Single-Minded: An Independent Journal of Fact and Opinion

The Washington Post recently ran a story on the Olympic sport of curling. The author, Hank Stuever, clearly was trying to burnish his credentials as a writer of arch prose with such stinging barbs as:

''It takes a lot to love curling, and people all over the world do, to no satisfactory explanation. Its presence on afternoon cable TV (and the high-ish ratings it garners) once again testifies to the soothing allure of athletic catatonia.''

Now it just so happens that I watched a bit of curling on CNBC. Okay, so it isn't the most action packed sport in the world. In fact, there isn't much action at all.

What action there is commences when one player gently sends a highly polished 42-pound granite stone gliding majestically down a 146-foot long surface of glass smooth ice. Two other players precede the stone, frantically sweeping the ice in front of it, providing the enduring image of curling that so lends itself to parody.

The idea is to get your stone into the ''house'', a 12 foot circle, and the role of the sweepers is to slow down or speed up the stone as needed. The strategy comes in knocking your opponent's stone out of the house and getting your stone in position to block the opponent from knocking your stone out.

Is this something that is pretty easy to make fun of? Sure. The guys that play it don't look like athletes, and the fans are decidedly not taken from the gliterati. You won't find a lot of $500 sun glasses in this crowd.

What you will find is one of the few remaining bastions of the amateur spirit that is supposed to be at the heart of the Olympic games. You don't get in to curling for the bucks. This isn't figure skating, where a gold medal is worth millions.

Curling is an actual amateur sport that is played by people who do something else for a living. Mike Schneeberger, a member of the U.S. Olympic Curling Team, is a bindery machine operator from Minnesota. A couple of his fellow team members work for Home Depot, another as a papermaker, another as a combination commodity broker and farmhand.

Curling is a throwback to an unplugged era, a reminder that in some parts of the world winter is a long cold affair and there is plenty of time on your hands. It surely must mean something that curling and golf both originated in the same part of the world.

Not everything has to have flash to be interesting. Not everything has to be fast to be fun. There may be no glory in curling, but there is plenty of pleasure to be found in watching men and women compete for the love of the game. That's the glory of it.

Something to think about.

February 18, 2002

Curling is played in 33 different countries by 1.5 million players. Of these players, 1.2 million are Canadians. The United States has about 15,000 players in 130 clubs. Over half of the American curlers can be found in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Curling is played with 42-pound granite stones are made from a rare type of granite found only in Scotland's Ailsa Craig. The sport originated in the frozen marshes of 16th Century Scotland and was brought to North America by Scottish immigrants in the 18th Century.

Oh yeah, the sweepers, what's up with that? The idea is to use the brooms to produce friction to melt the ice in front of the stone. This slows it up as needed to ensure that it ends up where it is supposed to.

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