Introduction

I can see them as plain as if it were yesterday. My mother and father standing in the family room of our house in suburban Don Mills, just to the north of downtown Toronto. They had donned matching ivory, heavy wool sweaters that dropped to mid-thigh on both of them. They wore turtlenecks underneath -- the sweaters zipped up to their high collars. More intriguing were the crossed kitchen brooms hovering over smooth, circular stones with odd-looking handles all knitted lovingly into the sweaters’ fronts by my grandmother. My parents wore tams on their heads like some Scottish people I had seen -- although the accompanying kilts were thankfully absent on my folks.

“We’re on our way to Avonlea,” my father advised. “Should be back by eleven.” Thoughts of Anne of Green Gables ran through my head, but it turned out their mission would be executed at an ice rink much closer to home.

Having informed me of their whereabouts for the next few hours, the two of them padded to the front door in their sock feet and proceeded to put on their boots. My father’s were brown, lined with white fur, and came up just past his ankle—he carefully arranged the bottoms of his grey flannel slacks over the tops of them. My mother’s footwear was much more festive. Shiny black leather -- almost patent, as I recall -- the top cuff a bright red tartan.

“Don’t forget the beaver tails, dear,” my mother reminded Dad on the way out. He reached into the closet and pulled out two brooms with long white necks and business ends made of straw. “I’ll need this tonight,” he chuckled. “Alex never comes out of the hack straight and has trouble with the in-turn. But if we get on it right away, most of the time we can swing it right onto the button.” It was all a foreign language to me. With murmurs only they could understand they saluted me with their weapons and were off into the frost-filled night. They were going curling.

The game of curling merits a single observance in John Robert Colombo’s book of Canadian quotations. It comes from the late actor Raymond Burr of New Westminster, British Columbia, the man who for years portrayed the lawyer Perry Mason and then a private investigator by the handle of “Ironside” on American television. “Sure I curl,” he told an interviewer from the Toronto Star in 1972. “We all curl in Canada!” A startling declaration that is surely untrue but still, it has a certain ring to it. When I reflected on Burr’s words it struck me that most, if not all, of us know what curling is and probably a large majority of people who grew up in this country have, at the very least, some sort of distant connection to the sport.

“There is something very, very unique to the game,” Vic Rauter told me once. Rauter is the voice of curling on TSN and has described the action at the highest levels of competition for seventeen years. “I don’t think there’s another game that actually represents the country as a whole like this one,” he continued.

Rauter was speaking from the broadcast booth at the Pengrowth Saddledome in Calgary, the site of the 2002 Canadian men’s curling championships, the Brier. This event brings together the best men’s curling teams from each of the ten provinces as well as northern Ontario, which warrants a separate entry. There is also in the field a combined squad from the Yukon and Northwest Territories. It was a Thursday night and the final games in the preliminary round-robin competition were about to take place. There were 15,000 boisterous fans from all over Canada in the nearly full hockey arena to observe matches that were, on the surface, of little consequence.
The playoff positions had long since been decided, with the traditional powers of Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan advancing.

Rauter peered down from his perch at one end of the dome alongside his analysts, Ray Turnbull and Linda Moore, both former Canadian champions. The play-by-play man smiled knowingly and gestured out to the sounds of the arena. Cowbells clattered, air horns were honking amid the shouts and shrill whistles of partisan groups representing far-flung reaches of the nation. Fans had their faces painted in the green and gold of Saskatchewan, and some from Nova Scotia had their hair dyed an electric blue.

“You could be a Newfoundlander living in B.C. and for two weeks a year at the Brier, you’re a Newf again,” Rauter claimed with delight. He went on to voice a much more ambitious sentiment about the game that has so obviously enraptured him. “I love the people who play it. I love the people who watch it,” Rauter said. “They are honest-to-goodness down-to-earth folks. They are folks who are hard-working and salt-of-the-earth kind of people. It covers all the demographics and I love that about the sport.”

I looked at the program in my hands and flipped to the biographies of the four-man teams that had each won provincial playdowns and ventured to Calgary for a chance at the coveted crown. Most who follow curling would argue that the Brier is the most difficult title to win given the depth of talent there is across all regions of this country. Yet there were no professionals in the field -- none of the players listed made his living by playing this game.

Quebec’s top man Francois Roberge worked as the supervisor of shipping and receiving for Sears Canada in Quebec City. He was taking on Russ Howard, a professional golfer now living in Moncton and representing New Brunswick. Over on ice sheet C, Saskatchewan’s chiropractor skip Scott Bitz of Regina faced twenty-three-year-old John Morris of Ottawa. Morris was taking time away from his kinesiology studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo to throw rocks for Ontario. Shawn Adams, Nova Scotia’s hope and an employee of Coca-Cola, was going head-to-head with the City of Winnipeg transit manager, Mark Lukowich.