Curling

There’s a lovely little human interest story on view at the CBC today, about Canada’s other national sport, curling.

That got me thinking…

In the pantheon of professional sport, professional curling is somewhere in the sub-basement, well below professional bowling.

Indeed, the word “professional” is something of a misnomer. Many a top “professional” curler in Canada, a global curling powerhouse, can’t afford to quit their day job at Tim Horton’s.

It’s definitely not like the NBA/NFL or anything like that.

That said, it must be remembered that curling does have its charms. Until relatively recently, it was one of the few sports that could be engaged whilst having a smoke and chugging a beer.

That’s got to count for something.

And there’s no denying that curling had a larger-than-life presence in small-town Canada. Many communities built a curling sheet right alongside their hockey rink.

I even had a brief brush with curling back in my high school days.

I got a call one Saturday morning from the captain of the GCVI curling team to show up at the Guelph Curling Club.

So I did.

Seems they were in some sort of competition and hadn’t had enough of the team show up to make a quorum, or whatever they call it in curling. They went deep into their archives and must have found that on the first day of grade nine, several years prior, I had ticked a box that said I “might” be interested in curling as an extracurricular.

Once they found out I’d never in my life thrown a rock, I was summarily, and in my recollection, somewhat rudely, dismissed.

But I have a hunch that I’d be a contender for a spot on the Kosovo national curling team. After all, the CBC is giving loads of free air to a Canadian expat and his girlfriend who invented curling in Kosovo.

Is this story about curling, or is it about giving a warm and fuzzy face to the Muslim enclave that NATO carved out of the former Yugoslavia?