Commentary: Curlers: Rock stars of the Olympics
By Dave George
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
PINEROLO, Italy — The true rock stars of the Winter Olympics, men who bring smooth, granite stones to every competition, are playing a limited engagement these days some 30 miles from the excitement of Turin.
The middle of nowhere is too harsh an assessment for where the Olympic curling tournament is being staged, but you do have to drive well past None.
That’s NO-nay, for those practicing their Italian at home, and it’s just one of the many crossroads on the highway to Pinerolo’s curling castle, the Palaghiaccio.
The passing landscape from Turin is a fair approximation of Minnesota this time of year, or the wintry plains of Canada, if only the permafrost were several feet deeper. The tractors are stored away in Northern Italy’s barns, unneeded in the vast, lonely fields with their bumper harvest of snow. Farmhouse windows glow dull and orange in the winter night, sealed tight, steamed over.
Perfect curling country, in other words, and peopled by ideal curling fans.
Gangs of local grade-schoolers on a field trip, for example, filled up whole sections of the grandstand at Monday’s afternoon matches. “ITALIA, ITALIA,” they called for half an hour, long before the Italian men’s team showed up to be crushed by the Swiss. Happy to be here, the kids were, and brilliantly cued, cult-like, to leap and hug and wave their little flags whenever a granite stone slid from the hand of a countryman.
Who says it’s tough to score an Olympic ticket? Just about anybody can find a seat in Pinerolo, and that’s just fine, because curling is the kind of sport just about anybody can do. Check out Scott Baird, an alternate on the American team, who at 54 is the oldest Winter Olympian ever.
John Shuster, who works the hardware department at a Minnesota Home Depot, is more common at this elite level. Even at 23, he was breathing heavy and searching for a sports drink toward the end of Monday’s 6-3 preliminary-round loss to Canada, having brushed and slid and brushed and slid for nearly three hours in the peculiar sweeping activity that reduces friction on the ice and thus alters the speed of the curling stone on its way to the target.
Imagine most of an afternoon spent rubbing oil stains out of the driveway. That’s the bent-over, serious arm-pumping motion of it.
Don’t imagine, though, that oil-stain removal will one day become an Olympic sport. Don’t be silly. Bowling will be a medal sport long before that.
“For sure,” said Shuster, “it gets hot out there. It may not look like it, but you can work up a sweat.”
Must be right, because up in the stands U.S. fans are wearing American flags across their laps like stadium blankets at Soldier Field. The temperature in this steel warehouse of an arena must be about 50 degrees, the better to preserve the sheen and speed of four ice sheets that are in use simultaneously.
All right, so we’ve learned that sliding a stone toward a target and surrounding it with busy broomsmen is hard work. I’m willing to suggest a second major lesson may be true. Though no one at the Palaghiaccio could confirm it Monday, it’s entirely possible that the odd term “right on the button” has its origins in curling.
The button is the bull’s-eye in the center of the scoring area. A perfect shot, then, would sit squarely on the button, and most likely be slammed right out of there a few seconds later by the opponent, shuffleboard-style.
It gets nasty, all right, though no one ever is quite foolhardy enough to cross the hog line.
Hey, the less we know about the 19th-century Scots who drew up the rules for this game, the better.
Let’s just say, all arguments about athleticism aside, that there is a fascinatingly cerebral foundation to curling, a basic understanding of the proper angles in billiards and of the useful method of curving, or “curling,” an object with a twist of the wrist upon delivery. You’ve seen all of that if you’ve gotten hooked on the Olympic video of the rock stars at work, and as a startling bonus you’ve heard them, too.
Listening to the various captains shouting frantic instructions to their sweepers in the various languages of the Games, it might as well be angry foremen on the Tower of Babel construction project. Raise your hand if you’ve been awakened on the couch some late night by this hoarse chaos coming from the television.
All right, all right, put your hand down and relax. Wouldn’t want to pull something. Curlers are smart enough to know that. Consequently, they train extensively for this two-week competition. And what space-age training method do they employ?
“Sweeping,” said U.S. curler Joe Polo, a self-proclaimed “sixth-year senior” studying mechanical engineering at the University of North Dakota.
Joe is known also as “Rik Danger,” according to his official Olympic biography, but that’s really just the name he gives when doing karaoke in public. Curlers singing karaoke on a Saturday night. Takes me back to the days of Lawrence Welk.
Takes us up, also, to the winning of medals, which may be the best reason of all for curling to be in the Olympics. Wonder of wonders, it’s a winter sport that Americans may actually be capable of mastering.
The U.S. women’s team, sadly, is out of the running, but if Pete Fenson can manage the men’s team in Wednesday’s semifinal against Canada the way he manages the night shift back at Dave’s Pizza in Bemidji, Minn., America will have its first medal in curling since the sport joined the Olympic parade at Nagano in 1998.
Of course, Canada, where more than 90 percent of the world’s curlers supposedly live, is expected to win that game, and the gold medal, too.
“By their countrymen, I guess, they’re expected to win,” said Fenson, “but we don’t expect them to win.”
Rock on, curly men, rock on.
Copyright © 2006, The Palm Beach Post. All rights reserved.
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