Sincerity's last stand
The sport where earnest feelings are still welcome.
All my adult life I’ve been integrated with and surrounded by the internet. That is not to say I’ve spent all my waking hours online. Oh, no. Ha, ha [awkward pause]
It’s, admittedly, not a healthy way to mature. The mechanisms of surviving the internet include dark humor, irony, speed over truth, ever-changing opinions on stuff, and as much self-detachment as possible. It works. But when those traits carry over into the non-internet, life can seem a little less fulfilling.
If you never watched Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, you really ought to if you have the streaming means, specifically the episodes where he went to Iran and Houston. (There’s a Detroit one as well, and he really does go off the beaten path.) But there’s one where he goes to Charleston, South Carolina and starts off by dining at Waffle House. You can imagine how a Bourdain soliloquy of Waffle House would go, being his first time in one. I was ready for him to completely pick apart the experience, as a classically-trained French chef trying to figure out how to order the hash browns. He was out of his comfort zone but approached the restaurant like anything else: with sincerity. One line in particular stood out for me: he called Waffle House “an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.”
That’s pretty much how I’d describe the curling club.
Now, let’s not confuse sincerity with blandness — quite the opposite from your place of work, where “niceness” basically translates to the veneer of politeness at best, where trite small talk about local weather and traffic is as far as you get, maybe as far as sports teams if you’re really close to them. With those that are curling, it has been extensively catalogued, are much friendlier. And it starts with their first step on the ice.
Typically at our “learn to curls” we give them the entire arena, sans judgment, and 32 souls initiate themselves with the ways of the game. Pretty soon everyone realizes we are, for no good reason, standing on weird bumpy ice shoving polished granite with funny handles a certain number of feet … but goddamn is it fun. Such an electic activity breaks down your defenses. Once in a while a first-time curling class will coincide with actual games, and still there is no judgment from the seasoned players because we all vividly remember our first class and how horrible we were. (I can still picture myself sweeping furiously as an increasingly larger part of the arena yelled whoa at me.) The decompressing then happens in the lounge and the healing begins. You haven’t had a conversation like this in a while.
There’s a lot of cynicism in all walks of life, and rightfully so, especially when hegemonic entities (re: sports leagues) engulf individuality in favor of clean profit. Sass and skepticism are our final tools to confront their monopoly and save our sanity. Even as we burrow into professional curling’s championships (with the USA’s in Washington this week, and the Scotties this weekend), the athletes straddle that space between necessary sponsorship and raw self-expression. Even if professional curling turns into a shitshow in 20-50 years and turns my online brain into a tepid pool of memes and pop-up ads, the fabric of the curling club and its copious amounts of genuine human actions will try to counterbalance everything else.
• Speaking of nationals, and this will surprise no one, but Tabitha Peterson and Jamie Sinclair are out in front at a perfect 3-0. Patti Lank and Cassie Potter are both back, and the latter we knew about, but the former was more or less a surprise appearance. Lank is the fifth for Christine McMakin’s junior team. They’re both fighting for third place. On the men’s side, it’s between the big three of John Shuster, Korey Dropkin and Rich Ruohonen. Then there’s a gap, followed by Chase Sinnett and Dominik Maerki elbowing each other to be the fourth team. I played both of those skips this year with extremely varying results, so you can probably wager a guess which one I want to see make the playoffs.
By the way, games are on the stream every day, four draws a day. TESN has been doing some terrific commentary and they have some new fun graphical toys and also perfected the quadbox.
• Sometimes you just want to throw some rocks dressed as Hungry Hungry Hippos. We’ve all been there.
• I feel like I’ve seen different version of this video but Afghanistan outdoor curling videos are always a bit soothing. Pond curling is everywhere.
• I’ll try to do another edition for the Scotties, just like I had planned to do for US nationals, but Friday will be the Wild Card game and it’s Tracy Fleury against Jennifer Jones who beat out about 37 other Manitoban teams for the honor of the one-game play-in to wear either black or white uniforms for a week. Jennifer Jones going monotone is going to be jarring if she wins, so I’ll pick Fleury.