Despite Many Comparisons, There’s No Sport Like Curling

“Curling? Isn’t that the Canadian game?” a curious directory-assistance operator asked a Seattle reporter seeking the telephone number for the U.S. Curling Association headquarters in Wisconsin.

Well, yes and no. Curling has its roots in 16th-century Scotland. Today, it is the sport of choice for 1.25 million Canadians and is closely identified with our neighbor to the north.

But next year, it will become a world game, debuting as a full-medal sport in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

Promoted as a game of finesse and fitness, curling is most often compared to bowling (for the way it’s played) or golf (for the frustration level) and sometimes hockey, tennis, chess and barroom shuffleboard, which means it’s not really like any of them.

Curling, played on an ice rink, involves two teams of four people each, who take turns sliding 42-pound granite stones 160 feet down a marked sheet of ice toward a bull’s eye target.

The team that gets a stone closest to the center of the target gets the points. Players aid the travel of the stones by sweeping the ice with special brooms.

A game is called a “bonspiel,” and it usually consists of 10 “ends” or innings.

“I love the competition, the companionship, the depth of the game and the thinking you have to put into it,” said Evelyn Rayburn, 53, of Edmonds, who curls at the Granite Curling Club here.

“And it’s cold, too,” she adds. About 28 degrees.

Beginning March 1, the Granite Curling Club will be the host for the 1997 national curling championships. The top four teams - two men’s and two women’s - win berths for Olympic qualifying in December.

“It’s a mentally challenging game - a lot like golf,” said Seattle’s Travis Way, the U.S. junior national curling champion and a 1996 U.S. Olympic Committee athlete of the year.

“There are days when it’s easy, and days when it’s hard.”

Way, 21, curls 2 to 3 hours daily, and the Olympics are his goal.

Those who believe curling was long overdue for recognition as an Olympic sport owe a debt of gratitude to Sophie Wallace and her husband, Thomas, who call themselves the World Curling Federation’s “curling ambassadors to Iceland.”

The Wallaces, originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, were instrumental in persuading Iceland to field a curling team for the Olympics. A minimum of 25 countries were needed to get the game in the Games, and Iceland was country No. 25.

“This was a country with the perfect name for this game,” Sophie said, yet curling was almost unknown in Iceland.

Sophie, a former physical education teacher, gave up bowling years ago for curling, which gets its name from the spin or “curl” a player puts on the granite stone.

“It’s much more of a finesse game,” she said. “It’s really the best all-around game I’ve ever been mixed up in.”

She also gives Canada credit for helping to create a future for curling.

“Canada has really promoted the game to the fine degree it is now,” she said.

In the United States, curling got its start in the early 1800s. The oldest continuously operating club is the Milwaukee Curling Club, founded in 1845, said David Garber, director of the U.S. Curling Association in Stevens Point, Wis.

There are 15,000 curlers in 135 curling clubs in 26 states in this country, and Garber expects the numbers to jump with the Olympics.