Curling In Chaska

There's a stretch of about four seconds in curling between letting go of the rock and finding out what you've done. You're still sliding. Your sweepers are looking at you, waiting to be told something useful. And somewhere in that four seconds you know, before anybody else on the ice does, whether you threw it right.

I am usually wrong in that four seconds.

I curl at the Chaska Curling Center on a team called Hank's Boiler Repair.

Good curlers use stopwatches. They time the rock between two lines, do a little arithmetic, and know how heavy the ice is running that night. We have talked about learning this. We have decided, more than once and on purpose, not to.

The theory is that if we understood the game any better we might start caring about winning, and then curling would turn into something we were bad at instead of something we did for fun. We win about half the time. That seems about right.

The Center itself is a little absurd for a town this size, and I mean that as a compliment. Six sheets of ice on Chaska Boulevard. It's a USA Curling national training center, and the guy who runs it is a two-time Olympian. When they opened registration back in 2015 they were hoping for 150 or 200 members that first year. They got close to 800 in the first month.

So on a given night you can have actual Olympians practicing on sheet one and me on sheet four, throwing a rock through the house at a speed suggesting I have somewhere else to be.

There are no referees. Not at the club level, and mostly not above it either. If your broom brushes a rock while it's moving, which is called burning it, you are expected to say so. Out loud. Right then, while it still costs you. Nobody else saw it. There's no replay. There's no whistle. We are accountable to ourselves.

That got tested in February. At the Olympics in Italy, a Swedish curler accused a Canadian curler of touching his stone after the hog line, and not for the first time, and the whole thing came apart on camera. The federation put referees on the sheets for about a minute and then took them back off after the players objected. One of the best curlers alive said afterward that the spirit of the sport was dead.

I'm not going to sit here in Chaska and tell an Olympian how to handle an Olympics. I have never played for anything larger than the next round of beers, and I don't actually know what I'd do with a medal on the line. Possibly worse.

What I keep coming back to is smaller than the Olympics: every foul you call on yourself is one you could have gotten away with. That's the test.

Anyway.

When the game ends, both teams sit down together. It's called broomstacking, from back when people stacked their brooms by the fire afterward, and the team that won generally buys the first round. So you spend two hours trying very hard to beat four people and then an hour hanging out and shooting the shit with them. I've been doing that for years and I still think it's the strangest and best thing about the sport.

I'm not going to pretend curling taught me anything about the Legislature. It's a game and I'm not even good at it; but I love it.