep to influence the trajectory of the rock. That’s about it.

That simplicity made the sport fairly immune to a concept called technology doping, which is what happens when the technology of your equipment gives you an unfair advantage. What if your shoes made you artificially faster, for example? Or what if your swimsuits were meant to simulate shark skin during the 2008 Olympics? What if your fingers let you use your Google instead of your noodles? (Just kidding, we know you’d never do that!)

It’s hard to see shoe technology impacting the game much, if at all. Sliding to deliver the rock isn’t about speed, but about timing that speed into a Goldilocks Zone. Too slow, and your rock doesn’t make it where you want to go, and too fast, your rock sails out of bounds. So that just leaves the broom, and well, it’s just a broom? What could that do?

You already know it’s going to do something crazy, but to understand what Broomgate did to the sport, you have to know the role of a broom. Originally, they were meant to keep debris out of the path of the rock, which could alter the trajectory of the ultra-precise throws being attempted. The role of the sweepers developed to not just maintain the rock’s path, but alter it subtly. Sweeping a rock creates friction on the ice that makes it travel further and straighter. It’s a limited amount of control, but a skilled sweeper will know when (and when not to) use their broom to achieve the desired result.

Until Broomgate, that is.

Traditionally, the brushes on a curling broom were made from animal hair, but today you’ll find most broom pads in clubs are fabric or nylon. But around 2014, Hardline came out with a broom pad with a new fabric, and they landed decorated curling veteran Mike McEwen as their highest-profile user.

McEwen’s team then went on a historic run in the 2014–15 season, sporting a record of 72–12, something unnoticed by the person considered to be the best curler in the world: Brad Gushue.

After McEwen’s team beat Gushue, thanks in large part to this ridiculous shot, Gushue became suspicious of the brooms and had his team test them heavily while training curlers in South Korea. International curling espionage?! You bet. And Gushue’s team found that these Hardline broom pads could direct the rock wherever you wanted, comparing the control to a joystick. They found that these pads made having a second sweeper completely unnecessary at the competitive level. After failing an attempt to get these pads banned, Gushue decided to force the issue by showing their full capabilities at the biggest stages.

They started out by rolling out a three-person team, rather than the standard four, and winning Canada’s top tournament, the Briar. That got the world’s attention, as did the seemingly impossible shots Gushue was able to make.

Suddenly, everyone started realizing what was up, and Curling Legend Glenn Howard was on the case. After letting his sponsor, Balance Plus, know about this out-of-nowhere jump in technology, they decided they needed some Black Magic of their own.

They got it in Balance Plus’ new “Black Magic” broom pad, made of their own proprietary fabric material. Balance Plus players could take a hard line against Hardline pads now, and when the Black Magic debuted at a 2015 tournament in Toronto, curling had a full-blown crisis on their hands.

The games were interrupted for an emergency basement meeting to deal with the accusations and counter-accusations from Balance Plus and Hardline players. By now, everyone had figured out what was going on: Instead of creating friction on the ice surface, the abrasive fabrics were cutting into the ice, giving a level of control over the rocks that no one had seen in the sport before. The Black Magic pads upped the ante with an even greater abrasive material than Hardline’s, which was damaging the ice.

The meeting ended with every curling team agreeing to put the new brooms away… until the final, when Howard’s team threatened McEwen’s with bringing out their Black Magic for the final unless they agreed to quit using their Hardline brooms forever. Team McEwen refused. After a three-and-a-half hour final match, Team McEwen and their Hardline pads scored a narrow victory over Team Howard and their Black Magic.

The curling world still wasn’t safe, as this controversy trickled down to clubs across the country, and maybe even the United States (I’m not sure, but probably?). There was only one way to solve this: A worldwide curling summit.

Remember how curling is a simple game? It also has a simple rulebook, which was just 42 pages at the time. Right now, it clocks in at 66 pages, a breezy read.

The curling summit eventually squashed the beefs that tore the sport apart for a time by having World Curling implement a standard fabric for competitive play, a rule also adopted by Curling Canada. Hearing accounts from that time, you can still detect some lingering hard feelings from the top names of the sport, but at the club level, I can report that the scandal is put to bed and I can resume losing most of my games in the friendly, fun environment curling is known for.

If you want to deep-dive more into the Broomgate story, including with first-hand accounts of Canadians re-hashing their beef, please listen to comedian and curling commentator John Cullen’s “Broomgate” podcast from earlier this year. There are many details from the show — including an incredible display of sportsmanship in an otherwise toxic environment — that didn’t make it in here, in order to give you some great stuff to seek out for yourself.