curling is a competitive sport that requires everyone to be friendly to one another. it is also the kind of sport that requires its participants to buy one another drinks. it’s in this regard the best of both worlds. there are no calls that send people to a penalty box for two minutes. but there are calls which will cause a double-knockout in the eighth end, which will in turn cause a round of doubles in the pub after the fact. i’m embellishing that. it’s only second the week so i still don’t have a clue what i’m talking about. but i can at least pick up on some of the finer points of the culture.
take into consideration the fact that this week our team was inadvertently split up (as would happen, since there are five of us) in the first round of competitive play. i had to face off against the dreaded johnnyg, omar lopez montegengro, princess lapin, and the pineapples. on my side were three other curlers who were new to the game, but oblivious to our own curling acumen. while their skills were more than sufficient, they weren’t good enough to let us top the other foursome. And frankly, my ability to invoke the power of various Howards can take a rink only so far. at any rate, the teams wished each other “good curling”, and then we scored a point in the first end, and then watched omar lopez and company absolutely destroy us thereafter. but it was all in good fun, so apparently we all came out winners, because that’s what curling is all about: camaraderie. curling is all about camaraderie, and it also being destroyed on the ice but being man-enough to not complain about it others. it is gentlemanliness, honour, machismo and bravado all spun up into the wool that your curling tuque is made of.
interestingly, we all got to play on the winning team. princess lapin was sadly attacked on the ice by a jittery horse, so my team helped to sweep when the other team curled. this made us all feel a little tired (and perhaps threw us off our game – i would go so far as to suggest that p.lapin’s leaving the game actually put our team at a competitive disadvantage. had that horse not kicked, we might have won). this made us all winners in a weird way, even if four of the eight winners remained losers through and through. but at least we all curled well because we all wished one another good curling at the start of things.
next week, in the third session, we might actually take up the difficult task of having a drink inbetween shots. stay tuned.
