This 90-year-old New Brunswick curler is in no hurry to give up the game

John Marr is local legend among his teammates at the Hampton Curling Club. 

He plays three times a week, loves to compete, and "has a knack for pulling a great shot out in the last end or two, and winning," says club secretary Ron Badger. 

No surprise there. Marr has had plenty of practice. When he celebrates his 90th birthday on Christmas Day, he will have been curling at the club for more than 45 years. 

"It's just a normal thing for me," he said. 

When Marr was growing up in Gondola Point — now part of the Saint John suburb of Quispamsis — the community hadn't even been incorporated as a village yet.

"It was pretty well a farming area back then," Marr said. "You knew everybody on the road."

He played hockey and field sports at Rothesay Consolidated, a Grade 1-12 school for kids from across Kings County, including Rothesay, Hampton and Sussex. 

"We were all pretty well involved in sports year-round, really," Marr said. "In the summer back then, you played a little softball, at school you did track and field. Hockey in the winter, soccer in the fall. Growing up on the river, we did a lot of swimming."

After finishing school, he got a job CP Express, the trucking division of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Over his 40 years at CP Express, he played regularly in the company bowling league. 

"Way back when I started, all of those couriers that are around now weren't around then. So we had pretty much all the small parcels. We were always busy."

When he's not curling, Marr golfs three times a week — a hobby Margaret, his wife of nearly 70 years, also enjoys. 

Curling has changed since Marr joined the Hampton Curling Club in 1976. 

"Seems to get a little harder now than it used to be," he said. 

But other than creaky joints — inevitable, perhaps, when one is pushing 90 — the smoother ice surface made possible by modern water filtration technology is the biggest transformation.