Getting Swept Up in Curling Fever

By MIKE PENNER

Jan. 4, 1998 12 AM PT

Already it looms as the unofficial running gag of the 1998 Winter Olympics, fodder so ready-made for David Letterman that it ought to be disqualified as “too easy.”

To the uninitiated--and most Americans are--it appears to be an activity pursued mostly by bored Canadians, who seem to make the rules up as they go along, partaking in a bizarre ritual that looks to be one part shuffleboard, one part frozen-turkey bowling and one part street sweeping.

“I have to explain myself all the time,” says Erika Brown, a member of the U.S. Olympic women’s curling team. “I was in Phoenix playing golf this summer and when people asked me what I did, a lot of them had no clue at all what I was talking about.”

Or, if they had a vague preconception about curling, Brown says, “Usually you got the standard image of people on ice, running around, screaming with some brooms, doing this thing.”

This thing is now a medal sport in the Olympics, and Brown and her teammates will be competing for the first-ever Olympic gold medal in curling next month in Nagano.

Which means American television viewers will have to brush up, so to speak, on their curling vocabulary.

Do you know your keen ice from your heavy ice, your hack from your hammer, your rock from your rink, your house from your hog lines?

Brown remembers introducing her boyfriend to her curling-mad family--quite possibly the First Family of American curling--a clan that includes father Steve Brown, a U.S. curling Hall of Famer, and younger brother Craig, a 1997 juniors national champion.

“We went out to dinner the first couple of times with my family,” Brown recalls, “and he’d be just clueless about what we were talking about half the time. Even the terms for the game itself--’the house,’ ‘the hack,’ ‘the rock’--you need to have an understanding of it just to have a chance in the conversation.”

Brown’s boyfriend has family in Kenya and last summer, the couple visited them on a vacation trip.

“You think it’s hard to explain curling to someone from Pittsburgh?” Brown says, laughing. “Man, first I had to explain what ice was.”

So how’s the relationship faring?

“We’ve been together six years,” Brown says proudly. “He’s a curler himself now. Or else, he would have been gone long ago.”

BORN TO CURL

Brown jokes that “I was born to curl,” pointing to a curling stone while noting, “I was shaped like that.”

As Brown tells the story, her father grew up in a small Wisconsin town, next door to a curling club. “He used to sneak in through the window,” Brown says.

“Then, when he moved to Madison, we joined a curling club. It’s a great way to meet people and socialize. And then he got more competitive [Steve Brown is a three-time national champion]. And then he got me involved.”

Brown qualified for Nagano as part of a four-woman team that won last month’s U.S. Olympic curling team trials in Duluth, Minn. The United States will have teams in both the men’s and women’s divisions that are considered medal possibilities, although Canada, Sweden and Norway are the traditional powers in sliding the stone.

“We’ve developed a big rivalry with Canada,” Brown says. “They absolutely hate to get beat by us. They can’t stand it. They get really fired up to play against us. It’s always a big brawl out there.”

If 2 1/2 to three hours spent on a sheet of beveled ice leaning over 42-pound chunks of granite and stroking chins while contemplating the next crucial throw--and the one after that--can ever be reasonably likened to a brawl.

“It’s definitely a head game,” Brown says. “There’s a lot of thinking, a lot of being patient. Knowing when to be aggressive, knowing when to be conservative. There’s lots of pressure. It’s a lot like basketball or something, where you just kind of react to whatever’s happening.”

Often compared to shuffleboard or bowling, curling is closer to golf in Brown’s estimation.

“The technique, the mental aspect, the strategy and the repetition involved in golf, I think, is real similar to curling,” she says. “The touch and the feel and the reading of the ice is a lot like putting.”

Explaining the fundamental process of curling, Brown says it begins with “one person delivering [the stone] and throwing it down to the other end of the ice. The sweepers are there to control the speed of it.

“You’re 125 feet away and there’s a 12-foot-diameter circle down at the other end and you’ve got to slide it and stop it exactly where you stop it. Ice conditions change during a game--they can get faster, they can get slower--and you have to be able to factor that in.”

Brown harbors no grand illusions of a sudden U.S. gold-medal sweep generating a post-Nagano curling boom from California to South Carolina--excited 6-year-olds tugging on parents’ pants legs and begging, “Daddy, can I have a hogs hair broom for Christmas?”

“I just hope more people understand what we’re doing,” she says, “and maybe want to give it a try.”

THE WHOLE KITT AND CABOODLE

Initially, the plan behind this weekend’s U.S. Ski Team Gold Cup was to bring American competitors from each of the Olympic ski disciplines--Alpine, Nordic and freestyle--together in Lake Placid, N.Y., for pre-Nagano publicity.

As a carrot to encourage participation, automatic Olympic team berths were offered to the winner in each of the individual events.

But the concept backfired in at least one case, resulting in a Gold Cup boycott by U.S. downhill specialist AJ Kitt.

In the weekly World Cup diary he writes for a newspaper wire service, Kitt contends he sat out the Gold Cup because “it’s contrary to [U.S. Skiing President] Bill Marolt’s philosophy of fielding the best teams at the Olympics. . . .”

“Marolt’s Olympic qualification criteria are almost completely based on World Cup results, and Lake Placid is totally contrary to that. There are six or seven men who regularly compete on the World Cup circuit in downhill who’ve had success and have dedicated their season to World Cup success. [Kitt includes himself, Kyle Rasmussen and Tommy Moe among this group]. These guys, maybe a few others, are the ones who should be considered for the Olympic team.

“But they get to Lake Placid, and instead of six or seven dedicated high-level athletes, you now have 20, most of whom never even have seen a World Cup downhill, much less competed in one.”

In a peculiar piece of logic, Kitt’s main complaint about the Gold Cup is that it offers a “level playing field” for all skiers.

“Because the Lake Placid downhill course is less than World Cup caliber, you could have an undeserving racer take away a spot from someone who belongs on the Olympic team,” Kitt writes. “When the playing field is level like that, there’s a much better chance of a guy coming from the back to pop a result.”

PROMISES, PROMISES

New Year’s resolutions from Alberto Tomba:

To win one last Olympic ski medal in Nagano . . . and to finally settle down.

“After 10 years of skiing around the world, I want to find the woman of my dreams,” Tomba told reporters in Italy last week.

“I’ve already got one or two on the waiting list and maybe I’ll get married in the year 2000.”

Tomba’s last two World Cup races of 1997 produced mixed results. He finished fourth in a slalom event in Sestriere, Italy, but crashed a week later in Alta Badia.

“In January,” Tomba predicted, “you’ll see the real Alberto.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Calendar

FIGURE SKATING

* Wednesday-Jan. 11: U.S. Figure Skating Championships (Philadelphia).

ALPINE SKIING WORLD CUP

* Monday-Tuesday: Women’s slalom, giant slalom (Ofterschwang, Germany).

* Tuesday: Men’s giant slalom (Hinterstoder, Austria).

* Thursday-Jan. 11: Men’s slalom, super-G (Schladming, Germany).

* Saturday-Jan. 11: Women’s slalom, giant slalom (Maribor, Slovenia).

* Jan. 13: Men’s giant slalom (Adelboden, Switzerland).

* Jan. 17-18: Men’s downhill, slalom, combined (Wengen, Switzerland); Women’s downhill, super-G (Kitzbuehel, Austria).