Making noise in the roaring game

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The thing you don’t realize about curling when you watch it via telescopic lens on TV – which is how the largest proportion of a gradually dwindling number of Canadians now experience the once-iconic sport of our chilled but eager country – is just how far you have to slide (or curl) a roughly 40-pound ellipse of Scottish granite (the stone) to reach the button (the centre) of the house (the bullseye end zone) at the other end of the sheet (the lane of ice you are curling on).

Are you following me? The point is, it’s a long way – about 120 feet, or more than a third of a football field, or the length of eight mid-sized cars – to push a rock that even amateur curlers expect to end up within inches of where it was aimed. A single shot takes about 25 seconds to reach its goal. That is a long time to suffer the embarrassment of a crappy heave – and I now speak from experience.

Then there’s all the other stuff that can go wrong: your initial slide, as you support yourself on a broom or a plastic stabilizer and try to lie down chin first on the ice to make your shot; your aim; the weight and speed you transfer to the rock; the rotation you give to curl the stone (four to five revolutions per shot, ideally; otherwise, thanks to the still-mysterious physics of curling, the rock is non-controllable); not to mention the quality of your teammates’ sweeping and the delicacy of judgment of your team’s skip (i.e. captain) who tells you, using obscure hand signals and inaudible shouts at the other end of the sheet, where to aim the rock in the first place. And of course there is the quality of the ice you are playing on, which changes over the course of a match.

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Curling, in other words, pits a deliberate human physical action against innumerable hostages to fortune. Maybe that’s why it feels so Canadian in the first place.

I fell over on my side like a poleaxed cow the first time I tried to launch a rock down sheet No. 5 at the High Park Club (founded in 1911), one of the few curling clubs left in Toronto’s west end. “When you fall, try to get up quickly, so you don’t melt the ice,” Kevin Scott, the club’s ice technician, insisted. How hot, I thought to myself, does he think my ass is? It was a Thursday evening. The Ladies Senior League occupied sheets 1 to 4. Many of the senior ladies were wearing helmets to ward off the possibility of concussion. But their rocks made a nice noise as they skimmed over the pebbled ice, hence “the roaring game.” I managed to stay upright for my second try, but the shot was so weak it didn’t make the far hogline, which is itself 21 feet short of the button. My manhood lay assailed and frozen.

Howard Stanfield, a former High Park Club champion, watched my rock putter to a stop and shook his head. Howard and Jodi McCutcheon, a well-known junior coach and two-time finalist in Canada’s national club championship, had offered to show me the ropes. “I’ve played just about every sport there is,” Howard said, his Geordie accent as thick as a slice of peat. “And curling is by far the hardest to learn.” Nothing I was doing was convincing him otherwise.

The first challenge of learning to curl these days is finding somewhere to curl: curling rinks are an endangered species, and ice time is gold. Toronto alone has lost 104 sheets of curling ice since 1980. The professional game is motoring along as an international TV spectacle (an average of 375,000 TV viewers daily watch the Brier, the Canadian men’s national curling championship), especially now that non-curling countries (South Korea, Italy) are winning Olympic medals. But the club game, not the sport but the pastime, is ailing.

“The number of people who are playing is declining,” Dr. Glenn Paulley, a former competitive curler turned coach and curling researcher in Waterloo, told me recently. There is a list of complicated reasons why: the main one is demographics. Like more than half the country not so long ago, Paulley, 63, grew up in the country, in rural Saskatchewan. “When I was little, curling was the lifeblood of the community.” In many small towns, the curling club was often the sole bar, the best restaurant, and the only reason people came to visit, for bonspiels. In 1950, Flin Flon, Man., (pop. 10,000, twice what it is today) had 50 curling rinks, more than Toronto and Montreal combined. Think about that sweet uncomplicated fact and enjoy it. Today, 80 per cent of Canadians live in cities, where land and the 8,000 gallons of water required to make the High Park Club’s ice are prohibitively expensive.

But in its heyday – the 1950s and 1960s – club curling was king. The first curling club in the country was founded in Montreal in 1807, and allegedly included among its members Scots who had curled while fighting the Seven Years War. Sir John A. Macdonald was a curler, as was Governor-General Lord Dufferin (he built the rink at Rideau Hall). Queen Victoria was a fan. Canadians were good at the game right from the start, given our long winters: the first Canadian team to tour Scotland, in 1908, won 23 of its 26 matches. The best club curlers advanced to the Brier (the men’s national championship, started in 1927) and the Scotties (the women’s equivalent, which kicked off in 1960) and thence to the world championships, originally known as the Scotch Cup. The sport was international, but its heroes were local: Ernie Richardson from the Richardson Rink in Regina (which won four Briers in five years) won the Scotch Cup the first year Canada competed, in 1959, and then won it again the next year, and then a guy named Hec (The Friendly Giant) Gervais from Edmonton (who invented the corner guard, don’t even ask) won it, and then Richardson won it again two years in a row. Canadian women such as Colleen Jones and Jennifer Jones (undefeated for gold at Sochi) and today’s Rachel Homan are global curling legends. At the Winter Olympics (where curling has been an official sport since 1988), Canada is the most successful curling country in history, with 11 medals, including six golds. The Swedes are barely visible in the distance, at second place.

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Curling even had moral clout. In W.O. Mitchell’s 1951 play, The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, an amateur curler from Alberta sells his soul to the Devil for a chance to play in the Brier – our very own frozen Faust.

A couple of days later I convinced a group of guys at the High Park club to let me curl with them. The youngest, a firefighter named Rick, was 53. The oldest was in his late seventies. It was the afternoon Men’s Seniors League, one of the raft of teams that crowd onto High Park’s coveted ice seven days a week. We shook hands before we started, and after we finished, as is curling tradition. They made me lead, which meant I threw our side’s first two rocks of each end. Lead is like being the drummer in a rock band: you set the pace, but no one expects you to sing. There are still three other curlers who can fix your screw-ups.

To my surprise, I placed my first shot, a centre guard, right where Mike Musgrove, our skip, told me to. “Beginner’s luck,” someone said. I later curled another sprightly shot in behind a guard, and managed a “biter” (a rock left partially on the outer ring) in the back of the house. The problem was that I threw them by accident, not because they were called for.

Alas my other 13 (thirteen!) rocks, in the eight ends we played over the course of two hours, either didn’t make it past the hog line or rocketed through the house like drunken teenagers.

Which was when I discovered the consolation of sweeping.

The weird thing, Jodi McCutcheon noted at that first lesson, is that “people haven’t really decided why a curling rock curls.” This gives me comfort. Sweeping or brushing in front or to the side of a curled stone can alter its path and/or make it go farther, a phenomenon Glenn Paulley has been studying with engineers and kinesiologists at Dalhousie University for at least 10 years. “We’re making some inroads into understanding what’s going on at a molecular level,” he admitted, “but I don’t know if it’s going to be solved in my lifetime.”

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Elite sweepers are much more important in the game than they used to be. Anywhere from 80 to 98 per cent of a top sweep’s body weight goes onto his or her broom, which is why they look like spastic octopi as they flail down the sheet. The friction allegedly melts the ice, which affects the direction and velocity of the rock. The problem, Paulley says, is that “the forces involved are very subtle, and very difficult to measure.”

The mysteries of sweeping have in turn fuelled curling’s rare cheating scandals. One old trick, from the days of corn brooms, was for a sweeper to hold a piece of broom straw in his or her mouth, to drop on the ice under a speeding rock to slow it down. (Nothing else will.) When Howard Stanfield and Jodi McCutcheon started curling, you were only allowed to sweep across the running surface of the curling rock. That technique evolved after the mid-1980s, after brushes replaced brooms, and well before Broomgate in 2015, when Newfoundland’s Brad Gushue (five Briers, two Olympic medals, a world championship) uncovered another team’s use of a ridged broom that was later banned. A scandal in curling! There were heart attacks all round. These days – after a lot of experimentation with horsehair and sundry other materials – only one kind of brushing material is allowed: Oxford 55 sport yellow nylon with a denier of 420. Curlers aren’t even allowed to share a broom, much less change them during a match.

I threw myself into sweeping. I sometimes couldn’t tell if the shouts of “Yes! Yes! Yes!” were coming from my skip or the guy on the next sheet over, but sweeping was a way of doing penance for my errant rocks. It felt almost Biblical. Every time I swept, Mike, my skip – a guy in his seventies who propelled his rocks with a “delivery stick,” so he didn’t have to crouch down – said “Good sweep.” I thought he was just being nice, but then I remembered Glenn Paulley describing curling as “the sport most dependent on teamwork. It takes four players to make every shot.”

The game ended in a tie. We were ahead 5-2 at one point, but I was so incapable of adding points to our score that the other team sneaked up on the last end. “Did we lose?” I said to Dave, the lead of the other team.

“You didn’t lose,” Dave said. “You tied.”

“That’s a loss for us,” one of my teammates interjected.

“And a win for us,” Dave replied.

No one seemed bitter. That felt … new, even unexpected. We all retired to the bar and had a drink, per another ancient custom in curling. “Do people ever second-guess the skip?” I asked Mike, our skip.

“All the time,” he replied.

“There’s a lot of plausible deniability in this game,” Dave added, revealing the source of curling’s ineffable charm. A loss can always be someone else’s fault, but it’s also everyone’s fault, and thus no one’s. Curling is the ultimate team sport. It demands instant and honest four-way communication, but also instant and total forgiveness, so a team can clear its house and start all over again in a fresh end. Imperfection and failure are built into its near-impossibility, which is how you can come out of any game feeling forgiven and, at the very least, human. No wonder we have always loved it so much.