The official team photo of the U.S. Men's Curling Team looks as if it could have been stolen off the wall of Waunakee's All-Star Lanes. Its members are more apt to be participants in the popular Men's Tuesday Night League than to be Olympic athletes competing on the world's stage. And who's to say they weren't?
This year's entire five-man squad, whose off-season occupations range from paper maker to bindery machine operator, are all, in fact, Wisconsin natives. If there were ever a hometown team, this is it.
Considered to be a cross between bowling and shuffleboard, this sport has upper Midwest written all over it. An ancient game that originated in Scotland some five centuries ago, when farmers would slide odd-shaped rocks across frozen marshes, it first came to North America via Canada and eventually worked its way south.
Today curling is mostly played indoors on a playing surface, or sheet, that is 138 feet long by approximately 14 feet wide. The rocks have become uniform 42-pound granite stones, and the game is played, in very simple terms, by sliding these stones across the sheet and trying to get them as close as possible to scoring markers called tees. Each team plays eight stones and the team that is closest to their tee wins.
But this simple description merely adds fuel to the fire of those who believe curling not to be a sport and therefore unworthy of Olympic status. Curling is in fact a very physically demanding sport in which success depends on acceleration in three main areas: the delivery, the sweep and strategy.
The U.S. team has combined a mastery of these three elements to vault into recent national prominence. In the Nagano games, the sport's first appearance at the Olympic level, the United States finished a respectable fourth, and in the first round of this year's games, they have so far already defeated the world-champion Swedish team.
Curling is also a sport steeped in tradition. Enthusiasts of the sport consider it a gentleman's game, and its honor code is rigidly enforced. Chief among these is that a true curler would rather lose than win unfairly. A good curler also never attempts to distract an opponent or otherwise prevent him from playing his best. And while no curler would ever intentionally break the rules of the game, if he or she does inadvertently do so, they are always the first to bring attention to it once realizing their mistake.
Perhaps the greatest tradition of this centuries-old game, though, is the traditional toasting of beer or some other alcoholic drink among teammates after each game (which may explain the bowler-like figure of most of its participants). It is a tradition so strong that when a Detroit-area club recently announced the opening of a new arena that planned not to sell alcohol, it was met with great uproar and controversy.
I repeat, this sport has upper Midwest written all over it.
