Unmerited and Self-Indulgent Prelude

When I started to write this blog 12 years ago I made a resolute but unconscious decision to either exclude any first-person identifiers (I, me, my) from the entirety of a piece, or to make it clear to the reader I was putting myself front and centre into the argument presented. This was a behaviour, along with many others, I mimicked from the political journalists and sports reporters I enjoyed reading, each of whom share the same respect for the mutually exclusive worlds of stories in which their presence is either relied upon heavily, or completely unnecessary.

With good reason, there’s a compulsion to put that aside today.

Some time ago these blogs of tournament recaps, the meat and potatoes of this CrokinoleCentre website, began to feel formulaic and repetitive. Faced with that realization, I felt like there wasn’t much to write about anymore. The words from Ecclesiastes, the most emo book in the bible, rang out in my head “There is nothing new under the sun.”

This will sound jaded, but in crokinole I thought I could no longer be surprised.

After having spent most of the day repeatedly dropping and picking my jaw off the floor of Quinte’s Sports and Wellness Centre, and then searching for my socks on the side of Cannifton Road after they were blown off, I knew I’d have to come out of my exaggerated and self-imposed retirement to write an emergency blog. And fortunately for the reader, after having stared at break-lights on the Toronto section of the 401, I’ve had time to compose my thoughts into something lucid.

The Stuff You Actually Care About

The 2024 Belleville Crokinole Challenge brought in a tournament-record 48 contenders, and that was far from the only record that fall on the day.

Justin Slater was seated into Group 1 in the morning and racked up 66 points in 9 games (pro-rates to 73.3 points over 10 games), setting the record for most points ever scored in the Belleville round robin, and good enough for 7th all-time in NCA singles events. Four more players, Andrew Hutchinson, Ron Langill, Ray Beierling and Shawn Hagarty, followed with point scores that prior to the day would have all been within the top 10 round robin scores ever recorded in Belleville.

But beyond the impressiveness of the points scoring was the 20s total of Justin Slater. He scored 149 20s in 9 games, which sets a new world record. The previous world record, set by Slater in Hamilton in 2019, averaged out to 148.1 20s in 9 games, so like Mondo Duplantis setting new pole vault world records, Slater has set a new record by a single 20 shot.

Also worth pondering was that the 20s mark from Slater came in the preliminary round, as most 20s world record close encounters happen in secondary rounds. There many top players are clustered together, boosting each others scores through the repartee in which 20s scored by one player typically only provide an additional opportunity for a 20 for the opposition. Amazingly, Slater achieved this 20s feat without the assistance of top competition.

Momentarily lost in the excitement of the 20s score was the excitement to follow about who actually advanced into what pool for the afternoon in Belleville. Scanning the names of the A pool advancers revealed the elite contender of Josh Carrafiello had missed the cutoff by a margin of less than 1 point, after pro-rating for a different number of games played in each group. Advancing at his expense was the unknown name of Devon Fortino of North Bay; “he’s a pretty good shooter,” was all that was whispered about as players began to settle in for the afternoon. What an understatement.

The afternoon kicked off and I was predicting another 20s record would be broken. Slater was sitting in the same row as the morning, ready to utilize his familiarity with the boards, while the rest of the 20s high-rollers were coming in looking for improvements against the stronger competition. The result would be a unprecedented surplus of 20s across the group.

After 10 games, this was the standings in Group A ordered by 20s only:

• Devon Fortino - 158
• Justin Slater - 152
• Andrew Hutchinson - 151
• Jason Beierling - 150
• Shawn Hagarty - 148
• Ron Langill - 130
• Ryan Buhr -125
• Ray Beierling - 120
• Nathan Walsh - 118
• Fred Slater - 117
• Garret Tracey - 97

While no one would surpass Slater’s morning record, 5 players from the A group had scores that before today would have been in the top 10 all-time 20s rankings, and Josh Carrafiello would have made it a 6th with 147 20s scored in the B group.

Looking purely at the history of the Belleville tournament, nearly the entire top 10 list of 20s performances was replaced in a single day. Darren Carr’s 137 20s from the B group adds in to knock Jason Beierling’s prior tournament-record of a 131.1 average in 10 games from the 2018 tournament down to 9th.

The players across Group A scored an average of 133 20s, which is by far the largest ever average 20s scored in a single round robin. The previous high marks was 116 scored in the 2018 Hamilton, 115 in 2019 Owen Sound, and 113 and 112 scored in the individual Round of 16 groups at the 2024 WCC.

Some theories were bandied about to try to explain the surge in 20s. None were convincing to my liking.

Some pointed to the level of competition, which was high, but arguably not as high as other tournaments one can find on the NCA Tour. Some pointed to boards, but this wasn’t like the good-old days of the Hamilton tournament where boards year-after-year delivered high 20s. The boards were similar to any other Belleville event, which historically hasn’t delivered a specially high number of 20s scored. Don’t even think about mentioning discs, which were certainly not new, in fact they were quite well-used.

Honestly the only thing of note that was new or different about this 2024 Belleville tournament was a commercial-sized fan that looks like it was pulled out of a chicken barn that now looks over the playing area. Somehow I doubt that was the difference.

As much as this achievement is exciting to me, I feel twinged with a vague despair. If the conditions in Belleville, whatever they were, can be repeated then I wonder if we are entering the world of too many 20s. From 2008-2009 there were 130 swimming world records broken, thanks in large part of polyurethane-based swimwear. The organizing body stepped in to ban them. I feel like a caveman who learned how to make fire one minute, and who accidentally burned down a tree the next. Ray Beierling was only half-joking when he lamented that he only had 3 perfect rounds in the afternoon!

Am I being too melodramatic? At this point you’d have to say yes, but it’s something to contemplate the next time you are dragged into a long 20 race against a rival foe.

The Bigger Surprise of the Day

20s excitement wasn’t all there was in Belleville, as the emergence of Devon Fortino continued unabated. While tournament favourites, Slater and Hutchinson, took the top 2 spots comfortably into the playoffs, Fortino solidified the greatest-ever NCA debut performance with a playoff appearance in 3rd place. He was followed 1 point behind by Jason Beierling for the 4th and final spot, who himself was followed 1 point behind by Nathan Walsh (oh yeah, that’s me).

The murmurs about just how good Fortino was continued as the players settled down for the semifinals. What was there to say? With the 20s parade that had happened throughout the day all that could be said confidently was that he was good at open 20s. He apparently only learned of the existence of competitive crokinole a few months prior to the Belleville event, but he looked like a seasoned pro.

Hutchinson would play Fortino in the semifinal which was a thrilling race-to-9 contest that never saw either player lead by more than 2 points, and featured 3 tied rounds, and eventually ended in a 9-7 victory for Fortino to continue his magical debut run. With the win Fortino became the only player outside of Josh Carrafiello, Justin Slater or Connor Reinman to defeat Hutchinson in an elimination match since crokinole’s return from covid.

In the other semifinal Jason Beierling was the on verge of defeating Justin Slater for the first time in a singles elimination match, before Slater had a miracle escape to come back from 8-4 down to win 10-8.

That setup the final of unheralded, but seemingly invincible, Devon Fortino, against the stalwart, record-setting machine of Justin Slater. A win for Fortino and a statue commemorating the occasion would have to be built outside the Belleville arena, TV news outlets would be forking over big bucks to Garret Tracey to get the video footage, and the crokinole world would have been set into a mayhem no lesser than if the Eagan-Fitzgerald crokinole cabal was actually real.

As I have chronicled the competitive crokinole milieu for a long time, and tried in vain to make mountains out of nuance molehills to make the game intriguing, I need to take a moment to underline just how shocking it was to have this newcomer-performance and 20s-domination on a single day. This wasn’t a case of looking up into the nighttime sky and being wowed by the beauty of a full moon. This was like looking up into the sky and seeing a meteor, 3 moons, and a cow orbiting the earth with the grace of Santa’s reindeer.

For a long time I’ve thought that a player needed to accumulate some competitive experience before they could truly compete with the best in the game. Fortino proved so solidly this was not the case that it makes me question my fundament understanding of competitive crokinole. The only other comparable performance I can think of is before my time in the game, when Bruce Hartung won the World Championship at his first ever event in 2005. “No one’s going to believe me when I get home,” he said. I always wondered what it was like to see a new guy show up and be that good. Now I know. It feels good to be surprised again.

In the end though, Slater was not to be denied with an 11-3 victory, which continued his perfect streak in Belleville of winning all 6 times he has entered the event. Perhaps, once again, there is nothing new under the sun.