The Straight Story Is, They Just Like to Curl

She slides intently toward the target, a blond-haired, blue-eyed ice sculpture with a chilly stare and a blowtorch voice.

“No! No! No!!”

“Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!”

Each of the 2,000 fans crammed into what feels like a middle school gymnasium can hear her. Soon, they are shouting as she shouts, gesturing as she gestures.

Many of them have no idea what’s happening.

But they know this is the Olympics, and the Olympics are about stars, and this is one of them.

“Kari, Kari,” shouts a 3-year-old boy, joining the chorus.

“No, no,” scolds his father. “You should still call her Mommy.”

Meet U.S.-leading, dinner-cooking, toddler-toting, two-job-working, sweeps-the-ice-and-the-kitchen Kari Erickson.

The Curling Iron?

She is the skip of a four-person U.S. women’s team that has suddenly become one of the cult favorites of these Games.

Part of the reason is they have won six of their nine matches and advanced to Wednesday’s semifinals after an 11-2 victory over Norway on Monday.

The other reason is their sport is inexplicably on television a record 50 hours during the Games.

Much of that exposure comes late at night, when bars are closing and sports fans everywhere are looking up from their beers and uttering the words that encapsulate this entire endeavor: “What the

After a few minutes of watching a sport that is essentially a giant version of tavern sawdust shuffleboard--with ice and 42-pound stones--they see this screaming woman with the nice smile and ask another question.

Who the heck is Kari Erickson?

“Yeah, I’m getting some of that e-mail,” she said with a laugh.

She’s getting more than that.

Autograph seekers hound the team outside the Ogden Ice Sheet.

Lloyd Ward, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, stopped by to shake hands Monday morning.

The other night, for the first time, Erickson was actually recognized by someone not carrying a broom.

“A complete stranger walked up to our table, told me good luck and offered to buy dessert,” she said.

So, of course, she coolly embraced her newfound celebrity by gently blowing him off?

“No way,” she said. “I bought two desserts. Cheesecake and carrot cake.”

So goes the appeal of the women curlers, whose charm lies not in their athletic skills, but in their Midwestern charm.

These could be four women from a bowling league. These could be the four women directing the carpool lane at your kid’s school.

You’ve seen them all before. You’ve talked to them all before. At least one of them has served you potato salad at the firemen’s picnic.

They are a perfect, shirts-untucked fit for a sport whose customs include the winner buying the loser a drink, and whose participants sometimes sneak outside for a smoke.

All of the four hold jobs. This includes Erickson, who, when she’s not aiming for the target, is checking prices at Target. She toils there on weekends, in addition to her job as a middle-school swimming teacher.

Two of her teammates work at Home Depot. The fourth, Ann Swisshelm, was laid off from her job at a corrugated box factory because her bosses wouldn’t give her time off for the Olympics.

“I do this because we’re like family,” Swisshelm said.

Three-fifths of the team are family

Erickson’s sister, Stacey Liapis, is one of the four players. Her father, Mike, is the team’s coach.

Many other family members made the trip here from their hometown of Bemidji, Minn., the curling capital of the country. Of the 15,000 people who curl in this country, about half live in Minnesota or Wisconsin.

And it seems all of them are here, crammed into three apartments, many of them sleeping on the floor. The local Elks Club even held a spaghetti dinner to help the relatives pay their way.

The curling folks are used to tight quarters. When the team trains in Bemidji, it stays with Erickson and Liapis’ grandmother.

Not that training involves anything more complicated than curling. Erickson said she spends maybe two months lifting weights in the local recreation center.

At least those weights include curls.

“We’re regular people who like to curl, nothing more,” Erickson said.

They liked it so much while growing up, Erickson and Liapis had the keys to the local curling club. The sport not only brought them to the Olympics, it may have saved their relationship.

Erickson, 30, used to fight continually with Liapis, 27, over clothes.

“I wanted to use her clothes, and she didn’t want to let me, so we tangled all the time,” Liapis said. “Used to even bite each other.”

The curling sheet was the one place they didn’t fight, so they kept doing it.

Today, they know each other so well, Liapis can tell how much she needs to sweep--clearing the ice of its tiny pebbles and increasing the distance of the throw--simply by hearing the tone in her sister’s voice.

“They’ve come a long way from fighting in the closet,” said their mother, Sue.

They’ve come a long way, period.

Last week, on the opening day of curling here, only a handful of people in the crowd even had a clue about the sport. What was supposed to be an intimate, loud arena sounded more like a quiet, confused bus station.

The fans?

“I’m watching everybody else to see when to cheer,” said 14-year-old Greg Schlesinger. “But it’s obvious, nobody else knows either.”

The rented bagpipe band that, in keeping with tradition, marches on to the ice before each match?

“No idea what’s going on,” drummer Aegina Spencer said. “I just know somebody goes, ‘Shh, shh, shh’ and then somebody else goes, ‘Hip, hip, hip.’”

The guy selling programs that should have explained the sport?

“The only thing I know is, get it close to the circle, right?” Bryan Child said.

The target is not called a circle, it’s called a “house.”

And a week later, amid a standing, flag-waving, hollering crowd that has come to understand victory if nothing else, it has become Kari Erickson’s house.

“Just a working mom,” said the Olympics hippest new star. “Just trying to fit curling in somewhere.”

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com