How To Love Curling

Curling is the bane of my wife’s existence. For some reason she gets very edgy when I am flipping channels and some world curling event is on. I like to watch for just a few minutes but even I can get knocked out of the curling zone after a while and get bored with it. However, if my wife hasn’t left the room yet, I will usually leave the curling club on until she storms out of the room. Married life is great.

Curling is a very old sport that follows the same path as many other very old sports in this very old world. It is popular nearly everywhere except for the United States. I live right near the Canadian border and you could cross into Canada and throw a stone in almost any direction and hit a curling rink or a curling supply store. Curling is huge in Canada and it is constantly on Canadian television. Much to my wife’s elation our new satellite service does not offer us the Canadian television channels anymore so she will have to wait until the Winter Olympics to get her curling fix. Did I mention that married life is great?

Curling equipment consist of a curling stone which is polished stone that looks like a squashed bowling ball with a huge handle on top, a broom, some curling shoes, and a huge sheet of ice about 14 feet wide and 146 feet long. If you have ever been to a curling rink then it will look very strange to an American as the hockey rink is broken up into strips. On each end of the sheet of ice is a huge red and white target. Just on the outside of the huge red and white target is a blue line. The object of curling is that each circle of the target represents points. There is one guy, or girl, who sends the stones down the ice and they have to either glide the stone just right so that it stops on the target in a scoring circle or they have to use their stone to knock the other team’s stone out of scoring and try to keep their stone in the scoring circle. To help the stone along there are 3 or 4 players whose job it is to glide along the ice next to the stone and sweep the ice chips from out in front of the stone so that it glides further. Each team consists of 4 players and all players throw the stone and sweep at one time or another in each game.

This goes on for ten rounds and these rounds are called ends. If you don’t like curling then it can get a little boring to watch. But in Canada it is extremely popular and once in a while on the weekends it gets popular in my house until my wife storms out of the room. I have said it before and I will say it again, married life is great.