Paul Savage has been around the game of curling since he was a teenager, growing up in Don Mills, Ontario, and following in the footsteps of another Ontario icon, Alf Phillips Junior. He won titles all over Canada and competed around the world, and is known as a talented and fun-loving player. A few notes about Paul Savage:
• His first provincial title was the 1965 Ontario Schoolboy, which he won while representing Don Mills Collegiate Institute.
• He appeared in the movie Men With Brooms, playing a minor role as a curling broadcaster, calling the action of the film’s ultimate match.
• He was the fifth man on Mike Harris’s Canadian Olympic team, which played in the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan. To qualify for a medal, he was required to play at least one end. He actually played two, in a game against Germany in which Canada had already posted a healthy lead. That allowed him to earn a silver medal. At 50, he was the oldest medalist in the ’98 Games.
• Prior to leaving for the Olympics, he had the Olympic rings tattooed onto his rear end. A picture of the tattoo appeared on the front page of a Toronto newspaper.
• He played in seven Briers, winning once as third for Ed Werenich in 1983, and finishing second on three other occasions.
• After his playing career, Savage became an entrepreneur in the game, starting an Ontario-based skins game, which grew to become a nationally televised event pitting the top teams in Eastern Canada vs. those in Western Canada.
• He was on the losing end of one of the greatest comebacks in Brier history. In the 1974 Brier, he was leading Hec Gervais by seven points after six ends but lost in an extra end—the 11th.
• He was given the nickname “the Round Mound of Come Around” by the Ontario Curling Report owing to his girth as well as his talent for playing the draw shot. It was a play on the nickname of NBA player Charles Barkley, who was known as the “Round Mound of Rebound.”
• Paul’s daughter, Lisa, was the 1994 World Junior champion.