Everybody must get stoned

Our man heads to the Great White North to try his hand at the king of slow-motion, broom-assisted sports: Curling.

By King Kaufman

April 19, 2002 | ST. PAUL, Minn. -- I know you only think about curling every four years when the Olympics come around, if then, but I tell you, it's got its hooks in me. Or its brooms.

Curling was an Olympic demonstration sport in 1988 and '92, then became a medal sport in 1998. Those Games were in Japan, though, and with the time difference affecting TV coverage, curling got short shrift. But at the Salt Lake Games it was lovingly covered by NBC and its hench networks, MSNBC and CNBC. And now curling's hot!

Well, maybe not hot, but warming up, if the experience of the St. Paul Curling Club, home to three of the four members of the 2002 men's Olympic team, is any indication. Jim O'Leary, who helps run the place, says that since the Olympics the club has received so many inquiring calls that for the first time it's offering clinics for newcomers. Prospective curlers learn the finer points of the sport and play a short game. I can't get to one of those, so I have O'Leary take me out on the ice and show me how it's done, thus allowing me to fulfill a lifelong fantasy of sliding around on ice with a guy named Jim. But that's another story.

O'Leary is a 63-year-old Duluth native. I ask him about the brooms. I tell him that when I was a kid, curling was inexplicably on TV on weekend mornings despite the fact that I lived in Los Angeles, where the sport has never caught on. The straight brooms and the frantic, hilarious sweeping were what caught my attention. O'Leary tells me those are called corn brooms.

"When I started curling, way back in 1950 when I was a kid, I used a corn broom, and corn brooms back then were, oh, God, like a house broom," he says. "And your hands were just taking an absolutely brutal beating. You curled a lot, and you tried everything to try to keep from getting blisters and callouses."

In the past few decades, the corn broom has been replaced by the push broom, which looks a little like a lightweight kitchen mop. Most are cloth-covered, but some elite players use brushes made of horse- or hog hair. Cloth-covered brooms don't leave as much debris on the ice, O'Leary says. A single hair can cause a sliding rock, or stone as it's also called, to carom wildly to one side. He says the club discourages the brushes.

"It'd be OK if they'd use 'em, but some guys, they buy these brushes and they figure the damn thing's gonna last forever," he says. "Well, it doesn't. You say, 'Let me look at your brush,' and holy jumpin' Judas Priest! You know, what they've gotta do when they get 'em is not only clean it but get a scissors and clip all that stuff off of there so it doesn't fall out."

I know you don't care about any of this. I just wanted you to hear O'Leary say "holy jumpin' Judas Priest!"

In this country, curling is mostly confined to Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota, though there are outposts elsewhere. It's nothing like in Canada, where the sport is second only to hockey. While the 90-year-old SPCC is the only curling club in the Twin Cities area, home to 2.8 million people, O'Leary points out that in the Winnipeg, Manitoba, area, with a quarter of the population, there are 21 clubs. A curling comedy, "Men With Brooms," starring Leslie Nielsen among others, has just become Canada's top-grossing domestic English-language movie of the past 20 years. The film doesn't yet have a U.S. distributor.

As O'Leary and I step onto the ice, a group of guys in their 30s are preparing to play a game. They're stretching. Wait a minute. The knock on curling is that the players look like truck drivers and supermarket managers, not athletes. What's with the stretching?

"There's muscles in this game that you don't use normally, so they'll stretch out and everything else before they go out on the ice, and they keep themselves in pretty good shape," O'Leary says, referring to elite players.

Later in the day, I run into Kari Erickson, the skip, or captain, of the U.S. women's Olympic team, at a Minnesota Twins baseball game. I accost her as she's buying a heap of ice cream and whipped cream only slightly smaller than she is.

"I see you're in training," I say. Ha ha. She could so kick my ass.

Next page: You gotta love a sport that's ritually interrupted by heavy drinking