To a spectator standing in the back of the arena, under the stands, a curling game sounds like a gladiator's contest.
The swish, swish noise may sound like whips being vigorously applied to victims but, in fact, is made by brooms sweeping rhythmically along the ice.
The banging, crashing, and thumping of curling stones striking each other or the wood barriers at the ice sheet boundaries could be mistaken for fists and sticks being used after the whips.
Commands are barked by team "skips" in ten different languages. The yelps of delight or groans of disappointment as points are made or missed sound like the cries of torturers and victims.
Then there's the crowd. The several thousand spectators, representing eighteen nations, ooh, ahh, and groan in response to their favorite team's performance, sounding like a crowd at the Colosseum in ancient Rome.
Such were the impressions left by the 1989 Men's and Ladies' World Curling Championships (WCC), hosted by the MECCA arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A total of twenty teams and eighty competitors assembled last April for eight days of serious curling. Canada, Denmark, France, West Germany, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States had men's and ladies' teams in attendance, while Italy's men's team and Finland's ladies' team also qualified.
Curling may look a little strange to the first-timer, but at this level the competitors are deadly serious, and their superior skill level is immediately obvious.
This isn't to say that players don't have a sense of humor. Some teams have good-luck charms: The Swedish women have four little stuffed "Garfields," while the German women brought a small, stuffed hippo toting a West German flag.
400 Years Of Curling
Sixteenth-century Scots added zest to their winters with curling--then played outdoors on frozen ponds. The earliest equipment included curling stones formed by nature--each one unique. The stones' paths often curved, or curled, as they slid across the ice--hence the sport's name. Brooms were used to clear snow from a stone's path.
Immigrants brought curling to North America in the eighteenth century, and it spread across the northern United States and Canada. By the twentieth century, the game came to rely upon standardized equipment and facilities as well as indoor, refrigerated ice.
"There are only two or three makers of the rocks in the world," says United States Curling Association (USCA) press liaison Larry Johnson. "It takes six hundred to seven hundred pounds of granite to make one forty-three-pound rock." These granite blocks are turned on special lathes until they form a teakettle-like shape. Then they are polished until smooth, and a metal handle is added on top of the stone.
Nowadays, during the curling season (generally October through
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