On the Rocks

SOME UNSOLICITED ADVICE for the cocksure weekend warrior: Underestimate the physical demands of curling at your own peril. Go on, question its standing as an Olympic sport, dismiss it as shuffleboard in sweatpants. But “delivering the rock” (that’s “trying to slide the squatty, granite teapot–looking thing as close as possible to the bull’s eye at the other end of the lane” to the sports–of–the–north neophyte) provides irrefutable proof that nothing is easy on ice.

This painfully obvious warning would have recalibrated my athletic confidence at the Granite Curling Club last fall, had it revealed itself before I sauntered out to the ice and flirted with a busted hip. Of course, there were clues when I got there: A laminated list of safety tips posted on the door to the rink that screamed, in so many words, “Remember, moron, pride goes before the fall.” The novice league members, squatting in their lanes, who steadied themselves on homemade braces made out of PVC pipe. The smirk that my coach, Brady Clark, flashed when I exclaimed, “Let’s do this!” as I stepped on the ice and then slipped.

I overlooked these omens of future humiliation in part because Clark and another member, Tom FitzGerald, had been tag–teaming me with shovelfuls of information about the club and the sport since I’d walked in. First came the history lesson: The Granite Curling Club, ­FitzGerald pointed out with justifiable pride, is the only facility on the West Coast dedicated to curling. Its founders literally and figuratively built the Elks Club Lodge–like structure from the ground up in 1961. (The club’s name, he claimed, is a nod to the quarried stone used to make curling’s 42–pound, handled rocks, but “granite” might as well be a reference to how the ice feels when you land on it.)

Then, as the novices scooted through drills on the other side of a wall of windows, Clark did his best to explain the deceptively complex rules of the game. Curling is, in most cases, played by two teams (or “rinks”) of four. Each player delivers two rocks per “end” (a round of play similar to an inning in baseball), for a total of 16 rocks. The rink that lands a rock closest to the center of the 12–foot bull’s eye (or “button”) painted under the ice gets one point for that throw, plus one point for every rock that’s closer than the opposing rink’s closest rock. The rink with the most points after eight ends wins. And about that furious sweeping: It creates a film of water on the ice’s surface that can extend a rock’s slide by as much as 20 feet. “So,” Clark said, “you want to throw it a little bit lighter and let the sweepers do the work.”

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Published: January 2010