Curling With The Curmudgeon: Part 4

The thing about curling is that it was invented by archaic drunk Scotsmen. There is no other explanation. Go back in time and imagine the kind of man who spent all summer whacking a testicle sized rock around a sheep pasture until it fell into a gopher hole. Imagine the sort of nut who would take the gopher hole game super-seriously until he’d molded it into a religion called golf. Next pickle his cerebrum. Keep him cooped up during a long cold winter. Give him scotch and bagpipes and nothing else to do. Eventually he’ll have cabin fever and wind up staggering around a lake playing oversized shuffleboard with a stone he swiped from the nearest sheep fence. That is curling.

I don’t care what the history books say, if you play the game, you know I’m right.

Other than the basics, I knew little about curling. Soon I was certain that it’s the best sport in the history of time. Why? Because there was a row of coat hangers at the sheets and above each coat hook was a cupholder for your drink. Designated beer holders?!? God damn I love curling!

Things took a downturn when I was handed a “broom” that looks nothing like a broom (more like a lame squeegee). I barely had time to grok the broom when I had to slip a ridiculous boot condom over my left boot’s treads. I did not like the boot condom.

The idea here is that your left foot now has absolutely zero traction while your right foot is still a regular Vibram soled boot (which is still slippery on ice mind you). When I say “zero traction” I mean it. You may think an ice skate has zero traction but that’s not true at all. An ice skate has an epic cutting edge. You can use that to control your motion. The shoe thing gave me no control whatsoever. Not forward, not backward, not lateral… totally fuckin’ useless.

There is no situation in life where asymmetric shoes are a good idea. I went down like a sack of potatoes and everyone was laughing. Only then did the second person step on the ice and they too went ass over teacup. Who’s laughing now? Then two more fell. Our host was desperately trying to instruct us on the fine art of keeping upright in the strange universe of asymmetrical ice shoes but we were too stupid to figure it out. None but our guide knew anything about anything and I wondered if he felt like the Napoleon women herding half sentient tadpoles around the hockey rink. Poor bastard.

I pulled my ass off the ice, hobbled to my drink for some liquid courage, stepped back on the ice, and balanced uneasily. Ballsy! One thing I’m sure of; asymmetric shoes are a unique experience and a great way to break a limb. (Wikipedia tells me the two shoes with different functions are called a “glider” and a “gripper”. This is totally unhelpful, but now you know it too.)

Invented. By. Drunk. Scotsmen.

Each lane (“sheet”) had a dozen or more “stones”. These Godzilla sized urinal cakes are made of granite. They’re color coded and numbered (I think the pros get to know each stone’s personality). They have a handy handle on the top but think carefully before you pick one up. I hefted one and promptly fell on my ass again. They’re heavy! Think bowling balls are heavy? Not a chance! Remember the drunk Scotsman theory? Double the weight of a mere bowling ball and you’re in the ballpark. I think I was noodling around with 40 pounds of granite… in asymmetric shoes…. on ice.

The huge mass impressed me. It’s pretty cool. They moved with mathematical precision. It was gorgeous to watch. 40 pounds of granite slides down the ice with arrogant amounts of momentum and you can sense Newtonian physics writ large. It felt less like pushing game pieces and more like establishing planetary trajectories. If bowling is rolling a cannonball, curling is shoving an asteroid into the void until it just kisses the edge of a gravity well.

Well that’s my description. YMMV.

Gorgeous motions don’t come easy. My stones didn’t go where I wanted. Ha! That’s an inadvertent pun but it is totally apropos!

It’s not just strength. It’s balance, coordination, and flexibility. You need the skills of a Cirque du Soleil gymnast to make ‘em go. I’m as flexible as a steel pipe. I was definitely out of my element.

How to throw a curling stone as explained by the Curmudgeon:

Here’s how you do it. You crouch against foot pegs (like the beginning of a running event). I think they’re called “hacks” but I called then “launchpads”. You’ve only got one foot against that solid launchpad. The other foot is a glider that’s moving all over the ice and is totally fucking useless.

In order to keep from falling over, you wedge the broom under your armpit and brace it against the ice. This doesn’t help a bit because you can’t easily grip a broomhandle with your armpit. Also, it’s braced against ice. Who came up with the idea of bracing against ice? The Three Stooges?

I’ll say this for it; when done right it looks very cool. I did not look cool.

You kick off the launchpad fairly hard and stretch out like a jaguar going for a kill. Except that you do it in slow motion; a mystic space jaguar on Quaaludes perhaps. The one leg that has launched has functioned like a pogo stick and is now bereft of kinetic energy. It drags behind you like a tailpipe that just fell off a Ford. Meanwhile the other leg is functioning as a monopod on a frictionless surface. The equivalent of a greased unicycle. With one leg splayed out and one twisted into a pretzel; pogo stick to the right and unicycle to the left… you’re already sliding madly forward. One hand is lightly resting on a stone that’s twice the weight of a bowling ball. The other is gripping a broom that is doing to no good whatsoever because it’s braced against fucking ice.

While you’ve got your whole body in motion (and spread across what feels like ten feet) you continue to slide on the foot with absolutely no traction (or lateral control), adjust the stone’s motion with the kind of precision NASA uses to put a probe on Mars, gently rotate the stone to impart spin, continue to balance with the broom, and then let go. The stone drifts away, almost frictionless and silent. Away it goes in glorious stately beauty.

Meanwhile, you’ve stretched so far that your nutsack is in Sacramento while your left shoulder is in Seattle. Then you faceplant on the ice like a turtle dropped from an airplane.

Did I take a few aspirin after this adventure? You’re damn straight I did. I needed it too, it was a week before I could walk without going in circles.

After action report follows in the upcoming last post…