Never on the Rocks

he flings it on direct; it glides along
Hoarse murmuring,
while, plying hard before,
Full many a besom
sweeps away the snow
Or icicle, that might
obstruct its course

At about the same time Graeme was writing his poem, Scottish troops stationed in Nova Scotia fought off boredom by melting down cannonballs to fashion curling irons (stones). The first club in Canada was established a few decades later in Montreal, by twenty merchants who had been playing on the frozen St. Lawrence River.

This all adds up to a rich history (you can almost taste it in Winnipeg), but after taking in dozens of games I have concluded that it will never be among the sexiest of sports. There will probably never be a Sports Illustrated Women of Curling issue. It does not rank with auto racing, fencing, bullfighting, cliff diving, or even basketball for grace and aplomb. There is little action, and what there is takes place slowly. Yet the sport is heavy with drama and suspense, and incorporates aspects from other competitions: the strategic planning of chess, the controlled languidness of baseball, the physics-in-action precision of billiards, the back-and-forth of tennis, the self-regulation of golf, and the beer-drinking camaraderie of bowling.

The close bond that many curlers share is reflected in the good-natured banter at the Pembina Club, where Wendy Foster munched on cold pizza and watched her son, Jamie, play. “My son entered the bonspiel late, and he’s in a tough draw,” she explained between bites. Jamie’s team was up against it, battling 2002 World Junior Champion and tournament favourite David Hamblin. Hamblin was among the few pros competing, and prior to the match he’d focused by staring into space. Like his teammates, he was fit, toned, and ready to conquer. “We go into every event expecting to win,” said Hamblin, without smiling. He draws a comparison to golf. “Only you decide,” he said, “when to begin your swing.”

Hamblin’s team easily trounced Foster’s squad 12-2. Still, the fact that amateurs and club players can play against established pros is one of the unique elements embodied in the bonspiel. And sometimes, with a little luck, the amateurs even win. “Curling is a humbling game,” Finkbeiner had told me. “You can be so much better than the opposition and still lose.”

It does have a social hierarchy, though Often the name of the most pretentious curling club in a community contains the word “granite.” In Winnipeg, the “mother club” is the Granite Curling Club, which was founded in 1880. I didn’t find any curling brooms disguised as flasks there; it bore more resemblance to the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters golf tournament, complete with stuffy men stuffed into stuffy blazers—except they were drinking beer instead of bourbon.

Clare Miller, a former Manitoba Masters provincial champion, has been a member of the Granite for forty-five years, and in our conversation he raised an interesting point. In a year when Canadians watched owners and striking players battle over $2 billion in nhl hockey revenues, and while nearly every professional sport has been damaged by the excesses of huge contracts and drug abuse, curling remained untainted. Sure, the purses for the big events have gone up, with teams competing for prizes as large as $150,000 on the World Curling Tour, but the game remains largely unchanged by either technology (a broom is still basically a broom) or temperament (as far as I could tell, there are no Todd Bertuzzis terrorizing the rinks). “I know of no other sport,” said Miller, “where all the competitors play the game in the positive sense, and do nothing detrimental to the game.”