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Curling
Saturday, 2005 March 5 - 12:08 am
Last week I almost went curling. This week I actually did. It has nothing to do with weightlifting or hairstyling.

Curling is a sport played on ice, with 44-pound granite rocks. I should probably say it's more of a game than a sport. Mr. Sorge, my sports medicine teacher in high school, defined the distinction like this: "If you can't BOO, it's not a sport; it's a game." There's usually no booing in curling. There's no trash talk. It's very genteel.

It's called "curling" because as you slide the rocks down the ice, you put a slight spin on them, and that causes their trajectories to curve. No one is quite sure of the physics behind why the stone curls; it's one of the great unsolved mysteries of life. Well, at least for Canadians.

I was a high school kid in Michigan when I first saw curling. It looked weird; I mean, how many other sports do you know that involve brooms and polished granite rocks? How many other sports have traditions involving drambuie and bagpipes? But I was weird kid, and I liked anything that was different. And besides, here was a sport that emphasized strategy and finesse over brute athleticism. I was hooked immediately.

I never got to actually curl when I lived in Michigan. I saw it on TV because we were close to Canada, and we could pick up CBC from Windsor. But the nearest curling club was in Detroit and I couldn't imagine actually going there. I had this idea that it was this very exclusive thing, like the Detroit Athletic Club or something.

At one point, Mr. Sorge, my sister, and I had this idea to flood a tennis court and make our own curling rink, and use gallon milk jugs as our curling rocks. But alas, that never came to fruition.

A couple of years after I moved to North Carolina, I saw an announcement in the newspaper that a curling club was forming, mostly from a bunch of transplanted Canadians and New Englanders. I could hardly believe it. My first thought was that I had to join this club, just so I could tell the folks back in Michigan that I was a curler. "I curl. I am Ken the Curler. Come, watch me curl."

The thing is, it turned out to be a lot of fun. And I'm actually pretty good at it.

Curling is now an Olympic sport. Unless they make scotch-drinking or porn-watching an Olympic sport also, curling is my only chance at ever being an Olympic athlete. I've thought about establishing a curling club in the Cayman Islands so I could be sure to be a national champion somewhere. Then Disney could make a movie about me, and they could call it "Cool Sweepings".

I think the best thing about curling is the tradition where the winners of a match buy drinks for the losers. Basically, it means EVERYONE'S A WINNER. Woot!
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Posted by Ken in: life

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