Coming Wednesday: Romancing the stone
Andy Holtzman/Daily News
Don't fret, America. My curling days aren't over. I'd just prefer to look at the rink as half-full, without innocent bystanders pointing and laughing. I'm still in the reinventing stage.
But with six months to go for the 2010 Winter Olympics, I'm behind schedule. More accurately, I'm sitting on my behind. On a block of ice. Trying to figure out why this isn't as easy as it sorta looks.
Let's see, just Google "Vancouver . . . 2010 . .. schedule." Passport? Who needs a passport these days to . . . never mind. Here, the curling competition runs from Feb. 16-25, with the medal event two days later.
By my calendar, there's probably enough time left to learn the sport that I've seen plenty of times in past Olympiads, qualify for the U.S. team, attend more training camp somewhere in Wisconsin, play in a few warm-up games against Poland, and clean up on the medal stand.
I dream big.
Which makes the pre-training session at the Iceoplex Easy Street rink in Simi Valley (liked here) the other night kinda look more like a nightmare. Or just a minor setback. It depends on how you interpret dreams.
The SoCal Curling Club (linked here) had its "learn to curl" session for anyone over 12 and with $20 to invest lured a couple dozen contestants who may have thought they were trying out for a Canadian reality show. The reality was, just because you owned a pair of warm gloves and thermal socks, there's no guarantee this club would even take you on as a regular participant once league play opens this weekend.
The club started four years ago, right as curling became appointment TV viewing during the 2006 Turin Games in Italy, since Fred Roggin made it all look so campy. That's about the time when Carrie Cresante, a Westlake Village attorney smart enough to make it through Pepperdine law school, thought she had the foresight to link into an Olympic-level sport and see where it could take her.
As a founding member of these SoCal Curlers, she's been to Canada, where she picked up a pair of $200 specialized shoes with special sliders on the bottom, but better than what you'd find in the rental department at the local bowling alley. She's also become quite fond of her carbon-fiber broom, because it's much lighter to move down the ice than those old wooden-handled jobs.
"Most don't have these shoes, but if I play, I use the right equipment," the 31-year-old said. "I'm competitive. I wouldn't be a good lawyer if I wasn't."
Plus, she said, the shoes were insulated. For that price, they'd better come with a warm-up act and two-drink minimum.
I really had no time, or patience, to learn all about the foreign terminology. The stone -- that a 44-pound piece of granite with a handle attached -- is supposed to be headin' to the house. If you accidentally touched it with a broom as you were sweeping, it's called "burning the stone," but since you're on the honor system, you have to call the friction infraction on yourself.
There's the lead, second, vice skip and skip yelling at you. The hack line is 21 feet to the hogline. . . .
Blah, blah, blah. . . . All hogwash.
The problem I soon figured out was that there was no real curling smack-talk. Not name calling, or any kind of disruptive maneuvers that would throw the opponents off.
"Curling is a gentleman's sport," said Cresante, a petite gentle woman who suddenly took on an icy stare looked as if she was about to serve me a subpoena right there for some kind of insubordination.
From that point, I shoved my notebook and pen back in my jeans' pocket, and then realized jeans really weren't the proper Olympic-issued uniform.
Ever tried a Pilates class? Lots of stretching, lunging, core muscle work. Shoulda thought of that weeks ago. You'd never think of trying that with jeans on. So why curling?
The first stretch - the first movement to get the stone sliding ideally down the ice - involves strong thighs, a steady push forward, and the balance of a diner waitress with six helpings of meatloaf on each forearm. Drop it, and you're a mess.
My left leg slid out, my momentum lurched forward, my right shoulder gave way and gravity played its evil game, making me look like a shopping cart with a stuck wheel. In some unfashionable way, I was flat on my stomach, sprawled out on the target in front of me as if I'd just fallen out of an airplane without a parachute and landed on a pond in Alaska during mid-January.
I was hardly alone, but still, feeling vulnerable. A few more attempts actually produced some more credible semi-slides forward - once, finally able to actually release the stone, give it the curl (hence, the name) and watch it spin out of control maybe five feet in front of me. Since the thing is supposed to slide maybe another 100 feet, straight, forward, with the help of my teammates' sweeping abilities, I was left pounding the ice with my fist.
Criminy.
To be brutally honestly, I was hardly swept up in this whole curling movement in general, and by what I was doing in particular -- sore from the lack of stretching prior, wet from the jeans soaking in the damp ice surface, and wondering how this could end even more badly.
I understand this thing may be sweeping the nation -- there are more than 130 curling clubs with 15,000 playing shuffleboard on ice, a handful in Southern California. The odds of breaking through and making the Olympic team don't look that tough.
I needed to regroup while my group went on to learn the ultra technical facets of how to properly put the biscuit in the basket -- or whatever the kids in Kentucky are calling it these days.
Many of them, some who came as far as a couple hours away to give this a try, showed promise. I could only promise my wife not to worry about buying me any official $200 shoes. I'd probably be OK with Chuck Taylors - shoes that may still take me to Vancouver. Just maybe not as a curler. Or one who'll be in the Top 20 by next week.
They do make this desktop curling game (linked here) that may be a cooler way to practice.
And by the way, that luge thing doesn't look all that tough. I'm already on my back, and it's cold. I'm ready to be reinvented again.
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