For Some Reason, Curling Is Enjoyable

It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how or why. But Curling, the Winter Olympic sport where averagely in-shape older men brush at ice with brooms while a usually bald guy slowly rolls a chunk of granite forward, is somehow genuinely fun to watch.

For some reason it has appeal. It sort of feels like watching your uncles sitting on the porch relaxing on rocking chairs and enjoying a casual conversation about the day’s events. It just feels good. To be upfront, I’m not a huge sports enthusiast to begin with. The first sports event I ever truly enjoyed was the Superbowl this year, and even that was mostly just because I thought it was funny that the commercials were all so sexist.

But curling is strangely addictive. It is very slow paced. All the guys are wearing badly designed spandex, they all look like Superheroes whose power is to be really good at riding a mountain bike. There are longish breaks between the action. Brooms and sweeping in general do not evoke a sense of intense competition. The sport itself has no adrenaline to it. It’s pretty hard to imagine an argument during a curling competition resulting in all-out brawl. No one has ever lost a tooth or been punched so hard their spine fractured over an argument about where a curling stone landed.

If sports originated, or at least came to it’s modern recognizable form, in the gladiator arenas of Rome, where slaves were given dull swords to fight tigers and elephants to the death, curling is the sports equivalent of a chihuahua. It is the breed of sport that has evolved so far away from its wolf origins that it now spends most of its time shivering and being fitted for tiaras.

Nonetheless, give Curling a second glance, the precision with which the guys must accurately land the stone in the target is engaging, and there is a shitload of fuck-you-screwing-over-the-other-team in the sport. The best Curlers are constantly knocking the other team’s stones out of the target, and it is always fun to watch one group of people screw over another group of people.

I’m not gonna go out and buy a skin tight spandex “Cheryl Bernard” jersey and Canada Curling Association foam finger or anything, but if you’ve got nothing to do at five in the afternoon and you get basic cable and Law and Order: SVU is a rerun, and your loved one is busy somewhere else, and you don’t have access to video games, and you don’t have access to books, and your car is in the shop so you can’t go anywhere, and it’s raining really hard so there’s nothing to do outside, and you’re over your cell phone minutes so you can’t call anybody, and you’ve already watched all your DVDs, and you’ve gotten arrested on DUI charges three times so you have an ankle bracelet that prevents you from walking somewhere, and there are no magazines or pamphlets lying around the house you haven’t read yet, give Curling a chance.