Growing up I always tried various sports. I always enjoyed things that had rules and strategy and numbers. And throughout my life and to this day, I like watching any kind of sport for that reason. But growing up trying to play them, I went in with high hopes and left with low morale:
Soccer — Too much running!
Baseball — Too much running! Also, good lord, did you ever try hitting a thrown baseball?
Basketball — Fun! Early growth spurt! Then the dudes kept getting taller and sweatier and I just got sweatier.
Golf — Too much walking!
Tennis — An insane amount of pivoting!
Football — Didn’t even try!
Hockey — Also didn’t try, though I appreciate that if I’m going to die playing a sport, at least its playing field is closer to morgue temperature.
I guess the one I enjoyed the most in high school was bowling. I fondly remember my first and only 200 game. It’s an underrated sport that combines a repetitive skill with mental stamina, plus an electronic scoreboard that you can manipulate to make it look like you did well, but at the end of the day it was just bowling.
Intramurals in high school across all sports were a bit disheartening. I was definitely not a good athlete by then, and the level of camaraderie felt nonexistent. The sports playing field has long been perceived as battlefield to establish dominance and little else.
In the fall of 2001 I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University. My college courses were laid out for me. I didn’t pick them. My advisor walked me through what I needed to take for my major and for core requisites. I didn’t sleep at all the night before this orientation day, due to nervousness. So at the time, a sleep-deprived me was very amenable to a microeconomics class Monday-Wednesday-Thursday at 7 p.m. A month in, there was much regret.
I always liked math, but I just couldn’t figure this one out. Also the professor was getting up there in years and extremely hard to hear. Any pencil dropping or chair creaking drowned out his voice. It was suboptimal, I would say. And all my friends started going out for the evening around this time, and here I am traipsing across an increasingly colder campus to listen to this shit.
One particular night I was dreading the upcoming class, which I had dutifully attended every time. And then a knock on my door: one of my friends swung by to ask if I wanted to go to the ice arena across the street because they had free curling lessons.
My knowledge of curling at the time was that it existed. That’s about it. I knew it was an ice sport. And I knew it wasn’t broomball. I also knew it wasn’t economics, and that was enough for me to grab my coat but not my backpack and try this thing out.
As I recall, we were the only two on our sheet with an instructor. They slapped a piece of duct tape on my right shoe to act as a slider. We learned how to throw some rocks. We learned how to sweep. We definitely got caught in a moment where they told us to stop sweeping but didn’t and then the entire rink was yelling at us to stop. But I left the experience … hopeful? I definitely wanted to keep trying it. So I fortunately found my way into the curling class (college credit and everything) and it took off from there.
(I ultimately passed the econ class.)
Admittedly, I didn’t take the sport too seriously in college. I loved it, and played in college tournaments whenever possible (which was to say, twice a year) and intramural curling, which was a thing, and I’d clean the hell up in those leagues because nobody else had even taken a class before. I regret not joining the actual club sooner, but I remember just wanting to play the sport with my friends and not adults … some of which were my professors. Now I play the sport, and compete with and against my former professors.
This is one of the first scenes from the 2002 Canadian film Men With Brooms, a film which I recently discussed on the Big Screen Sports podcast. It’s available on Amazon Prime if you’ve never seen it, and it’s probably a must-watch-once film. If much of the rest of the movie can be disregarded (namely the romantic comedy portion of it where the main character ends up with his ex-fiancée’s sister), it’s still worth it for this scene, and this soliloquy.
The more I get into it, the more I am asked how I found this weird sport, and maybe at some point I will start changing the story to be the opening scene of Field of Dreams where a voice told me to plow under my crops to build a curling rink so that the 1939 Brier champions would have a place to play, but ultimately it would be so that I could sweep a rock thrown by my dad.
That’s actually a better origin story, because it has ghosts.
The Links Portion Of The Newsletter That Will Probably Have A Better Name Next Edition — You likely do not want this newsletter to just be me rambling about how much I like this sport … OR DO YOU? Assuming you don’t, here’s some stuff I found around these parts that other people did rather well:
• Kalamazoo had their Beerspiel last weekend which meant the triumphant return of keg curling. At some point they’re just not going to use the rocks and the entire beerspiel will be keg curling and nobody will complain.
• The United States, a country known for winning gold medals in the sport of curling and nothing else [citation needed], somehow hadn’t won a men’s Grand Slam yet, at least until this past weekend at the Tier 2 Tour Challenge. Congratulations to Korey Dropkin’s team, who had Joe Polo playing with them, who is apparently the secret to winning an Olympic medal and/or a Grand Slam for the Americans.
• Also Nina Roth’s team, skipped by Tabitha Peterson, reached the Tier 1 Tour Challenge women’s semifinals. Roth is on maternity leave, expecting her first child in April, and when she comes back, I think the team is going to have a very interesting decision on who throws skip stones.
• Everyone has pins, but what Palmetto Curling Club is trying to say here, is, maybe we should be doing scarves instead. (And what a scarf it is.)
This week: I’m doing our mixed doubles bonspiel for the first time. Mixed doubles is very fun and it’s the only time anybody lets me sweep in a bonspiel.
You have successfully reached the end of the first edition of this newsletter. The goal here is to send this twice a week.