sports

Bump, Set, Coach

· June 5, 2022 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

You know how sometimes you wake up in a weird location? Sometimes it’s a dark hotel room when you turn the wrong way while looking for the bathroom. In my younger days, I found myself sprawled out on my living room floor with the front door still wide open. I’d managed to make it all of two steps inside my domicile.

In a similar fashion, I recently looked around, bewildered, coaching my daughter’s volleyball team.

An odd place to find oneself, to be sure. At least when I passed out in my living room, I knew how I got there. But coaching a sport one never played beyond maybe junior high takes a gargantuan lack of organizational skills. Surprisingly, in this instance, not my own.

We figured Daughter had more chance for success in volleyball than in the standards like soccer and softball. Sports that required endurance and precision, or even a general awareness of where your body is at any moment, were never going to be her forte. 

First we tried soccer. She was okay with it, except for the fact that it was a co-ed team. The boys were mostly ball hogs and the girls had little desire to assert themselves. The following year, it would’ve been girls only. Not sure why they wouldn’t do that from year one, but whatever. Daughter wasn’t opposed to trying soccer again, but also wasn’t gung-ho to return to the pitch.

In softball, she was already a year behind some of the other players. Then everything got shut down for Covid. In 2021, when it returned, we still weren’t sure it was the best idea, so by now she’d be three years behind other players and, even worse, at the age of eight, she’s at a point where she’d notice being behind, and Daughter ain’t the type to use that as motivation to catch up.

Volleyball, we figured, was a better option for her. She loves playing keepy-uppy with a balloon, which is the basic concept behind volleyball. Don’t let the damn thing hit the ground. She’s also, somehow, always been tall for her age. Don’t ask me how. I’m 5’8″ on a good day and my wife needs tip-toes to reach 5’5″. Neither our parents or grandparents come from tall stock. A bunch of diminutive Irish and Italian ancestors. Yet Daughter has consistently been above the 90th percentile for height. Her birthday is in May and she’s usually the same height as her classmates whose birthdays are in September and October. 

Allegedly my dad was one of the tallest kids in his elementary school classes. Then he stopped growing in eighth grade, and by the time I knew him, he was 5’6″ and looking up at the gents the ladies call handsome. So maybe Daughter will peter out in time. Maybe she’ll be the blocker in elementary school before transitioning to the digger in high school.

And no, basketball never entered into the equation. Remember, she has virtually no coordination. Basketball requires not only running up and down the court, but bouncing a ball at the same time. If it’s possible to trip over both a foot and a ball at the same time, Daughter would find a way.

So it’s volleyball or curling. And I don’t think many colleges offer curling scholarships.

I still wasn’t planning on coaching, though. That came much later. Much, much later. As in, two days before the season started.

We signed Daughter up in January and, apart from an initial acknowledgement of registration, we heard nothing for a good eight weeks. It got so bad that my mom thought we lying to her about having no schedule, trying to finagle out of her visiting, but it was legit. We were less than two weeks from opening day and were still on radio silence.

I was on my curling club’s Board of Directors for six years, and ran the league for a good portion of that time. I totally get that these endeavors are chaotic in the best of times. You can tell people when the sign-ups are, you can email them repeatedly, and you’ll still get a whole lotta “Wait, when does league start?” Noting’s more infuriating than, a week after the “deadline,” when you find yourself with an odd number of players/teams, you contact someone asking if there’s any way they can spare the time, expecting an ”Of course not, otherwise I would’ve signed up,” but instead getting a “Yeah, totally. Sounds great.” Umm… then why didn’t you… You know what? Never mind.

But at least when we were rearranging teams 24 hours before the start of the season, we were still sending out information. “Don’t forget we start this weekend.” “Here are the dates, but we might be assigning byes, so let me know if there’s a date you’ll be out of town.” “We’ve got more teams than skips, does anyone want to try their hand at a new role?” In reality, we were still recruiting ten players while those were going out, but from the members’ perspective, it seemed like it was ninety percent set.

With volleyball, it was a whole lotta nothing until about ten days out, when an email gave a generic list of days, not dates. “Every Thursday and Saturday, starting next week.” No mention of which days are practice, which are games, but if I know anything about youth sports, the games gotta be on Saturday morning. Just maybe not the first Saturday? Cause Daughter doesn’t know shit about volleyball yet, and given that they don’t allow any kids younger than her, for once she won’t be the only clueless kid.

Buried in that first email was a brief mention that there were still coaching spots available, so hey, if you’ve ever thought about maybe wanting to help out, they’d love to have ya.

Yeah, no thanks. Looking forward to letting someone who knows what they’re doing take the reins.

As a bonus, the email went on, the coach gets, not only their own kid, but one other player of choice to ensure your child’s with their friend. Considering we didn’t know anyone else signing up, that wasn’t much of an incentive. Also, while I was unaware at the time, they only had enough kids for one under-nine team, so whether I coached or not, Daughter was going to be on the same team as everyone younger than fourth grade.

Another week went by before we heard anything else. This time they were a *little* more focused with their messaging. We need fifty coaches. We only have ten. As of now (three days before the first practice (or maybe game), your child’s team does not have a coach.

Okay, that’s a little different. If they were forty coaches short, one wonders what the numbers looked like when they sent out the, “Hey, have we got a great opportunity for you” email. Maybe they should’ve been in four-alarm fire territory long before the eve of play. 

While the email never explicitly said that if we didn’t step up, the season wasn’t happening, I took it as such and signed up to assistant coach. So did one other parent and one older sibling who’s in high school. Wow. A team of thirteen and, even after a “you have no coach” plea, only three sign up to assistant coach. Maybe if there’d been more regular communication, they might find more buy-in.

At least no other parents better bitch about my coaching. Cause they all coulda had the position.

Ironically enough, when I followed the link to sign up for assistant coaching, I had to provide two references, particularly people to attest to my volunteer work and work ethic. Uh huh, sure. It’s Wednesday and you are hoping to get forty-plus coaches “hired” before Saturday. I’m putting my hooker and drug dealer in the field and daring you to tell me no.

Instead of a “sorry, but no” email, I get, predictably, a “Hey, thanks for your interest in being an assistant coach. Wanna be coach?”

To which I reply, “Not really. I’ll miss at least one practice and I am bad with names, to say nothing of my propensity to beat small children.”

“No problem,” they respond. “Welcome aboard, Coach!”

Evidently, Adolf Stalin Beelzebub must’ve given me a great reference.

They sent me and another co-coach (Who also reluctantly signed up to assistant) a couple YouTube videos, and wit twelve hours to spare, we were set to teach a bunch of seven-year-olds how to spike a volleyball.

Wait, spiking is first? Not bumping? I thought every volleyball instruction started with bumping. Maybe this is why they only recruit coaches two days before the season starts. Fewer questions.

Coaches were told to come a half-hour early to help set up nets, for which there was also a YouTube. When I showed up early, however, it was absolute chaos. We gravitated toward a few parents who had volleyball t-shirts, meaning it’s at least their second season. They showed us how to set up a net, but there was little guidance beyond that. 

By the time the hour was up, and all the peons (ie parents smart enough to not bow to last minute, passive aggressive recruitment) showed up with children ready to play volleyball, only half the courts were set up. Parents and children practiced bumping to each other during the delay. Bumping, that skill that won’t be covered till the third or fourth practice. After setting. How the hell does one set without first receiving a bump?

There was supposed to be a coaches meeting ten minutes before practice started. In reality, it took place ten minutes after practice was supposed to start. My co-coach and I already had our kids in a circle playing the “name game” when we were called away. Um, so maybe let the kids keep playing the name game amongst themselves? It’s not like we coaches need to know their names or anything. 

The coaches meeting, it turns out, was only to go over the agenda for today’s practice. Like the name game, which we were already doing because they’d sent the agenda out the day before. We’re to spend ten minutes playing the name game, then fifteen minutes spiking, then thirty minutes serving. Except now we only have about thirty-five minutes left for the whole practice.

Again, I understand these volunteer organization difficulties. At the curling club, we throw a number of events that come off by the skin of the grace of God’s teeth. There are league games where the rocks sink into the ice because we forgot to bring them down to temperature first. Or learn-to-curls with five instructors and forty students. 

The difference is that participants rarely know when we’re skimming the tangent of disaster. In my eight years curling, six of which I was on the Board, we never once made a new learn-to-curler carry a rock to the ice. Even if we were still setting the hacks while they receive introductions in the warm room, the second they walked onto the ice, the picture’s pristine. After we rope them in to the game, then we can rope them into helping.

If Big Volleyball wanted to look like a well-oiled machine, the type of organization other parents would want to join, they probably should’ve had us fools who agreed to coach show up an hour early, not a half-hour. Then, when the average parent shows up ten minutes before the first practice, the courts are all put together and the coaches are off to the side at an ooo, aaah, special meeting that wouldn’t you really like to be part of in the future?

Other practices followed suit. The coaches meeting that is supposed to occur ten minutes prior to practice actually takes place five minutes after call time. My co-coach and I stopped going to them, because they only go over the practice plan, which was emailed to us at 10:00 last night, and which we’re going to promptly ignore. Unfortunately the damage was already done, because half our team doesn’t show up on time anymore.

The reason we ignore the agenda is because it isn’t what our kids need. I understand it’s hard to make a practice plan that fits teams ranging from ages 7 to 14 And far be it from them to come up with, I don’t know, two practice plans. So we’re stuck “teaching” our team how to block a powerful jump spike. Because that happens all the time with seven-year-olds. How about we focus on getting the fucking ball over the net instead? Or, I don’t know, maybe explaining the purpose of the game to them?

Their long-term planning is even worse than the short-term. The night after our second practice, we received the agenda for practice the following day when we were finally going to go over bumping. A coach replied-all that the invoice we were sent didn’t have the park reserved tomorrow. Does that mean we’re on Spring Break? An hour later, the “in charge” guy emails back that, hah hah, oh yeah, the next three practices aren’t actually happening. See you in two weeks.

Um, okay, but are you going to tell all the parents who I said “See you Saturday” to last night?

Damn, I really wish we had gone over bumping first. If for no other reason than I don’t want to spend the next ten days making my daughter work on setting, a skill that rarely shows up before varsity-level high school.

Later in the season we had another late all-call. “Reminder:” the text read, “Tomorrow is a game day. The game will last two hours, rotating fields every twenty minutes.”

Perhaps they don’t understand the subtle nuance of “reminder.” It’s usually meant to imply something we’d already known. For instance, I can “remind” my wife that I’m hitting the grocery store on the way home from work. I can’t “remind” my students about the fall of the Berlin Wall when we’re still studying the Enlightenment. 

Needless to say, when we showed up the next day, I had a whole bunch of parents coming up to me saying they had to leave after an hour. If only they’d known beforehand. I fired back that I was right there with them. As coach, I’d love to have more than twelve hours notice that we might have a game instead of a practice or scrimmage. 

That’s the particularly shitty thing about this arrangement. I’m somehow seen as an authority figure, as if I have any fucking clue about what’s going on. When I told them I was as surprised as them, they roll their eyes as if I’m just a slacker. Shit, they probably think I came up with the bright idea to hold off bumping until after Spring Break. I can only politely remind them that they could’ve had the fucking job.

Fortunately, whatever league was visiting us didn’t have a u9 team to play against, so the fact that I would’ve been down to three players after one hour didn’t matter. The guy in charge said they contemplated rotating us in with the 9 & 10 year olds but decided against it. Of course, they didn’t incorporate any of the coaches or parents to these discussions.

The guy in charge, by the way, says he loves teaching our age level. They’re so enthusiastic and their growth during the season is spectacular. In fact, he’s coached the u9 team each of the last four seasons. Really? Well then why the fuck did he leave it up to a couple know nothings who can’t even convince the kids that the goal is to get the ball back over to the other side of the net this time? How about he give us the 14-year-olds he’s currently coaching. I’ll have them setting like motherfuckers.

Although maybe not. Then I’d have to stay for two hours on game days, whenever the hell those things are. Probably with only half a team, all of whom were pissed at me for hoarding the information to myself. 

So maybe I should just stay over here on my court with a bunch of kids who have no idea what they’re doing. 

They’ll be in good company.

March Madness at Covid Casino

· March 26, 2021 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

For years, I’ve thought about posting a real-time account of March Madness. The highs, the lows. The buzzer beaters. The “why the fuck are you trying to win the game if you already covered the spread”s.

You see, I usually spend March Madness in Nevada. You’ve never truly experienced a basketball game until you’ve been in a room full of three hundred people absolutely losing their shit at a team dribbling out the remaining seconds of a twelve-point game, the winner of whom was obvious by halftime. 

Shoot the ball, motherfucker!

Or, if I’ve bet the underdog, don’t! 

For the uninitiated, March Madness is the college basketball championship, wherein 68 teams vie for the title. Those 68 (or at least 64 of them) play all their intro games in two days. Thirty-two games, spread out over 36 hours or so. And you can bet on every single one!

I had this grand plan. I would precede the Madness with a general post about gambling, then, as with Camptathalon, I’d tabulate all the craziness. The fifteen-seed Davids beating the two-seed Goliath that nobody cares about because they covered the spread by halftime. Or the meaningless eight-versus-nine-seed game, the winner of whom will most likely be destroyed against a number-one seed in the next round, that has the entire sports book on pins and needles because a two-and-a-half point spread brings all the boys to the yard.

But don’t worry. This post isn’t about college basketball. It’s only tangentially related to sports.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m a degenerate gambler, but when the casinos closed, I started playing the stock market. One of the stocks I bought was Draft Kings, meaning I’m now gambling on gambling becoming more prevalent. 

Whenever my friends and I find one of those “signs you are a problem gambler,” we make bets about how many of the checklist items we’ll mark. Even if those lists are bogus. One checkmark is getting upset about losing a bet. Doesn’t that mean we don’t have a problem? You become a problem gambler when you shrug off one loss because you’ve made ten others.

I have the same issue with the alcoholic checklist. Do any of my stories start with, “I was drinking one time and…”? Um, yeah. Do you want good stories? I can start out my stories with “One time I was sitting on my couch rewatching a Marvel movie,” but it’s not gonna get much more exciting than that.

The reason I never got around to that projected March Madness post is how ephemeral it is. When it takes me six months to transcribe my Camptathalon journal, the hilarity still stands. Whether it’s June or January, fart and dick jokes work. But reminiscing about the eighteen-year-old who shanks a free throw and now will never realize his lifelong dream of playing in the NBA has got a shelf life.

So unless I plan on carrying a notebook throughout the casino (which I assume they would frown upon), then transcribing that shit while still blowing a .12, a March Madness post is gonna be tough.

But if I can combine a little bit of sports gambling with my first trip to a casino in the COVID-era? Make my observations more  observational than transactional? Just maybe…

But seriously, University of California at Santa Barbara, how the fuck do you lose by one point when I bet you on the money line? Wide open layup to win the game and you brick?

Okay, with that off my chest, how bout them COVID-restrictions?

As with every other stripe of life, Nevada seems more concerned with appearance than efficacy. Like the TSA guy who pulls me aside for a ham sandwich in my backpack while three terrorists walk through. It’s to make me feel better.

We’re supposed to wear masks, except for when we’re eating or drinking or smoking. Not sure if you’ve ever been in a Nevada casino, but the amount of time you’re not doing one of those three activities is maybe ten percent. I don’t even smoke, but I think it’s state law that we have a cigarette in our mouth fifty percent of the time. Just ask every numbnut sitting next to me at every fucking table, going through a pack an hour. And those new partitions aren’t as good at blocking cigarette smoke as they are (hopefully) at blocking viruses.

Hey, speaking of the numbnuts always at my blackjack tables, one sticks out as the worst of the worst, and that’s saying something. The numbest of the nuts. 

It was at the Tropicana in Vegas, not where one expects to run into high rollers. He was making stupid moves as soon as he sat down, like doubling down on a thirteen and splitting face cards. It was shortly after the book and movie about the MIT card counters, so numbnuts the world over thought they’d figured out how to beat the system. What’s worse is he was sitting in the last spot before the dealer, where a bad move can fuck over the entire table. To wit:

Dealer was showing a five. Fuck Face gets two sixes. The book says you stay on your twelve and wait for the dealer to bust. This guy splits. He hits his first six, gets a ten. Now he’s got a sixteen and he’s hmming and huhing. He finally decides to stay, then hits the other six and, wouldn’t you know it, another ten! 

“Two sixteens!” he exclaims. “What are the odds?”

Umm… those are the exact fucking odds! Literally the entire blackjack playbook is based on one rule: always assume the next card is a ten. 

What made it worse was that after Mr. Fucknozzle takes two bust cards away from the dealer, who now turns over the fifteen we all assumed he had, then hits a five (instead of either of the two tens Einstein took) and takes all our money. 

Casinos don’t discourage you from card counting, because most people make a phenomenal mess of it. Now if you care count well, then they’re taking you out to the desert.  

At least if that jackwagon were still at that table today, he’d have this nice visual of how one drinks or smokes while wearing a mask. 

Whew. Glad they laid that out. As if that weren’t enough Idiocracy, this sign was posted multiple times in each bathroom:

To quote Whitney Houston, I believe the children are our future. Cause if it’s up to us adults, we are well and truly fucked.

Oh, and did I mention that Florida State was favored by 10.5, meaning they had to win by 11 for me to win my bet? Guess how much they won by: Ten. Which matched the number of seconds left in the game when they got the ball back for the final time. And what did they do? Just dribble it around, never even looking at the basket. Come on, people, don’t you know what the spread is? There are people out there who had confidence in you, and you’re rewarding us by standing there for ten seconds instead of piling on two meaningless points that are anything but meaningless.

Why bother winning the game if you aren’t going to cover the spread?

So how are the casinos adjusting to the pandemic, aside from instructions on how to smoke cigarettes and what not to flush down the toilet?

They’ve put up Plexiglass barriers everywhere. Just in case you weren’t feeling lonely playing slot machines before, you’ve now got a three-sided cone of silence. No high-fiving each other after getting that big cherry combo that pays out a thousand credits before remembering thata thousand pennies is less than your initial twenty-dollar deposit. 

Not that there are legitimate penny slots anymore. They say they’re penny slots, but then it costs a minimum of 60 or 80 or 125 credits for one spin. What’s worse is they don’t pay out in those increments. So you bet 60, you win back 17. Then there reaches a point where you’ve got, say, 58 cents left in the machine but you can’t do anything with it. So you cash out and now you’ve got a slip of paper “worth” 58 cents. One machine had the last four “victims” left behind, four printouts of various small denominations. I added my fifth. Perhaps someday in the distant future, someone will be able to combine enough to make one spin, get twelve cents back, and begin the stack anew.

I understand the way inflation works in the casinos. They can’t make legitimate penny slots anymore, because pennies aren’t worth shit, It’s not so much the sixty cent minimum that piss me off so much as the partial payoffs. I’m a completionist. If I’ve blown the twenty I put in then, dammit, I want to be down twenty bucks, not down nineteen dollars and change. And they’re not fooling anyone. Is there anybody who bets sixty, wins back ten and thinks, “Huzzah! Finally able to retire!”

You know who’s really been screwed by inflation? The cocktail waitresses. Back in the nineties, I sat down at a two-dollar blackjack table and, when my “free drink” came around, I tipped the cocktail server a dollar. Nowadays, I sit down at a ten-dollar blackjack table and, when my “free drink” comes around, I tip the cocktail server a dollar. I went from tipping her fifty percent of a hand’s value to ten percent. But it would feel somehow wrong to tip five dollars for a free drink. That’s almost as much as the drink might cost if I paid for it.

Are strippers experiencing the same diminishing returns?

The cocktail servers can’t be hurting too much, though. I see the same ones year after year at March Madness. There are a couple of them who have worked the same portion of the sportsbook at the same time of the day as they were a decade ago. They must not be hurting, even if they do seem a tad slower than they once were, not turning in their orders until they have pre-orders filling every centimeter of their tray. 

Maybe I should up the tip to two bucks, as awkward as that would feel. Although in my defense, I still tip more than some of the people I’m at the table with. I tip my dealer, too. If I was an asshole like the Maker’s Mark fucktards, I might not walk away down forty bucks all the time. Damn my service industry background!

In addition to the partitions up at the slots and tables, you’re not allowed to touch your cards. That took some getting used to. My hand was slapped away three or four times before I adjusted to the new normal. Even after I figured it out, it was friggin hard to keep my hands to myself as my two cards sat there screaming at me. 

I’ve played at blackjack tables where everybody is dealt face up, but this wasn’t that. Your cards are dealt face down, then the dealer comes around to turn up one set of cards at a time. That player then decides what to do and it’s on to the next. It leads to shorter decision times. Not like it’s difficult to add two single digit numbers, but it goes beyond that. If the dealer’s showing an eight, I have to think ahead of time what I’m going to do if it’s a twelve or a fourteen or a sixteen. Normally I can think about those permutations ahead of time. 

The weirdest action was when asking for/buying insurance. If the dealer is showing an ace, they try to take more money in the suckerest of all sucker bets. If you “win” an insurance bet, that means the dealer has a blackjack and you’re getting your money back instead of losing your bet. Still not winning anything, though. And if the dealer doesn’t have a blackjack, you “lose” the insurance bet, but then play the hand normally, which means you can still lose and now you’re out 150% of your initial bet. Even if you win, you’ve lost 50% of the win because you lost it to “insure” the hand. 

Obviously, the insurance bet isn’t going away, just like the extended warranty on cars. But they have to show us our cards to see if we want to insure it. Who would insure a sixteen, after all? Heck, who would insure a nineteen? So when the dealer has an ace showing, she goes one by one, holding up our cards to the plexiglass at eye level like Jim Carrey at the jailhouse in Cable Guy. You nod or shake your head, then she puts your cards back on the table, face down. At least then I get a few extra seconds to decide what I’m going to do with those cards. Just in time for her to reveal she did, in fact, have that blackjack, so maybe I should’ve insured my sixteen?

But as with the TSA, the “what you can touch and what you can’t touch” rule seems arbitrary. For instance, after the dealer shuffles the cards, one of the players still cuts the deck. The dealer hands a plastic divider card to the player doing the cut. First it’s my turn, then with the next shuffling, it’s the guy next to me’s turn. This being single-deck, it’s only a few minutes between my grubby hands and the next guy’s. Not saying he’s going to get any viruses I’m carrying. Didn’t we determine many moons ago that it’s not traveling via touched surfaces, but water globules? Hence the masks and partitions. I mean, maybe if I spit in my hand before cutting the deck, he’d be in trouble. I’ve seen a lot of strange superstitions at blackjack tables over the years, but none have involved bodily fluids.

Then I went to the pai gow table. In pai gow, you’re given seven cards that you divide into two hands: a standard 5-card poker “high hand” and a 2-card “low hand”. The dealer doesn’t turn over his cards until everybody has made their hands. In fact, most beginning pai gow players ask the dealer or other players for advice as they learn. For instance, if you have two pair, do you put one pair in the high hand and one in the low, or do you make the high hand a much stronger two pair, leaving the low hand crappy and all but insuring a push?

So it can totally be done the same way as COVID blackjack. The dealer could turn over my cards, I could instruct him to put the jack of hearts and seven of diamonds into the low hand, then on to the next player. There might also be some difficulties of communication, but pointing works fine, and again, I’ve seen plenty of conversations between player and dealer about which cards should go where and never noticed a communication problem. The real issue is the amount of time it would take. If there are five players at the table and each one takes thirty seconds, you’re looking at five minutes gone by the time the dealer’s done his own and paid out winnings and collected losings. Even worse is that pai gow is a game where the casino doesn’t make money every hand. There are a lot of pushes. I often play it when I need my money to last longer. So if they don’t accumulate money as quickly as possible, and then they add to that the time it takes to play each of the six hands one-by-one, those drinks ain’t gonna be free much longer. But if we all use our thirty seconds simultaneously…

So it should come as little surprise that, in pai gow, we’re allowed to pick up our cards. They’re the exact same cards being used at the table next door. Technically, they go through a shuffling machine, but I’m almost certain they aren’t sanitized inside there. They don’t come out dripping with antibacterial residue or anything like that. They feel like regular cards. Or at least what I remember regular cards feeling like. I couldn’t confirm on the blackjack table. 

Because the casino might say they’re concerned about our safety, but in reality they’re really just “interested in” our safety. What they’re “concerned with” is making profit. And if the two of those can go hand-in-hand, then so much the better. Partitions help remind us we’re all making sacrifices. No blackjack touchie for you!

Just don’t let those sacrifices go too far. 

Camptathalon 2020

· February 12, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

Seeing as I posted about our aborted attempt at snow camping, now seems a good time to finally post the journal from last year’s oft-canceled, nearly-aborted Camptathalon trip. After a number of false starts and offside penalties, four of the five regulars were able to escape the shitshow of 2020 long enough to make an abbreviated attempt at a bona fide Camptathalon. So sorry if it’s a little light this year. 

As per usual, we logged what occurred. Everything here is 100% accurate. 

Taken 90% out of context. 

Friday.

3:10 Stop at Snowshoe Brewery in Arnold, CA to fill growlers, might as well stay for a pint. They don’t even require food to purchase booze in this county. It’s the wild west!
3:15 “Is it too early to put my mouth on your beer cup?”
3:40 “Sucking Daniel Craig’s dick would be just like kissing Rachel Weisz”
4:20 First two arrivals at campsite.
4:35 Last two arrivals at campsite. That was quick.
4:37 Chris opens first beer. Rick follows.
4:46 Oops. Packed tent but not poles. Fucking 2020.
4:55 “Why is there a tea bag in my tent?”

5:11 “I’ve decided to make a Camptathalon T-shirt contest. Since none of you knew, I win this year.”

5:37 “How spicy do you like your chili?”
   “Like my women. Hot, brown, and full of meat.”
5:44 Sparky is all-time leader in Loser Libations, the shitty alcohol the first person out of poker is required to drink.

5:57 Official Opening Toast

5:59 First baseball card of Camptathalon 2020 – Chet Lemon

  • 6:06 Every time that flag’s unfurled, they’re comin’ to Camptathalon. Today!
6:27 Hey, has anyone seen Rick?

6:35 Is it proper chili without beans?
   (Grabbing Crotch) “I got your proper beans right here and if you give me five minutes, I’ll make some sour cream for you.”
   “Dude, you need five minutes?”
6:46 Sparky recalls being invited to a loose girl’s house in high school, watching Kent Mercker’s no-hitter on her TV. “So she pitched a no-hitter, too?”
7:10 First party foul. Spilled beer while grabbing cookies.
7:21 First Event: Friday Night Poker
7:41 Loser Libation Preview: It hasn’t been iced.
7:51 “It’s from that movie called… What the fuck is that movie called? It’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer making out some other chick.”
    “Oh, that’s Cruel Intentions!”
7:52 Wait, who the hell dealt this hand? Check, check, check.
7:56 Put your dick on the table. One red chip dick.

8:17 With the first all-in, Loser Libation is revealed as Franzia Sunset Blush

8:19 All-in won. Live to see another day.
8:23 Can we please put that on ice now?
8:25 “No. Fuck you guys. Tell the story. Tell the story right now.”
8:34 Chris out on a double full house.

8:38 [redacted]

8:42 “I have a 4.”
8:50 “Loser Lube-ation.”
8:53 Sparky keeps dropping cards. Tony invokes Jon Lovitz as Dukakis. “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!”
8:58 Two growlers down.
9:00 “Are you taking this stick or do I need to wrap up these sticks?”
9:11 Loser Libation is finito.
9:17 Another card dropped through the table crack by the crack whore.
9:23 “As happy as I am that you can do math, I cordially invite you to suck my cock.”
9:33 “Gunslinger Rick puts out his second opponent of the night.”
    “I put out all the time.”
9:34 “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a pok’er.”
9:43 “How is this guy still in it? He was up against it twice and I had to fucking drink the hole fucking Franzia all in one night.”
9:49 Sparky down for the count
9:58 Standings after one event: Rick 5, Tony 3, Sparky 1, Chris 0
10:01 I think we can leave the baseball cards out. I’m not worried about bears eating cards.
10:37 Savory in your mouth
10:57 Rick retires
11:11 Tony & Chris out.

Saturday

6:57 Upon further reflection, those last two beers, and the entire bottle of Makers Mark, might not have been entirely necessary last night.
6:59 “I evacuated the Loser Libation last night.”
7:24 “Where the hell did you find Franzia?”
    “You can find it behind the tree over there right now.”
7:57 Guess it’s time to go read the constitution

8:07 Butter removed from ice

8:23 Chipmunk jumps in the fire

9:10 Same stupid chipmunk jumps in the bocce ball box.

9:25 Trip to store unsuccessful in locating Miller Genuine Draft. Thank God.
9:27 First beer of the morning.
10:00 Cribbage.
10:42 “I’m ready for some cornholing.”
   “That’s all you, buddy.”
10:47 It’s probably too early to start drinking heavily
10:59 Rick cornholes Tony in Round 1 with a score of 21-2
11:02 “I need to get better. I’m going to ask my wife for a cornhole for Christmas.”
11:09 Another cornholing as Sparky beats Chris 21-8
11:40 Lunch: A couple of hot Hawaiians
12:10 Round two of cornhole
12:19 Chris wins third place.
12:22 “What’s a devil’s three-way?”
   “Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”
12:31 “You keep tickling the cornhole, but not going in.”
12:39 Sparky powers back from 15-3, wins 21-20.
  Cornhole results: Sparky 5, Rick 3, Chris 1, Tony 0
  After two events: Rick 8, Mark 6, Tony 3, Chris 1

12:42 Hurricane Laura is the Butter Toss target.

12:51 Too close to call, Rick and Sparky must toss-off to make the final round against Chris.
12:53 Butter Toss results: Chris 5, Rick 3, Sparky 1, Tony 0
    After three events: Rick 11, Sparky 7, Chris 6, Tony 3
12:57 Homerun Derby
1:07 Round 1: Chris 8, Sparky 4, Rick 3* (7 outs left), Tony 2
1:13 Round 2: Chris 2 (8 outs left), Rick 2 (7 outs left), Sparky 1
1:18 Rick and Chris headed to a 5-out jack-off, tied 7-7 in finals.
1:24 Rick 2, Chris hits 3rd with four outs left, flips bat, runs around gimpy and pumping arms like Kirk Gibson
   After four events: Rick 14, Chris 11, Sparky 8, Tony 3
2:00 Chipmunk in bear locker. Bear’s going to be pissed.
3:16 “I’m going to take a leak. Then change clothes. And then I’m going to have a beer. Not that you all needed the play-by-play.”
3:40 Exhibition event. Welcome to… New Las Vegas “board” game.

5:11 Tri-tip on the grill, time for Adventure Bocce

5:43 Adventure Bocce results: Chris 5, Sparky 3, Tony 1, Rick 0
   With one event left: Chris 16, Rick 14, Sparky 11, Tony 4
6:01 Tri-tip sammiches
6:25 Rick putting cooler back in car. Quitters never prosper!
  “Fuck you. I’m out of beer in that cooler!”

6:31 “Like a 14-year-old groping around on prom night.”
6:35 It’s about time we read from the Rimmer book.

6:47 Final event: Cards Against Humanity
7:17 Rick wins on “A romantic candlelit dinner would be incomplete without… calculating every mannerism so as not to suggest homosexuality.” If Chris comes in second, we’ll have a tie atop the standings.
7:26 Tony finishes second with “What helps Obama unwind? Out of this world bazongas.”

7:32 Final Camptathalon standings: Rick 19, Chris 16, Sparky 12, Tony 7

7:37 Draft: Action Movies
Order: Sparky, Chris, Rick, Tony
Rd. 1: The Rock, Terminator, Die Hard, Missing in Action
Rd. 2: Top Gun, Red Dawn, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Red
Rd. 3: The Fast & the Furious, First Blood, Aliens, Gone in 60 Seconds
Rd. 4: Bourne Identity, Tango & Cash, 300, The Goonies
(Ed. Note: Drafts are snake-style, so Tony took Missing in Action with pick 4, then Red with pick 5)

8:09 Draft: Holidays
Chris, Rick, Tony, Sparky
Rd. 1: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Independence Day
Rd. 2: Father’s Day, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day
Rd. 3: Constitution Day, Veteran’s Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day
Rd. 4: Easter, Super Bowl Sunday, Opening Day, MLK Day
Rd. 5: Fishmas, Cesar Chavez Day, Canada Day, 21st Amendment Day

8:31 “Now that the sun is down, I can pee openly.”

8:35 Draft: Candy
Rick, Tony, Sparky, Chris
Rd. 1: Pay Day, Peanut M&Ms, Twix, Whatchamacallit
Rd. 2 Snickers, Reese’s Pieces, Peese’s PB Cup, Hershey w/ Almond
Rd. 3: Mr. Goodbar, Almond Joy, Gummy Bears, Kit Kat
Rd. 4: Butterfinger, 100 Grand, Caramels, Nestle Crunch
Rd. 5: Twizzler, Goobers, Starburst, Swedish Fish
Rd. 6: Lifesavers, Bueno Bar, Orange Slices, Black Licorice
Honorable mentions: Junior Mints, Heath/Skor, Hershey’s Kisses w/ almonds

8:47 Ladies across the way already went to sleep. Fuck them. Quiet hours aren’t until 10:00
8:58 “Is it 9:00 yet?”
  “You must stay up until 10:00. First person who falls asleep, we’re dipping your hand in warm water and shaving your eyebrows.”
  “Without warm water or a razor?”
9:32 “I can blow well.”
9:44 “On that note…”
“It’s not 10:00 yet, bitch.”
10:01 “And on that note…”

Sunday
6:34 Shushed by karens next door for packing up too loud.
6:37 Every time that flag’s refurled…
6:52 That smoke in the sky is new. And ash on the cars. Looks like we barely beat the fire this year.
7:43 Westbound and down.

Passing on a Passion

· November 20, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

I’ve been teaching Daughter some of the finer parts of sports recently. Y’know, “beyond the box score” stuff that gives you a deeper understanding of what it’s like to lace up them cleats and face the world like men.

But before I could get to the intricacies of ideal down and distance for a screen pass, I had to start with more basic fundamentals. Like “this is called football.”

Not that we’ve avoided exposing her to those various American pastimes, altogether. Wife and I met at a baseball game, so Daughter attended her first minor league baseball day (on Jimmy Buffett Night, no less) at about six weeks old. She’s been to three of the five major league stadiums in California. If we’re ever allowed to travel out of state again, she should finish the AL and NL West in no time. One trip to Seattle, one trip to Colorado, two places I love to visit!

What’s that? Arizona? Texas, too? During the summer?!?

But I don’t inundate her with many televised sports. Wife and I both grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when every television in America was required to be turned on whenever anybody was inside the house or else the Russians were going to win. Nowadays we prefer to have music on instead of TV. With SiriusXM and Pandora and Amazon Music all streaming on our Alexa, it’s a variety that would’ve given me carpal tunnel system with that behemoth of a five-CD changer I spent a month’s salary on my senior year of high school. 

When we do watch TV, it doesn’t follow the same pattern as when my father only knew of two types of programming – news and sports. By contrast, our TV is tuned to Disney, Jr about ninety percent of the time. 

The times I absolutely need to watch a baseball or football game, I’ll go to another room or, since this is the 21st century, watch it on my laptop or phone on the couch right next to my daughter watching Bluey. Daughter actually thinks curling is as prominent as football, since it’s only on devices, never the TV, so I watch it more often. Use that for your 21st century communications thesis!

Ha-ha, just kidding. Communications majors never write papers longer than a paragraph. 

Sometimes I wonder if my relationship with my own father would’ve been improved if he could’ve watched his sports by himself. Or, more realistically with my dad, if he could’ve sent me to the other room to watch my cartoons because, goddammit, he worked hard to pay for that roof over my head and, goddammit, he only gets to watch sports on weekends and every evening, but not Sunday evening because that’s 60 Minutes time and…

Sorry, where was I? Oh right, if I hadn’t interrupted my dad’s sport-watching so much, he might not’ve hated me so much? Or vice versa? 

But due to a confluence of events over the past month or so, she’s had to cede a little bit of her television dominance to some live sports instead of the same episode of Vampirina for the sixth time in a row. And since I’ve commandeered the tele, the least I could do was explain what’s going on. It makes me feel less guilty about asserting my manorial rights. Plus if I don’t engage Daughter and she jumps all over Mommy, then Daddy’s sports-viewing time is going by the wayside regardless of the fact that they’re going for it on 4th-and-one.

The first sport to grace our television screen was the baseball playoffs. I couldn’t watch them on mlb.tv subscription, which I use during the regular season because I root for an out-of-town team. But somehow the 150 hard-earned dollars I spent for their product doesn’t extend to the postseason. Sheesh, talk about a rip-off! I only get to watch 162 games from my favorite team for that $150? Why, back in my dad’s day, he was able to watch something like seventy WHOLE games. But only for the local team. And only if they weren’t opposite Belle and Sebastian, which my dad referred to as “What’s-his-face and his dog.”

At least he knew there was a dog in it. During the Latchkey 1980s, that might’ve won him a nomination for Parent of the Year.

So, sitting next to Daughter for an opening-round Padres game,  I started trying to explain baseball to Daughter. And herein the problems began. Because, in case I haven’t made it clear, my relationship with my father wasn’t great, and it was even worse when it came to sports.  If you need more proof, his favorite teams were the Dodgers and the Raiders. I grew up (yes, even when he was in the house) an Angels fan. When I finally got around to noticing the football, I opted for the Broncos, probably because I’d heard my dad curse John Elway’s name many a time.

I wasn’t entirely a self-taught sports fan. My grandparents were in the Angels booster’s club and I’ve been going to games in Anaheim my whole life. But I was in my teens before I learned how to throw a baseball. I used a VCR to tape a Braves relief pitcher’s delivery on TBS, then played it back in slow-motion to copy the mechanics. To this day, I still can’t throw a football. I throw it like a baseball, which countless people tell me isn’t possible until they see me throw a football, then remark, “Holy shit, you throw that just like a baseball!” 

It’s a good thing Daughter’s name isn’t Son.

Most of my sports viewing came about in college, primarily so I’d have something to talk to “normal” people about. My interests revolved around history and classic rock and penis/fart jokes. Meatloaf says two out of three ain’t bad, but I was, at best, batting .333, and unless I could pick and choose my audience, most of the time it was a hat-trick of strikeouts. So I expanded my understanding of baseball, including the fact that there were, at the time, 23 OTHER teams not named the Angels. I also partook in the weekly dorm-floor football viewing on Sunday mornings. Sprinkle in a dabbling of hockey and basketball and, voila!, I don’t have to leave the room when my anecdote about Catherine the Great falls flat.

I’ve taught plenty of girlfriends and other nerd-friends about how to follow sports, but seeing as my own appreciation for sports occurred beyond the age of reason, I don’t know if those experiences translate to fathering. When explaining the game to a six-year old hoping for guidance and discovery, the differences between a two-seam and a four-seam fastball probably ain’t gonna cut it.

The only thing my mom ever told me about how she raised me to like baseball was that, when we went to a game, we couldn’t go get food until there was a number under the “4” on the scoreboard, meaning top of the 4th if the away team scores a run, otherwise we had to wait until the middle of the inning when the “0” pops up. In retrospect, that seems to predicate one toward rooting for the away team, but I guess she was more concerned with her wallet than my blooming sports interest. Perhaps that helps explain my disparate, heterodox sports fandom these days. I live in northern California and the short list of teams I root for include the Anaheim Angels, Tennessee Titans, Colorado Buffaloes, and Calgary Flames. Don’t ask. It’s probably worthy of blog post of its own.

And no, they’re not the Los Angeles Angels. California Angels is okay, but Anaheim Angels is ideal. It’s alliterative and appears first in the alphabet. You’re never going to win over L.A., Arte Moreno. People in Orange County hate L.A. Lean into it!

My dad is no longer alive, so I can’t consult him about how he tried (and failed) to pique my interest, or at the very least, how he explained sports to me. I assume it was something along the lines of, “Fuck off, kid, the game is on.” Not in so many words, but the message would’ve been clear.

So I started with the basics. Pitcher versus batter, the most pure faceoff in all of sports. Equal parts strategy and execution. Two warriors trying to out-think each other before resorting to natural talent honed by thousands of repetitions.

How did I translate this into Daughter-speak?

“The guy with the ball is trying to throw it through the little square on the TV screen.”

One thing is certain. I can guarantee that isn’t how my father explained it to me. 

The “little square on the TV screen” is, of course, the strike zone, which is digitally imprinted on most baseball broadcasts over the past decade. I’m usually not too big of a fan of it. It’s not the official strike zone, of course, because that’s only in the eye of the umpire. But if nothing else, it gives us verifiable proof of what we’ve all been yelling since “Damn Yankees” – “You’re blind, Ump. You’re blind, Ump. You must be outta your mind, Ump!”

As an aside, who the hell decided that Broadway musical and 1950s baseball was a good mix? Throw in the devil, too. I’d be curious to watch the “Mad Men” episode that analyzed exactly which cross-section of society they were aiming for with that one. And why, when they revived it in the 1990s, did they stick with the Washington Senators, a team which hadn’t existed in 25 years? It’s gotta be even more confusing now, with the new Washington team playing in the national league and, ergo, never losing a playoff spot to those Damn Yankees. Baltimore Orioles is the same number of syllables. Just sayin’.

So I managed to get a few basics through to Daughter. Four pitches thrown outside the little box means a walk. Unless the batter swings and misses. Until I told her, on a 3-2 count, that the next pitch was the one where it would all be decided, only to see it fouled off. Then again. Then again. 

And she was done. Maybe next season she’ll learn what a base hit looks like.

Since the World Series, we’ve been doing some mandated COVID home-improvement projects. At least I assume they are mandated, because everybody I know is building house additions and buying new couches and converting the kid’s bedroom into a dry sauna room even though the kid is still living in the house. 

Our particular project was getting new carpets. This necessitated moving a bunch of furniture around, and for about a week, we only had (shudder…) one TV plugged in. In the whole house! What is this, 1947?

To make matters worse, my Titans were on TV. Since they made the AFC Championship last year and have the best running back in the game, they’re showing up as the game of the week a little more often. This is difficult for me because I’m used to the years when they only show up on my TV once or twice a year, so I’ve attuned myself to watching every time they’re on. This year, I’ve already seen them four times and we’re only halfway through the season. Although one of those was a Tuesday game that was delayed due to COVID, so maybe it’s less about Derrick Henry and more about 2020 just being fucked up in general.

Anyway, the Titans were going to be on TV and we only have one TV in the house. Sorry, Daughter, but I’m going to do an impression of the grandfather you never met. Now pull my finger.

So Daughter plopped herself next to me and asked me what was going on in the game, what the teams were trying to accomplish.

And what did I tell her?

They’re trying to get to the yellow line. 

That’s right, the magical first-down marker which I mocked and reviled when it was first added to football games. I considered it the greatest dumbing-down in the history of sports. How the hell hard is it to figure out how far they have to go if it’s listed as third-and-four and, by the way, they’ve got a giant fucking orange stick glaring at you from the sideline. 

Yeah, THAT magical yellow line.

You see, Daughter, they have three chances to get past the yellow line, and if they’re successful, they’ll get a new yellow line. If they don’t make it, they have to kick it away to the other team, who will get a yellow line of their own. 

Fortunately, she didn’t watch long enough to see somebody go for it on 4th down.

So let’s chalk “teaching sports” up as one more thing I can’t conceive of doing before technology existed. I don’t know how we found random businesses before Google Maps. Nor how we coordinated schedules with friends. How the hell did teachers teach without googling “Russian Revolution lesson plan.” How did authors write without cut-and-paste functions? Did they really have to retype the whole fucking page to fix one typo? What happens if there’s a typo on the retype?

And now, sports. The pitcher is trying to throw the ball through the little square. A football team is trying to get to the yellow line. If I ever turn on a hockey game, I’ll have to tell her they all want possession of the glowing thing.

Well, at the very least, I can be sure of one thing. 

I’m certainly not approaching sports with my daughter the same way my dad did with me.

Outdoor Curling, Off-Ice

· February 9, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

I originally intended for this post to be a two-parter.One for preparation, one for the Sawtooth Outdoor Bonspiel. But one of our games turned into an epic, inspiring poems retold for centuries to come. So now it’s a threesome of posts. No, wait a second. Is there another word for a group of three? Perhaps a double-team? You’re currently reading the meat of this curling-post sandwich.

Read on to find out what the beautiful town of Stanley was like and how I managed to snap my wrist! Then you can find the on-ice stuff here.

Okay, so the good news is that the weather was way warmer than expected. I spent the last three months expecting zero degrees Farenheit, and in the end I got zero degrees Celsius (and y’all thought I didn’t know metric.)

Heck, we didn’t even need the beards and goggles. But when you deck yourself out this sexy, there’s no turning back on account of weather.

The bad news is that it’s really, really difficult to curl when the ambient temperature is the freezing point of water. Because, you see, we need the water to be actually frozen. If it’s melting, the stone can’t glide across it, as it’s supposed to. We went to a hockey game and a water polo match broke out. Not that I’d trust horses on either surface.

As an example, we time our deliveries in curling, in order to give the sweepers an idea of when to sweep and to give the shooter an idea of how the ice is working. We only time the beginning of the delivery. Under normal conditions, a delivery of 3.5 or 3.6 or 3.7 seconds means the rock will end on the button (the middle of the “bullseye”) at the other end, about 25 seconds later. And if I’m timing the lead on my team and discover it’s 3.7 to button versus 3.5, then that tells me I need to slide out a little slower than usual.

At the beginning of our first game, it was 2.6 seconds to button. As far as we could tell. At those speeds, it’s hard to get an accurate reading, as the sweepers are chasing after a 20 MPH bullet. So yeah, for the first two ends, we were pretty much throwing as hard as we could and hoping for the best.

The game was scheduled to start at 5:00, but they pushed it back to 5:30 to accommodate for the weather. They should’ve pushed it back to 6:00. Because by the third end, the ice was closer to normal. Okay, maybe it was 3.3 to button instead of the usual 3.6, but that’s something we can work with.

Not that we could work with it. We scored one in the first end and then got shutout for the next five. There were a few times we’d get a little something going, but then the other team would make a perfect draw and we’d end up with squa-doosh. I was ready to throw in the towel on the second-to-last end when we were down 8-1. But then we were looking at three points before I took my final two shots. We all agreed: if we score less than five, we’ll shake hands and concede the game. Because if we score, the other team gets the hammer (final shot). And it’s really, really hard to score more than two if the other team has the final shot. But if we scored five, we’d be down by two. And then….

We scored five. Game’s now 8-6. Other team wants to shake hands, but we went dick-mode and made them play the final end. It didn’t matter. My final shot curled a foot too far, pushing our own stone back instead of their stone, as intended, so they didn’t even need to take their final shot.

The weight actually normalized a bit when the sun started to set. Although human beings might not like the temperature in the twenties, curling rocks do. That’s one of the ways we were able to mount that comeback. Once the ice behaved in a marginally normal way, we were able to make some stuff happen. The lines were still wonky. If you moved the broom six inches to the left, the rock might end up six feet to the left. But that actually worked in our favor because the other team kept missing their hits. A team can’t really score five points in an end unless the other team messes up.

Then again, you gotta be ready to pounce on the opponent’s mistakes.

After the game, we headed to one of two restaurants in Stanley. There’s usually a pizza place, too, but it was closed for renovation. We were worried that, in a town of 67, the restaurant might not be open past 8:00. Heck, I live in a city of 60,000 and it’s sometimes hard to find anyplace open that late.

Turns out we didn’t need to worry. They stayed open for us, and were still open when the next draw ended. Makes sense. Sixteen teams, four curlers apiece. We just doubled the size of their population. I guess when you live in a remote town, anytime there’s outside money coming in, you gotta accommodate them. Otherwise you’re just taking money from Henry at the hardware store, whom you’ll be giving it back to next week when you need some more propane.

Word in the restaurant was that the late draw worked the opposite of us. The speed of the ice was normal for the first couple of ends, and then the fog rolled in, which pushed people back up to 2.6-second draws. I never thought about the effects of fog on curling rocks (not something we encounter too much indoors), but it makes sense. The air’s going to get heavier and there’s going to be more moisture. Neither of those are great for speeding up a 42-pound rock sliding across a frozen pond.

Unfortunately, because we lost game one, we were stuck in the early draw the next morning. 7:00 AM, an hour and change before sunrise. A wonderful time to enjoy the comfort and extravagance of a mountain retreat. It was pitch black when the game started. Check this out:

You can almost see where you’re aiming, huh? It changed how I held the target broom. Usually I try to make the target as small as possible. I stand directly behind my broom, tuck one foot behind the other. The head on my broom is usually a neon green or garish orange that really pops against the black of my pants and shoes. Don’t want to confuse my team with where the target is. Some skips stand with their legs a foot or two wide and the next thing you know, you’re accidentally sighting in on their left foot or the open air in between instead of the broom.

I started this game doing just that. Then one of my teammates told me to spread my legs. After the commensurate and anatomically errant “That’s what she said,” I opened them up wide. When finished, I saw why they were asking. My body had been blocking the spotlights. They couldn’t really see the orange target. But if I widened my stance like a GOP Senator in a Minnesota airport, they could see the giant stick between my legs.

And there was a broom there, too. Hey-Oh!

I was told by a guy who had come in previous years to be on the lookout for the sunrise. It’s beautiful, he said, and it will, however temporarily, help you stop the nagging doubt building in your gut as to why you signed up and paid for the “privilege” of frostbitten testicles. Then again, he was there on one of those negative-five days, not a twenty-degrees-at-sunrise type of day that I got to experience.

But he wasn’t wrong about the sunrise:

These photos are brought to you by a couple of stones that I didn’t bother watching. I probably could’ve swept them to better positions, helped my team win their fucking game. But really, how can I let that sunrise go by? I didn’t come here to win games. I came to freeze my testicles!

I decided to throw on an extra layer of clothing this time. Despite months of planning, the previous night had been a bit chilly. My legs were fine. My toes, despite two layers of socks and two layers of rubber, felt the ice whenever I stood still. But the worst part was my chest and arms. One layer of thermal, then a t-shirt, then a onesie was not enough. And that had been at thirty degrees. This time the thermometer read a crisp eighteen when we left our hotel. What had been a wee bit uncomfortable last night would be a tad more hard-core today.

It was fine, though. I brought the flannel shirt I usually take camping. It’s thick. Add that to some thermals underneath and my super fancy onesie on top and I should be nice and cozy, right? Well, it was better but still not ideal.

I did finally get my chest to a happy medium, though. After our second game, we were supposed to return to the ice rink to help them out with some stuff around midday. This time I went old school. I have some of those old-fashioned wool long-john style underwear that I’ve had since I was a teenager. I don’t want to say we’ve regressed as a society, but the ugly-ass shit from World War II works a hell of a lot better than the sleek black Audi shit of today. We’ve become more concerned with looking good than, I don’t know, surviving the elements. At least the rescuers will find a very sexy corpse-sicle.

Fortunately it stretches, cause my gut ain’t what it once was. Or rather, it’s a lot more than it once was. Unfortunately it doesn’t stretch THAT much, so the downward-slope of my undergut was feeling a bit drafty. But whatever, it kept the rest of me warm. I actually just wore a t-shirt over it. No onesie! Besides, it was the low-thirties once again, so I didn’t need to ward off frostbite.

By our third game, I had perfected it. Sleek black thermal, wool longjohn, flannel shirt, onesie. Four layers! I was downright toasty.

Except for my feet. Cause no matter how protected my chest and arms were, my toes were still permanently aware of the fact that they were walking on ice. One layer of cotton sock, one layer of thermal sock, shoe rubber and gripper rubber be damned.

I tried some of those iron-oxide foot warmers, but they didn’t seem to do much. I put them outside the thermal socks, thinking the closer to the ice, the better. Maybe I should’ve put them in between my two socks. If I ever return, I’ll test that out.

Oh, and I fell on the ice when I helped during the day. You see, when the sun is out and it’s 34 degrees, it makes the ice super slippery. It’s a bad time to curl and evidently it’s a bad time to walk. I was in the act of kicking an errant rock over to the edge. The ice was in the act of kicking my ass to the ground.

The good news is that years of curling has taught me how to fall on ice. Always fall forward, never backward. Backward is where blackouts and cracked skulls happen. And trips to the emergency room with the commensurate ambulance bill. Unfortunately, when your ass gets above your teakettle, you can get a concussion on the front-end, too. Did you know it’s possible to land temple first?

The good news is that my on-ice instinct must be honed very well. The bad news is that I got my wrist underneath me at the last minute before my face planted. Or maybe it’s the good news. Because a sprained wrist is better than being knocked unconscious and whisked off to the nearest hospital, which was over an hour away. But unfortunately, a sprained wrist is substantially worse than an unsprained wrist. It looks gnarly, too.

That’ll teach me to help out.

College Mascots

· March 21, 2019 · Musings · , , , , · One Comment

March Madness is upon us. So I guess now is as good a time as any to write about my favorite college teams. Bear in mind, none of these teams have anything to do with how good the colleges are or the teams are. Or what sports they play. If you want to know the 13-seed most likely to pull an upset, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

All I’m here for are the mascots.

My high school does a “college day” every Wednesday, where they encourage teachers to wear college gear. Of course, ninety percent of the teachers at this Sacramento-area high school went to one of two colleges, such that our students actually roll their eyes at Sacramento State and UC Davis.

I wanted to be different, so I set out to find hats of obscure teams with fun mascots. One Wednesday, I might be sporting a Northern Arizona Lumberjacks hat, and the next I’ll bust out the UMKC Kangaroos. Not really sure why they’re the Kangaroos. Last time I checked, there aren’t a lot of marsupials in the Kansas City area. Then again, there aren’t a lot of Mastodons in the wherever-the-hell-IPFW is. I think it stands for “I’m Peeing in your Front Window,” and I know for a fact that there are no mastodons near my front window. Or Fort Wayne, for that matter. Or Fort Worth. I’m just covering my bases, because I’m not 100% sure what the FW stands for. The only thing I know for certain is the “I’m Peeing” part. And there are no mastodons anywhere one might find oneself peeing.

Not that I bought any IPFW hats for our college days, because IPFW doesn’t sell hats that contain both the college name and the mascot. I can get a hat that says IPFW, or a hat with a menacing elephant, but I can’t find one with both items. Seriously, IPFW. You have a pretty cool names and an awesome mascot. Yet you sell no hats that combine the two. I assume marketing is not one of the majors that is offered at IPFW? It’d take room from that vaunted prehistoric zoology department.

You know who else is super shitty about putting mascots on hats? Canadian schools! I know, I know. Who the he’ll knew there were universities in Canada? I was surprised, too. And they’ve got some damn good mascots, too. For instance, did you know that the University of Calgary are the Dinos? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. The apparel department at the University of Calgary are alson unaware they are the dinos, as you can’t purchase any hats that indicate that fact.

The University of British Columbia are the Thunderbirds. The University of Winnipeg has Wesley Coyote. The University of Manitoba are the bison, which looks suspiciously similar to the University of Colorado’s Buffalo. But there aren’t any hats for the bison, so your best bet for repping Manitoba is to buy a Colorado hat and then put a Manitoba sticker on it.

As far as I can tell,  Nunavut Arctic College doesn’t even have a mascot. How the heel does the name of your school include the word “arctic” but you can’t pick a mascot? You probably have some legitimate options, like a polar bear, that aren’t available anywhere else in the world. Kinda like all the indigenous kangaroos in Kansas City made that such a logical pairing. But no. No mascot at Nunavut Arctic College. Hell, in America,  even our elementary schools have mascots.

The University of Saskatchewan has Howler the Husky. The University of Saskatchewan also often uses the shortened name of U-Sask. Pretty cool name. I wouldn’t even need a Husky on it if I could buy a U-Sask hat. But I can’t.

And inside Saskatchewan, we have the city of… You know what? I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to my hat collection. One of my favorites belongs to St. Peter’s University,  which I guess is in New York. It’s not that I’m a big fan of St. Peter’s, it’s just that their mascot is the Peacocks. How, I ask, could I NOT wear a hat that had not only the word “Peter,” but also a derivation of both “Pee” and “Cocks.”

Because,  although I’m the only non-sophomore in the room,  let’s be honest,  I’m also the most sophomoric.  Do you know how hard it was to be the only one stifling giggles when I had a student giving a book presentation about all the beaver hunts the Russian settlers used to go on in the Pacific Northwest? And by “the only one stifling a giggle,” I don’t mean that everyone else was laughing uncontrollably and I was the only one to keep it under control. I mean I’m the only one who was finding it giggle-worthy in the first place. All the rest of my students were paying rapt attention to the wonderful information about the relative value of rodent-pelts.

“Yeah, so there used to be a lot of beavers. And these men were trying to get as many beavers as possible. It was a real sense of accomplishment for these men as to who could nab the prettiest beavers.  Like, if they could get more than one beaver at the same time, that would be really impressive.”

“Thank you for that very informative report about the history of my college days. Um,  I mean the non-British colonies.”

And this all brings me to what this article is about.  My favorite colleges,  which have nothing to do with the quality of the educational facilities or sports acumen. I gave a dream conference. Eight schools that should play each other on a regular basis. I don’t care about travel costs or the competitiveness of the matchups. I mean, sure, Alabama should destroy Oregon State in football every time they play,  but then again,  shouldn’t it be a bloodbath every time the Crimson Tide visit the Beavers?

(Russian traders notwithstanding)

Okay,  so here’s my conference.

Alabama. See above. Although I don’t really know if they should play anyone other than the Beavers.

Oregon State. These guys would be the MVPs of the conference,  year in and year out.  Who doesn’t want to pound Beavers on a regular basis? Just ask my sophomore book-report girl.

Ball State. See what I mean about Alabama? The crimson tide should never come anywhere close to Ball State.

Sacramento State.  This might seem an odd addition if you don’t live in Northern California. But this school usually advertises itself as “Sac State.” The cheerleaders even wear uniforms that just emblazon “SAC” right across their chest.  So knowing that, are y’all as upset as I am that we don’t have an annual “Ball-Sac Classic” in every sport? I wonder what the trophy would look like.

Wichita State. These guys have gained some traction over recent years as their basketball team has done well. Their first year of prominence,  the networks were completely unaware that their team name,  the Shockers, had a completely different connotation than “one who shucks wheat.” But if you look closely at the stands at one of their televised games, you’ll see evidence of the OTHER type of Shocker. If you aren’t aware of the Shocker, then you don’t spend much time on Urban Dictionary. It’s a rather crude, misogynistic play on a sexual move. I don’t want to get too graphic. Maybe I can use some of the pithy phrases associated with it. Like “Two in the pink, one in the…” hold on, that might not be appropriate. What about “If two fingers don’t rock ‘er, give ‘er the…” No, I can’t finish that thought. This has to stay a family friendly blog, what with its references to bloody ball sacs and whatnot. Regardless, the international symbol for shocker is the ring finger being held down by the thumb. What you’re left with is the pointer and middle finger paired together, while the pinkie (the Shocker) is off on its own. I’ll let you figure out what it’s there for.

South Carolina. I think I once wrote an entire blog entry all about my love of cock. No wait. That sounds wrong. What I mean is that, while watching college football, I like to see a lot of penetration. Like, when the University of South Carolina has a good defense, there end up being a lot of cocks in the backfield. Hold on a second. I think this is all coming across incorrectly. What I mean is it’s great to see the Cocks rise to the occasion. It would only be fitting if the winner of the Ball-Sac Classic were to team up with the Cocks for a hopeful encounter with the Beavers. Unless the Crimson Tide is in town.

University of Southern California. Nobody likes having the Trojans in their conference. They just seem to get in the way. And the pleasure that you normally get from that encounter between the Cocks and the Beavers is totally deadened by the presence of the University of Southern California. But in this era of lots of travelling matchups between various cocks and balls and sacs, it’s probably a good idea to keep the Trojans nearby. Safety first when it comes to college sports. We don’t want to have to figure out which concussion protocol to follow when there’s an errant Shocker involved.

Hey, did you know there’s been a recent tiff between the Cocks and the Trojans? The University of South Carolina is upset that the University of Southern California are the ones usually ascribed the moniker “USC.” It’s a somewhat common gripe in a country with thousands of colleges and only a finite number of letter combinations. The Buffaloes usually go with the awkward phrasing of “Colorado University,” because the California schools have already stolen the “UC” designations.

And of course, I’m sorry to spoil the Cocks’ wild dreams, but the real USC is in Southern California. Isn’t that just like the Trojans to get in the way?

And so that is the conference I wanted to see. I wanted to see Cocks and Shockers and Beavers and Ball Sacs. I want all of their games to be televised nationally and only to be announced by comedians who know how to toe the fine line of double entendre.

But there was always a problem with my conference. It only has seven teams. You can’t have a conference with an odd number of teams. You can’t have a team off every gameday. Plus, there are three sets of natural rivals and then poor Wichita State is all there by its lonesome, like a pinkie hanging around the back door.

So I looked long and hard (yeah, baby) for an eighth team to add to make it a full conference. I guess the St. John’s Red Storm is only a pale impression of the Crimson Tide. The Rams of Colorado State or Rhode Island? Meh. The Presbyterian Blue Hose had potential until I realized that they were talking about tights worn by Scots. Plus I’d have to change the spelling. I could switch around the Tulsa Golden Hurricanes into Golden Showers, but the beauty of the conference to this point is that I haven’t had to change a word. The meaning, sometimes, but Wichita State are legitimately called the Shockers.

And Navy have the audacity to call themselves the Midshipmen, when we all know they should be the Seamen.

The Massachusetts Minutemen had promise. I imagine it’s not a very good pickup line in the Bay State. “Hey baby, let me be your minuteman.” Do the cheerleaders have to stop their cheers in the middle or else the players won’t be able to finish their play? Like I said, it’s got potential, but I don’t see the Minutemen ever engaging in enough foreplay to encounter a Shocker. And they probably need matchups with the Trojans on a regular basis.

I was ready to give up on my dream conference until I started looking at those Canadian schools who hide their mascots. That’s when I found…

The University of Regina. Regina is the capital city of the Canadian province of Manitoba. It’s home to the Canadian Football League’s Roughriders. (I bet it is). The Mounties also have their training there. (I bet they do).

Of course, these jokes are only funny if you know how the name of the city is pronounced. It looks like the last two syllables should read like name Gina. The University of Re-geena. And why would Gina have anything to do with Roughriders and Mounties?

But it’s not pronounced that way. You see, much like they mispronounce the word “about” and misspell the word “labor,” those poutine-lovers pronounce a long I in Regina. So it rhymes with with Dinah. Or Carolina. Or…

So yeah… I mean, I guess… Ball State and Sac State make it into my conference by name alone, so I guess I can let the Rajin’ Gynas in on name alone. Sure, it seems odd to throw in a Canadian university. They have 110-yard football fields and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to figure out how many centimeters it is from home plate to first base.

Let me peruse it while I look up their mascot and… whoa, ho, ho!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

The Regina Cougars.

My work here is done.

More Crazy Curling

· February 21, 2019 · Musings · , , , , · No Comments

It’s time for the update nobody was asking for.

Seriously, I’ve seen the stats. I could tag “wiping my ass” and have five likes by the morning. But curling sends all the boys to the (other) yard.

But I don’t care, because someone (most likely me), somewhere (most likely here) wants to know how my curling has gone since my last post. Did I play more bonspiels in the second half of 2018? Have I played anything other than lead? Did I ever make it past the 2-2 bugaboo that seems to plague me at every turn?

Well, I’m glad I asked myself!

I might have some new readers since my last update, so here’s the skinny: I started curling (yes, the one with the sweeping and the grunting and the yelling) back in the 2014 Olympics. Or rather, while the 2014 Olympics were going on. Not IN the Olympics, mind you. Now I’m approaching the five-year mark, which technically means I should be getting much better. And there are some games where I totally am better. And then there are games where I seem to have forgotten which direction the stone is supposed to go or how to hold a broom or, really, what the fuck this “ice” thing is that we’re standing on. I’ve never been much of a golfer, but I hear that is response of most golfers: I hit that shot yesterday, why am I in the bushes today? And for the next three months?

In my last post, I wrote about the dream team of new-ish curlers that we put together to take the crown at the vaunted “Five Years of Experience or Less” tournament and how we failed miserably in that regard. We won our first two games and lost our next two games, which has more or less been the hill I tend to die on in most bonspiels. Two wins, two losses, and almost always in that precise order.

Well since then, I’ve curled in two more bonspiels. And the good news is that in one of them I didn’t go 2-2! Huzzah!

I went 0-4!

Just kidding. We actually won four games that weekend! Huzzah! And then I went to another bonspiel and went 2-2 again. In the same fucking order I always do. Except I was kinda, sorta proud of that record this time around. Was it against better competition? No. Not at all. The competition was atrocious. So why was I so tickled at this particular 2-2?

Before I get to that, let’s focus on the 4-1 record. Because that one came first chronologically and I’m a history teacher.

Most bonspiels are run in a standard “bracket” system a la March Madness. Some start with pool play. Others do not. Regardless of whether you played in a pool or bracket, though, you reach a point where the loser goes home. And ideally, that loser-go-home game comes after the teams have been sorted into the haves and the have-nots. Sometimes that can be a little brutal, as you win your first two games and are rewarded with a do-or-die game against some behemoth team with Olympians. Meanwhile those numbnuts who you beat 15-2 in Game One are now playing on Sunday morning, twenty hours after you were eliminated, in the semifinal of the bracket where all the teams started out 0-2.

My home club starts with pool play which then goes into three brackets. We send the top sixteen teams, which ends up being all the first-place teams and most of the-second place teams, into the A Bracket. This seeding has often been the undoing of my team. As I mentioned, we often win our first two games and then lose our third. That usually puts us in second place and then we enter the A Bracket as something like the 15 or 16 seed. And if you follow March Madness, you know what usually happens to the 15 and 16 seeds. Even if you don’t follow March Madness, I bet you can probably figure out what happens when the 16th-best team plays the best team. It’s time to drink!

So when we won our first two games at last September’s bonspiel, we got nervous. The third team we were playing was 1-1, but if they beat us, we’d both be 2-1 and they’d get first place based on head-to-head record. Most of the tiebreakers were established before the third game started, so going into it, we knew that we were either going to be the fifth seed with a win, or the fourteenth seed with a loss. The pressure was on.

We won the third game. Don’t ask me how. And by “don’t ask me how,” I don’t mean that we had no fucking business beating that team. I just don’t remember how we beat them. It was back in September and I’ve played a lot of games since then. Nothing really sticks out about that game. The games we lose? Yeah, I remember every fucking mistake and the number of centimeters each shot missed by. But wins don’t stick in my craw very long.

Wins are forgettable and the losses stick with you forever. Why the fuck do I play this game?

But I do know that, since we finally got past the double-digit seed shenanigans, we also finally won our first game in the A Bracket. Again, though, it was a win, so I got nothing to tell you about that game. All I know is we were 4-0, we had survived until Sunday, and we were in the quarterfinals of the A Bracket. The Elite Eight! And who cares if our potential Final Four match-up happened to have a guy who came in second place at the Canadian Men’s Championships last year and was prominently featured in this John Oliver clip. The one in the hat. Super nice, has come to our club a number of times. Would totally destroy my team. But that doesn’t matter, because the Final Four is the Final Four, baby.

Except you have to make it past the Elite Eight first, and astute readers will note that I already said we went 4-1. So maybe I should stop looking ahead at a match that would never happen.

What happened in our fifth match? Well, since it was a loss, I can tell you in excruciating detail. Again, why the hell do I subject myself to this mental torture?

In Game Five, we made two key mistakes. Our strategy was solid. We hit our shots. We curled well. We swept well. We took advantage of the other team’s mistakes. From a curling standpoint, we did pretty much everything you would need to do to win the game.

So where was our problem? Walking.

The first faux pas came when we had a two-point lead. They had one point in the house, and we were taking the final shot. There was a little bit of a port between guards where we could get to their rock, so we decided to go for it. Worst case scenario, we figured we’d give up one and still have the final shot in the next end. Well, our shot didn’t make it through the port. It clipped the guard. No biggie, the shooter and the guard should have rolled out and everything in the house stays where it is.

Except it didn’t roll out. The other sweeper on my team happened to have his foot there, so the rock cushioned up against his inseam. And since his foot was in the process of walking forward, the rock shifted its momentum, too. It spilled into the house.

The rules say that the opposing team gets to decide what happens to a stone that is “burned” (ie touched). Usually this means putting the stone back or removing it from play. But you can let it stay where it ended up after the other team touched it. The unwritten rule is that you do your best to determine what the rock would have done if it wasn’t touched.

I can say, without equivocation, that there is absolutely no way this particular rock was going to end up in the house. It was leaving the guard area on a route that was parallel to the house. The other team said it would’ve hit one of the other guard rocks, which is true. There were two rocks just past my teammate’s foot, which is why his foot was in the evacuation path in the first place. But there were two stones there that the stone in question would have transferred its momentum to, and the front one would’ve trapped it there. There’s no way it would have taken the right turn that it took unless it came up against an object already moving in that direction. Such as a foot.

Think of marbles. Or billiard balls. When a ball strikes another ball, it stops. It might roll a little bit one way, but it’s lost most of its momentum by then. Especially if there’s another ball there after it rolls a bit.

Anyone who knows anything about how curling rocks behave knew that the stone would not have ended up in the house. Hell, had the opposing skip actually been watching, he would have admitted that, but I don’t think he saw what happened. I think he all of a sudden looked up and saw two of his rocks in the house and just said he’d take the two points.

And the rules say it’s up to the other team and, shocker, they take the second point. I can’t be certain I wouldn’t do the same thing in his position.

But no biggie. It’s a tie game and we’ve been outplaying them the whole game. As long as we don’t make any other stupid walking mistakes.

The next snafu was mine. The good news is that my feet didn’t kick any stones into play. The bad news is that gravity can be a bitch.

I’ve fallen plenty of times while curling. Most curlers do at some point or another. When one of the primary actions of the sport requires walking on ice, it’s bound to happen. But most of the falls are harmless. It’s only bad if you fall over backwards and hit your head. That’s why we encourage people to always lean forward. That way the worst you can do is fall on your knees.

But oh man, I never realized how gnarly falling forward could be. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I was too far behind the rock. I knew I was too far behind the rock. I could see the trajectory of the rock, which is something I really shouldn’t have been able to see if I had been in the proper position. That’s why there’s so much screaming in curling, because the people who are sweeping can’t tell where the rock is going. But because I was out of position, I knew it was starting to curl earlier than it was supposed to, and I knew that my skip was going to start yelling soon. So when the shouting came, I was already overextended, my front foot far away from my back foot. When I lifted my broom, I looked like Superman shouting “Up, up, and away.”

Hey, did you know Superman leaves the ground when he goes horizontal?

I flailed out like a motherfucker. But I didn’t burn the rock! Huzzah for five years of curling instinct, telling me to sacrifice my body instead of touching the rock. I did some Matrix shit in mid-air to ensure that neither my broom nor my hand nor my arm would make contact with the rock.

Unfortunately, that meant that I was going to hit hard on my shoulder and my hip.

Hey, did you know you can get a concussion from hitting your shoulder too hard? It turns out you can. And I can’t guarantee I had a concussion after that, but I’m pretty sure the NFL wouldn’t have let me back out on the field. Luckily there are no field sobriety tests on the curling ice.

That’s how they check for concussions, right? Follow my finger, touch your nose, say the alphabet backward. They’re just trying to catch you saying, “Dude, I couldn’t even do that with a horizontal brain.”

Anyway, the important part of my fall turned out to be neither my ability to avoid the rock nor the state of my brain inside my skull. No, the reason I remember this fall so much is what I saw the rock do from wonderful new vantage point on the floor.

You see, the usual purpose of sweeping a curling rock is to keep it straight. The rock wants to curl. And sometimes we want it to curl. But there are other times we want to keep it straight. And the important sweeper for this endeavor is the sweeper on the inside of the curve. If the rock is curling from right to left, then it’s the sweeper on the left that matters. He needs to seep across the rock, trying to convince the rock to follow the path of the broom, not the path it’s currently on.

The rock I fell on (not fell ON, mind you, but fell DURING) was traveling from right to left. I was on the left. Then I was no longer on the left. The other sweeper, the one whose foot had fucked up a half-hour earlier, was on the right. When he realized that his teammate and friend had crashed down in a concussive force and was sprawled out on the ice behind him, he did what any decent human being would do. He completely ignored me and concentrated on getting into position to sweep the rock.

Oh sorry, did I say decent human being? I meant good curler. He did what any good curler would do. If I sacrificed my health for the greater good, he better not waste my effort.

Unfortunately, to get into the best position to sweep, he had to stop his own momentum, step over the rock, then step forward again to get into the position I had failed to obtain, so that he could sweep from left to right. By the time my teammate was in position to sweep, our rock’s trajectory had gone from hitting the target stone at the 11 o’clock position to hitting it at the 1 o’clock position. By the time my teammate got a proper sweep in, a point in time where I should have already had ten sweeps in had I been able to stay on my feet, it was desperately hanging on to the three o’clock position. And before I knew it, there was no way it was making contact with the target. It was going to crash a meaningless stone sitting two feet to the left. I mean, yay, we held the other team to scoring one instead of the two they might have gotten. But had I swept it the whole way, they weren’t scoring any.

Want to know the final score? We lost by two. How many walking mistakes did we have? Two. So even assuming nothing else changes, the two points they got off those mistakes were the two points they won by. But in reality, it wouldn’t have been that close. Had we been up by three after my friend’s foot incident, we would’ve played the game differently. Had I swept the second rock the whole way, then we have the lead going into the final end instead of down by one.

Two walking mistakes. Two points. Ugh.

To be fair, we would’ve gotten destroyed by the professional Canadian in the semifinal. The team that beat us got destroyed. But then they went on to win the third-place game pretty handily. I’m pretty sure we could have, too. And third place sounds a hell of a lot better than “lost in the quarterfinals.”

But don’t mind me, I’ll just be sitting here watching all the 0-3 teams playing in the “C Bracket Semifinal” after my 4-1 team was eliminated.

Dammit. At the end of it all, I can’t say that 4-1 feels all that much different from 2-2. Or even from 1-4. Because I’ve had one of those bonspiels, too. We always say that the first goal is to stay alive until Sunday. But when you’re eliminated in your first Sunday game, you say, “Dammit, why did I have to drag my ass here an extra day for this?”

Oh well, maybe my next time would go better.

Which leads me, a month later, to the beautiful resort town of McCall, Idaho for a 16-team bonspiel on the shores of a mountain lake. I mean, we technically weren’t curling on the lake. We were in an ice rink right across from the lake.

1007181023They do have an outdoor bonspiel on a frozen lake in Idaho, but that’s in January, not October. The outdoor bosnpiel, called the Sawtooth Outdoor Bonspiel because it’s in the Sawtooth Mountains and because it seems like it would be a real SOB, continually runs on and off my bucket list. It usually sounds like a good idea in the middle of summer, but when my California-born-and-raised ass bundles up at fifty-five degrees, I’m not sure if athletic activity outdoors at 7:00 in the morning of a day that will top out at ten degrees sounds like a great idea.

Don’t worry, if I ever do it, I will live blog it. Assuming my fingers don’t fall off. But in the meantime, you have to muddle through my indoor Idaho curling.

McCall marked the furthest I’ve ever traveled to curl. Every other place I’ve curled has been in the Pacific Time Zone. I really need to get to one of those Wisconsin bonspiels someday. I’ve heard many of them have all-you-can-drink beer included. How the hell have I not set up permanent residency there yet?

Speaking of time zones, not only is McCall far away in miles, but I’m pretty sure it’s still 1983 there. They have a video rental store.

And an arcade.

1006181334

And deer might randomly walk through your front yard.

1006181740bAnd you can smoke in bars???

1006182018

But the town itself was a beautifully quaint mountain town. Check it out:

And the curling itself… well, I’ve already spoiled my record. Two wins, followed by two losses. But in my spoiling, I also teased that I am much prouder of this 2-2 record than most. Because this time I was skipping.

What is skipping? The skip is the person who holds the broom, does all the screaming, and then takes the final two shots when it’s all on the line. If you watch “Curling Night in America” on NBC, you might be fooled into thinking the skips are the only people on the team who take shots, because that program is pre-recorded and edited for content. As a result, the poor leads and seconds, the roles I usually fill, are rarely shown delivering a stone. Boo. Hiss.

The team I cobbled together for this trip were based primarily on who could take a day off work. The full team didn’t come together until the weekend prior. And without one of the usual skips in our club on the team, I seized the role from the members’ cold, dead hands.

Okay, maybe they weren’t dead, just cold. And really, that was only before they put their gloves on. My point is that I said I was fine with skipping and they all said they were fine with me skipping, so I skipped.

Skipping’s a different animal. I’ve done it before. Sometimes our skip is gone for a league game and the rest of us rock-paper-scissors for it. Other times I’ve been hurt and couldn’t sweep. Of course, on those times, I usually take the first two shots, then just do the holdy-broomy, shouty thing, which is only one part of skipping.

The thing that really separates most skips, and the reason we continually see John Shuster or Nina Roth when we’re watching the American teams at the Olympics, is because they’re taking the last shots. Oftentimes, these are the toughest shots. But even if they aren’t tough, they are the shots that matter. If I’m a little bit short when I take a shot as the second or vice, I shrug my shoulders and say, “it wasn’t horrible, and I’ve put it in a good position for the people after me to do something with.” But when I’m skip, there’s nobody after me. And if I’m supposed to get it to the button (the middle of the “target”), but I end up on the outer ring, then the other team just scored some points.

Mike McEwen made one of the best shots I’ve ever seen, but if he had been a vice skip, then the skip on the other team would’ve just put another rock into the middle of the house, negating most of his good work. When a vice makes a good shot, it’s like that defensive lineman who celebrates tackling the running back for a loss on second down, only to see the QB convert the third down thirty seconds later.

So while Matt Hamilton has a much better porn ‘stache, John Shuster’s the guy who hit the double takeout to score five in the gold medal game. And in most bonspiels, I’m like Matt Hamilton, but with less cool facial hair. In McCall, I was John Shuster.

Which doesn’t mean I won. Trust me, if you followed curling before last February, John Shuster’s name was hardly equated with winner.

So how’d I do?

I mean, how’d we do?

(But really, how’d I do?)

We dominated the first game. Wasn’t even close. The other team had at least one new curler, and the others had never played with their skip before. I mean, we had a new curler and most of my team hadn’t played with me as skip before. But the other team had been onsite, and drinking, since morning and were really sloshed, whereas we had just flown to Boise then driven for two hours to get there. So I guess that’s all it takes.

Game two was a little bit closer, but it still didn’t raise much of a sweat. I think after three ends, we were up 3-2. They had scored one twice, we had scored three points in the second end. Then I don’t think they scored again till the final end. If I were to guess at the final score, I’d assume 7-3 or 8-3. Pretty comfortable, and we were feeling good about ourselves. With only 16 teams in the tournament, we were already into the semifinals of A Bracket. And if we lost the next game, we’d drop down to B Bracket. So either way, we’re through to Sunday. Goal #1: Accomplished.

I’m not sure what Goal #2 might have been, but it wouldn’t end up mattering.

Game three was bad. They had a Canadian. I think we were down 5-0 before we even scored. Then we got it back to 5-4, as in the words of Robin Williams’s golf bit, “just ta give ya hope.” Then they scored in the next two ends, and we managed to put up a respectful 7-5 loss. Afterward, the Canadian complemented us, said he told his team not to rest easy when they went up big, because we were really close on a lot of our shots. If only we had an experienced skip who knew what the hell he was doing.

The Canadian didn’t say that last part. Canadians are way too polite. And, to his credit, maybe he wasn’t even thinking it. But I was.

That whole game, I felt like we were chasing. We could never get to playing the game I wanted us to play, the style of play from the first few games. I knew at the time that this was happening, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop playing from behind. Even on the ends that we scored, we were still scoring on their terms.

Oh well. On to B Bracket. Still two wins away from taking home a trophy. Or maybe just getting our picture taken with a trophy. Wait a second. Did they have trophies? Well, I’ll never know.

That night was the banquet, which took place in one of the smoking bars. Then there was a pub crawl, which is not easy to do in a town with one major road and only two or three bars. The team we were playing the next morning kept trying to get us drunk. We kept trying to get them drunk.

Hey wait, I finally figured out why I still play this infernal game!

Our final game was a back and forth affair. I still felt like I was playing the other team’s game a lot, but we were at least able to keep the score close. I figured out early on that this team didn’t like hits and takeouts. They always wanted to draw. They could put the rock the proper distance into the house almost every time, although not always on the right line. My team? Exact opposite. We could throw the correct line each time, but our weights were nothing to be relied upon. And I was the worst of all. My weight was off all weekend. But man, give me something to hit, and I’m in my happy spot.

So if I can always hit their stone, I just need to make sure there’s nothing behind their stone, right? So dammit, why was I faced with their stone on the button, right in front of two of my stones every damn time I’m heading down to take the final shot?

But we persevered. We entered the final end tied, and we had the hammer (final shot), which is totally the position you want to be in.

At least we thought it was the final end.

You see, at most bonspiels, and in most leagues I’ve experienced, they usually ring a bell to signify you’re getting close to the end of the game. It’s usually about 20-30 minutes before the time limit, and the rule is (usually) that you can finish the end you’re on and play one more. At McCall, there was no bell, just instructions to not start any new end after the one hour, fifty minute mark, so that we could be off the ice by two hours. Most ends take between 15-20 minutes, so I felt like ten minutes was cutting it a bit close, but whatever.

And in my defense, I was saying that before we lost our last game.

We started the “final” end with about 25 minutes to go until we had to be off ice, meaning about 15 minutes until we couldn’t start another end. So I played the whole thing as if this was it. We put a stone near the button with one of our first shots. They missed it and then it became a series of guard, guard, guard. The other team kept pouring stones into the house, but they couldn’t get to the one we had buried. All I needed to do was score one, and that one wasn’t going anywhere. The opposing skip went down and delivered his first stone, and then it was my turn. As I’m walking down the sheet, I glanced up at the clock. It was 10:45 AM.

Wait, what the fuck? How have we delivered the first thirteen stones in only ten minutes? And how can I waste five minutes for the final three stones? If this was an NFL game, I could fake a hamstring injury or something. Can I throw the flag for an instant replay?

Okay, don’t freak out.

“This is the final end, right?” I asked my sweepers when I got into the hack.

They looked back at me like the metaphorical deer in the headlights. They had just been having a similar conversation. And none of us really liked the answer we were coming up with.

I delivered the stone, and their skip practically runs down to deliver his next stone. He isn’t even trying to go after my rock. He’s… he’s guarding me from putting another one in there? What the fuck kind of wicked sorcery is this?

So I stall. I discuss my shot with my vice, not only to waste time, but because all of a sudden, for the first time this end, I’m like “Shit, how do we score two here?” Because I’ve spent the last four rocks trying to close that shit off.

But I can’t just run out the clock. There are unwritten rules, and if I was going to break one of these unwritten rules, I needed to be less obvious. I needed all of my teammates to take an extra thirty seconds for each of their shots instead of me taking an extra five.

At 10:47 AM, I let go of my final rock. Twenty-something seconds later, it came to a rest. I take off my glove in order to shake some hands, but the other team’s hearing nothing of it. Their lead is in the hack and ready to deliver.

Could I have still won? Or tied? Sure. But we were shellshocked. Just like after AJ Piersynski cheated to get on base in the 2005 ALCS. Could the Angels have gotten the next guy out? Sure. But it’s pretty fucking hard to get your head back in the fucking game when you realize that Doug Eddings is a fucking dipshit umpire that doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, much less the difference between a catch and a drop.

Sorry. Angels fan here. Not still bitter thirteen years later or anything.

But we were in a similar situation. We thought the game was won.Each person on my team felt they had thrown their last stone. We were focused on playing in the finals. Preparing our acceptance speech. And now all of a sudden we had to play one more end, without the hammer, against a team that could out-draw us. The good news is they still had to make their final shot. The bad news is they did.

So there you have it. My last six months or so of “competitive” curling. And even though I haven’t won any big ones, I’m still pretty happy with how things have gone. My competitive team went farther than it’s ever gone, and then I skipped a team to a respectable finish. Two bonspiels in a row where my team ended up in fourth-or-fifth place range, whether I’m calling the shots or sweeping the shots. Not too shabby. Maybe I’ve finally figured this shit out.

Check back in three months, when I can’t hit the broadside of a barn.

Bandwagon Season

· August 10, 2018 · Musings · , , , , , , , · No Comments

There’s a strange hue hanging over Northern California recently. And no, it’s not the ubiquitous smoky sky from approximately seventeen thousand wildfires going on simultaneously. It’s August, so we’re pretty accustomed to that visage.

Although did we really need to name one of them the Carr Fire? You know “car fire” has a different connotation, right, media?

“Hey, did you hear the latest on the car fire?”

“No, I took a different route to work today. Is that why you were late?”

But the current strange vision is  a color combination that I’m not used to encountering in the summer. Or really, at any time since the Bush administration. It’s a distinctive shade of green. Bright, unnatural. Maybe it’s called Kelly green? I don’t know. It seems to me that Forest Green is very deep green color, and everything else is Kelly Green. Or turquoise.

But these shirts and hats I’m seeing definitely aren’t turquoise. Turquoise only shows up in this region in April or May of years when the Sharks are both in line for a top playoff seed AND didn’t underperform in the playoffs the season before. So, basically never.

“Never” is also when I assumed I’d see this garish green-and-yellow again, but it’s the summer of 2018, and it’s back. When I first moved to Northern California, in the early 1990s, it was everywhere, the unofficial color of spring and summer, after which it became garnet-and-gold season. Then it disappeared, only to have a brief resurgence in the early aughts, coming up for breath once per decade like the Nessie above the surface of her Scottish loch. I’m wracking my brain for what that precise confluence of events, which stars and constellations have aligned, to bring out the blinding combination once more.

Wait. Could it be… Let me double check the standings just to be sure and… Yep, the Oakland A’s are holding the wild card. If the season ended today, they’d be in the playoffs.

At least the Giants aren’t in contention, so we don’t have to worry about the green-and-yellow clashing with the black-and-orange that is usually seen around these parts this time of year. Of course, you could never have both teams being represented at the same time. Because the people wearing the green this year are the exact same people that were wearing the orange two years ago.

You see, Northern Californians are horrible sports fans. When a team is losing, they are either afraid to represent it, or more likely, they simply stop rooting for that team. Ignore it like Janet Jackson asking, “what have you don for me lately?” And then, when that team starts to win, they all of a sudden come up with these wonderful stories of how they’ve been lifelong fans, busting out clothes that looks either twenty years old, or freshly purchased this week.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not just NorCals. ALL Californians are horrible bandwagoners. Northern Californians are just much more obvious about it. The SoCals’ fandom expands or contracts based on the viability of the team at the moment. A decade ago, Dodger blue was only noticeable in the Valley and LA proper. Now it’s the unofficial color of the Southland. At least it was until LeBron signed with the Lakers, and then my Facebook feed looked like it was 2010 all over again.

But the SoCals don’t swap allegiances quite as fickly as thee NorCals. Now, maybe that’s because Southern California teams rarely change position. The Clippers, Angels, and UCLA aren’t competitive enough to do a true control experiment. The Angels won one World Series, but usually underperform. The Clippers gave us a little test run, being a better team than the Lakers for most of the past decade. And while I saw more people checking in at Clippers games, and many people saying “Hey, good for the Clippers,” nobody was changing their profile pictures to suddenly claim their lifelong Clipper fandom. If the Clippers and Lakers played in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, there would be a whole lot of people shuffling past their red-and-blue to find their antiquated purple-and-gold the moment LeBron signed. (See Below: Kings, Sacramento; Warriors, Golden State)

Southern California does have one sport with two different champions. And I give them credit for sticking by their hockey guns. The level of excitement for the two Kings championships was equaled only by the general level of ho-hum, oh-wait-there’s-another-hockey-team-here apathy the two times the Ducks won it all. And most of my friends live in Orange County. However, most of them became hockey fans before the Ducks existed. Oh, and they hate Disney. Still, if Orange County gives more of a shit about the LA team than the one in their own backyard, they’re not bandwagoning.

Back to Northern California and the impending return of “A’s Country.” Northern Californian teams swap places on a more regular basis, and boy howdy, do those fan allegiances give me whiplash. Fifteen years ago, when the Sacramento Kings came within one compromised referee game of winning the NBA championship, everything north of Fresno might as well have been washed over in purple. You couldn’t go anywhere without proudly showing your allegiance to the basketball team-du-jour.

There was another NBA team in Northern California at the time. Not that you’d know it. They were called the Golden State Warriors. I doubt you’ve heard of them. Their colors were… dark blue? Or maybe grey. I seem to remember they had some sort of ninja on their logo. With lightning-bolt lettering?

I’m being serious here. I don’t remember what their colors were in 2002, because NOBODY owned any Warriors gear. Or if they did, they wouldn’t have had the audacity to show it in public.

I know what the color and the logo look like now. It’s blue and yellow, with a picture of the Bay Bridge in a circle in the middle. I know that because the Warriors are good now, so everyone is wearing their gear. And a hell of a lot of these “Lifelong” Warriors fans were so decked out in purple a decade ago that their own children might not recognize them.

Nowadays, if you  wear a Sacramento Kings hat in Sacramento, you will be mocked incessantly. This is Warriors-county, baby!

Does this bleedover happen in other markets?  I imagine that, even when the Dallas Mavericks were very good, the predominant gear worn in Houston would still belong to the Rockets. Am I wrong here?

The good news is these Warriors fans can’t claim they bought their gear twenty years ago, because the Warriors have changed their look so many times. And yeah, their current look is a bit of a throwback, but the Bay Bridge has been torn down and rebuilt since the 1980s logo.

We went through the whole bandwagon with the San Francisco 49ers, too. Again, when I moved here, you could barely go out in public between August and February without sporting a gold Starter jacket. But by the time Y2K rolled around, you couldn’t find Niners gear everywhere. And I know these fans still rooted for their team. They would come into work on Monday morning rehashing every play of the game. Even in shitty Candlestick Park, the team was still selling out games. But there were no hats or jerseys or Starter jackets.

It got to the point that I forgot I lived in Niner Country. Then Jim Harbaugh showed up and they started winning again. All of a sudden, people who I had worked with for ten years started showing up in Niners polos and jerseys every Friday. I even mocked some of my students (“Oh hey, you Niners fans finally found all that gear at the back of your closet”), which was mean and probably a bit errant because the Niners had never been good in their life, so if they had gear, they probably were legitimate fans.

Although, in my defense, last year I taught the younger sister of the girl I mocked. I asked her if her sister still wears a lot of Niner gear. She said no.

Northern California fans feel this is absolutely normal. They simply believe the way the world works is to stop showing support for your team when they are losing. Clearly they’ve never been to Chicago, where people were wearing Cubs and White Sox gear when neither team had won anything in fifty years or more. Or Boston before 2004. Hell, I’ve never been to Cleveland, but I bet there are still a lot of people wearing Browns gear during football season there.

And this says nothing of international destinations, where people still wear shirts for their teams when they drop down to the minor leagues.

At least Niners fans didn’t put on silver and black when the Raiders got good. If there’s one sport where NorCal fans don’t just jump to the currently successful team, it’s football. But when you talk to a Giants fan who thinks it’s perfectly fine becoming an A’s fan overnight, and you ask them if they should do the same thing with the football teams, they will look at you aghast. That’s fucking crazy talk.

It should be for baseball, too. Browns fans are still Browns fans, even after years of being horrible. They wouldn’t jump ship to the Bengals just to save face. Nets and Knicks fans don’t have to look at the standings to know which team they like that day. I have a White Sox friend who says, “I’d rather my sister be a whore than my brother be a Cubs fan.”

Of course, I always told him those weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

And I guaran-fucking-tee there is no New York equivalent of this monstrosity:

20180810_074941

I’m not saying you can’t root for a team other than yours. On any given day, there are usually 14 games that do not feature your favorite team. It’s not a bad thing to prefer one team over the other. In 1986, when the Mets were playing the Red Sox in the World Series, I assume that Yankees fans wanted the Mets to win. But I doubt they started spouting off about how long they had loved the Mets and started wearing Mets gear instead of Yankees gear.

That’s what puts California fans apart. They are proud of switching their allegiance on a dime. Again, look at that atrocious hat. People are PROUD to own that hat.

But when two teams share one media market, dammit, those are supposed to be rivals. I grew up an Angels fan and I absolutely hated the Dodgers. The typical sports news in Southern California was eighty percent Dodgers and twenty percent Angels. We were the red-headed stepchild of SoCal.

Then the Angels won the World Series and the whole Southland was smothered in halos. Not only did the Orange County Register remember there was a team in Orange County, but the Los Angeles Times did, as well. It was unnatural. I felt uncomfortable. I actually felt a little sorry for the Dodgers fans who stayed true, because I knew how they felt rooting for the forgotten team in the market. Just like those Golden State Warriors fans.

Even worse, the Angels started selling out their games. I was like the fan of the indie band that hits it big. For two or three years, I couldn’t get tickets.

Of course, the Angels only won once and within a few years, the Dodgers were back on top in SoCal. Now I can get any ticket I want in a stadium that’s only forty-percent full. All is right with the world. Until we lose Mike Trout…

Which brings me back to the Bay Area. I thought we had finally gotten to an equilibrium a la SoCal, with the A’s as the permanent underclass. They haven’t been competitive in over a decade, and they usually have to trade away their entire team every year. Even worse for them, their decade of crap was also a decade when the Giants won the World Series three times.

And some of the A’s fans that switched to the Giants actually acknowledged it. They say it’s tough to root for a team that will never sign good players and will always trade away their stars. The irony, of course, is that it’s the Giants fault. Back in the early nineties, when NOBODY went to, or watched, Giants games, they threatened to move to Florida. To entice them to stay, the commissioner made it so that the A’s would never be able to move out of very-heavily congested Alameda County. So then the Giants built their brand new stadium and everybody started going to their games. The A’s tried to follow suit and the Giants blocked them. The Giants are literally the only team in all of sports that can control the ability of a rival to make money.

And that power was given to them because the A’s were too popular in their market.

Now, or at least up until this year, the Giants have the fancy new ballpark and the world championships and all of the fans. Fans who say, “I just love the black-and-orange color scheme. That rustic, intertwined SF Logo. I mean, the A’s logo is just so gauche and doesn’t really match with anything.”

Until 2018.

In Sacramento, our AAA team switched affiliates from the A’s to the Giants, thinking this would bring in more fans. Not only did they switch, but they went Giants all the way. When they were the A’s franchise, they marketed themselves as “Sacramento’s team.” Since the switch, they reference Sacramento as little as possible. All of their giveaways are Giants players who never played in Sacramento. The bobbleheads all wear Giants, not River Cats, uniforms. They even put the fucking Golden Gate Bridge on our hats and uniforms.

It’s sucked for attendance though, because they forgot that Northern California fans are fickle. The year after the World Series? Yeah, gangbusters in Sacramento. But since then, it’s been dismal. Plus the team has tanked. The A’s usually have really good minor league teams, a result of that whole “trading their entire team every other year” thing. But the Giants don’t really build through the minors.

So now the River Cats are horrible and the stands are empty. The only time fans show up is if a major leaguer is rehabbing, and then they only pay attention when that particular minor leaguer is at bat. Then they talk over the rest of the action and check their phones and just generally don’t give a shit about anybody else on the team.

When Madison Bumgarner was rehabbing, tickets were being sold on eBay for over $100. Fifteen-thousand fans showed up. MadBum  pitched into the third inning. By the fifth inning, there were only about four-thousand fans left. The following week, MadBum was back up in San Francisco. The stands were half-full. Those Sacramento fans probably could have seen him for substantially less than $100, even after paying for gas and bridge toll.

Hey, at least playing in Sacramento is preparing those AAA guys for what it’ll be like to be a real San Francisco Giants, where nobody will come to their games or bother knowing who they are unless they’re winning a World Series or are named Barry Bonds.

Curling, Parts 1 through %$@*&$

· May 15, 2018 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , · 2 Comments

Since my last effort at real-time blogging seemed to work, I’m trying it again. Only this time, instead of Hawaii, I’m off to lovely Seattle. And I ain’t going for no fun-fun time vacation, neither. This time, my game face is on. It’s curling bonspiel time, motherfucker!

No, I won’t be live-tweeting every shot. I won’t be attaching a GoPro to my broom. I probably won’t even post the thing until after the weekend is over. What I will write down my thoughts and reflections after each game, as my team works our way through the weekend tournament. The highs and the lows that inevitably come from these tourneys. The “I curl better than John Schuster”, followed by the “Why the fuck do I do this stupid sport?”.

One of the reasons I’ve chosen this particular bonspiel to live-blog is that we’re here to fucking win it!

Don’t I always want to win? Sure. But this time, there’ll be no Olympians in my way. This bonspiel is called a Five-and-Under. It’s not for toddlers, although that would be friggin’ awesome on a whole nother (hilarious) level. In this 5&U, everyone in this tournament must have less than five years of experience. This is my fourth year, as with two others on my team, and our skip is aging out this year. So if we’re ever going to win it, this is the time.

This is my third time at this particular event. Two years ago, it was a mish-mash of different players thrown together at the last minute. We won our first two games, but lost our third, which is the first elimination game. The team we lost to went on to win the entire tournament, so as far as I’m concerned, we might have been the second-best team there. We would have lost to that team whenever we faced them, but so did everyone else. Second-place may be first loser, but who’s the one that lost first, hmm?

Last year, my team was a bit more purposeful. We combined two players from our team with two players from a team that went all the way to the final game. They lost that game against the same team we lost to. So combine the first loser and the last loser, and what do you get? We lost our second game, which is actually better than losing your third game. It isn’t an elimination game. Instead, it drops you into the “B Bracket,” and we went on to win that bracket. Not bad, but there were some personality conflicts. Shaq and Kobe all over again.

This year, it’s finally the team I’ve always wanted to bring. A team of people I like playing with that also has a chance to win. Me and the guy I’ve played with all three years (he’s the skip that is aging out) finally convinced two of the guys we curl with locally to venture out of California. Well, it wasn’t the two guys that needed the convincing as it was convincing their wives. But we finally did that, and now we’re ready to go 5-0 and take the crown.

Let’s do this.

Game One. 

Game one only counts in the standings. But it still counts in the standings.

Three of the four curlers on our opponent team have been curling less than a year. Oh, and one of those three hadn’t shown up yet, so add some fatigue to their inexperience. Yes, you can get fatigued while curling, especially if you’re taking extra shots and are the only sweeper.

Their skip, the only person with more than one year of curling, could hit some draws. Unfortunately for him, we made him draw every end, and he could only hit “some draws.”  A draw is where you’re just trying to slowly go around a guard and have your rock sit in the house. You’d think that would be easy. It’s not. Give me a guard or a takeout any day over a draw to the button. The difference between a draw and a rock that sails through, hitting nothing, is two-tenths of a second on your delivery.

In our first end, we scored two, and thought we were going to cruise to victory. We played the second end a little loose, and all of a sudden, they had two points in the house. We took out one with our final shot, but they had one more shot and a wide-open draw to score a second point and tie the game. He came up short, so they only scored one. Whew!

That scared us enough to bear down. We scored two in the third end and four in the fourth and cruised to victory.

These are the types of games that can be dangerous. We didn’t hit all of our shots. Far from it. Yet we won 12-2, and we were being generous to keep it that close. We could have scored fifteen or more. There were two ends where we had all eight of our stones in play. We would put two in the house, then set up six guards. If we wanted to, we could’ve put more of them into the house. At least I think we could have, but I was light on a lot of my throws. A better team could’ve taken advantage of that.

Like the team we’re playing tomorrow. They beat some of my friends at the same time we were playing. Every time we looked over, we assumed we’d be playing our friends next. They were up 4-0. Then they were up 5-3. After we were off the ice (a 12-2 game tends to go faster than a close game), they gave up three and lost 6-5. Ouch. They made the mortal sin of continually scoring one point per end, which is a very precarious way to play. In the final tally, they won five of the seven ends that were played, and the other team only scored in two of the ends, but that’s not what matters in the end.

Our friends said we should have no problem beating this next team. We’ll see. It’s hard to judge which part of their game was the fluke. Were they a lucky team in those two ends, or were they good enough to keep limiting their opponent to one point at a time? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

The only other item of note in game number one was the double balloon. At a number of bonspiels, they have a cowbell stuck to the end of a balloon. If anyone on your team hits a double-takeout (Removing two opponent stones from the house with one shot), you ring the bell and move the balloon to your sheet. It sits there until another game steals it with a double-takeout of their own. Whoever ends the game in possession of the balloon gets a free pitcher of beer.

I’ll repeat that: A free pitcher of beer!

The goddamned balloon had been in our goddamned possession for damn-near a half-hour. When our skip got in the hack to take his final shot, he turned around to look at the balloon. “Okay, we still have the balloon, so I’ll just throw a guard.” When his fucking shot was halfway down the fucking lane, some other fucking team rang the fucking bell.

I’m a little bitter. Can you tell? Nothing is so demoralizing as, in the midst of sweeping our final shot, knowing that I’m now going to have to pay a whopping thirteen dollars for my next pitcher of beer. That bell was worse than the bell that starts the final day of school. Something so close, and yet just out of reach.

We had time to play one more end. We discussed with the other team the possibility of playing one more end just to set up doubles. We tried to convince them that they could use another end as practice. Heck, that was the only reason we had played the final end, already up 10-2. But this time, they just shrugged. The spirit of curling says that the winner buys the loser beer, so they were getting free beer regardless of if it came via us or a balloon. Besides,the way they were playing, we couldn’t guarantee their ability to put stones in the house for us to take out.

So pitcher on me! Worst. Thirteen Dollars. Ever.

Interlude.

The curling club that’s nice enough to give us their ice for this shindig has their own league that runs on Friday nights, so the organizers of our event usually find an activity in Seattle for us to comradarize at that night. Last year, it was a Mariners game. This year, they’re out of town, so we went to a grown-up mini golf and duffleboard place, instead.

What’s duffleboard, you ask? Good question. It was a question most of us had, and oddly, it was not defined on their website. I guess they just want you to come on down and check it out.

Duffleboard is part shuffleboard, part mini golf. They set up a “green” on a table. You use a stick with a flat end, like the letter T, and push the golf ball across the board. You get points based on where the ball ends up. On a soccer table, you push the ball from corner kick territory and are supposed to bank it off of a defender into the goal for the equivalent of a hole-in-one. If you missed the goal long, it was two strokes, three if it was on the near side of the goal, up to five or six for missing the defender and leaving the ball out in the middle of nowhere. Another table was set up like SafeCo Field (hole in one for hitting it through small holes in the home run fence, two for a slightly large hole without a defender, six if you couldn’t push it out of the infield). There was also a Seahawks #12 table. I’m sensing a Seattle theme. Then we came upon a basketball one, which I found odd because Seattle hasn’t had basketball in twenty years. The table had a picture of Key Arena. I don’t think that’s even standing anymore.

The duffleboard was fun. More fun than the actual mini golf. The mini-golf course was seven holes making the word “Seattle.” However, to make it grown-up, the letters are all chopped up with boards and kegs and awkward lanes. To wit:

I get it. I’ve played mini golf with the daughter, and one would assume adults need something with a little more nuance, a bit more adversity. But this place also had beer, and one would think that drunk adults might not need too many wrinkles. Just think of the joys of stimulus-response time if they were to put in a windmill

In the end, the duffleboard was much more fun, cheaper, and we didn’t have to wait a half hour for a tee time. They might want to pump that up a little on their website.

One more thing from Friday night. The bar didn’t take cash. Card only. I really wanted to go all economics teacher on them and mention that fiat currency is “good for all debts, public an private,” but decided against it. Because they had beer and I really, really wanted to incur a private debt.

Game Two. 

Curling is a team game. And thank God for that. Because I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn in game two, but we still managed to take the W.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself. My first two shots were beautiful. Pristine. We had one beautiful stone fully covered underneath a proper guard. In fact, maybe I should wax a bit more eloquent about that first end. We only scored one. It wasn’t even the one that I had put in the house, because that got jostled out by the best player on the opposing team – a twenty-year old girl who could pretty much hit anything out of the house whenever she wanted. I can’t throw upweight half as well as her.

So the end itself wasn’t all that spectacular, but did I mention I hit both of my first two shots? Because in case you hadn’t heard, I did.

The next twelve shots I took? Yeah, best not to talk about them. Maybe my hangover was starting to fade too much.

There were at least two ends where neither of my rocks ended up in play. That’s bad. It doesn’t give the rest of my team much to work with. Unless I want to claim that I was keeping it wide open for my teammates to take out the other team’s stones. Yeah, yeah, that was my plan all along. Like when Kobe bragged about giving his teammates so many rebound opportunities when he missed.

Mind you, not all of my shots were horrible. Many were, but some were not. Unfortunately, the non-horrible ones still weren’t very good. The best I could call them was “something my teammates might have a chance to do something with.”

But hey, we won, right? I’d rather play shitty and win than to be on top of my game in a loss. After we scored one point in the first end (did I mention my shots in the first end? No? They were magnificent!), the other team came back and scored two in the second. In the third end, we couldn’t get anything going and, starting with their wee-lass doubling out two of our stones (what’s the point? She wasn’t even old enough to drink her free pitcher, so she might as well have kept our rocks in play), neither team let any stone stick around. The result was a blank end, meaning nobody scored. That was intentional on our part when it came to the final shot, because it’s better to hold onto the hammer (final rock) than to score one and give the hammer back to the other team. Especially if we’re already down one.

At that point in the game, I was nervous. If they could take out our stones and were already up by one, then it would be difficult to score more than one, and we had already seen what this team will do if you keep scoring one against them. Or zero, as we had just done.

But in the third end, we scored three. We didn’t deserve it. In fact, I thought we only had two, but there was a stone, way in the back of the house, still in play by maybe only an inch, that counted. It had been sitting there for five minutes, just minding its own business, laa, laa, laa, don’t mind me, and what do you know, we score three.

That’s when the wheels came off the other team. Their second was still shooting lasers, but everyone else on the team was missing. Did I mention I’d rather play shitty in a win than play well in a loss? Annie fucking Oakley over there was the Reverse Wombat in this particular game.

So we made it through to the  quarterfinals. Because we’re 2-0, we are still alive whether we win or lose the next game. If we lose, we head to the B Bracket. If we win, we’re into the Championship Round. Goal number one of any bonspiel is to still be playing on Sunday. Mission Accomplished!

Good thing, too, because the team we’re playing next looks solid. They played right after us, so we stuck around to do a little scouting. The team they played came from our sister club, so we’ve played them pretty regularly. Our sister club team, who we’re comparable to, fell behind 4-0, but made a game out of it, coming back to 4-3 before giving up one in the final end.

So there’s a chance there, if only our fucking lead can get his fucking stones in play.

Oh, and there will be karaoke off ice while we’re playing. Expect a second interlude.

Game Three.

Fuck.

A.

Duck.

I swear, those of you reading this as one full post after the fact will believe that I, like the masterful storyteller I am, went back and changed my Game Two write-up for juxtapositional purposes. I promise that is not the case. The reason I decided to track my progress through this weekend was because this ain’t my first go around, and most bonspiels come with highs and lows in rapid succession. And we just experienced the fuck out of those highs and lows.

Remember when I said I’d rather play shitty and win the game than play wonderfully and lose? Well, I played great in game three.

Seriously, let me take a moment to explain some of my wonderful shots. Draw to the button? Yeah, I hit three of those. Guards? No fucking problem. There was this one shot – there were two guards, one ours, one the other team’s, that were about two feet apart from each other. Behind the gap, sitting right on the T-Line (that’s the horizontal line that goes through the middle of the house, making a T, or maybe a t, depending on your angle). I threw a take-out that went right through the port, knocked their rock out of play, and then rolled just a little to the right, under the cover of one of those guards I had just passed through. If I were to pull a John Elway and walk away at the height of my curling career, it might’ve been after that shot.

My vice (that’s the guy who shoots third – vice skip, right before the skip) also had a double takeout that end. Ring the cowbell, motherfucker! We scored four points in that end, to go up 5-3.

Then we lost the game.

At least we held onto the double-balloon for the free pitcher of beer this time. Trust me, we needed it.

Prior to that four-ender, the other team made an odd decision. They were up 2-1 in the third end, and with their final shot, the house was wide open. According to Hoyle, you should blank the end – throw through, intentionally score zero, hold onto the final shot. Instead, they drew for one point and gave us the hammer back. The following end was the one we scored four. That’s why Hoyle says what Hoyle says.

After that four-ender, we stole one, which means we scored one despite the other team having the final shot. We were feeling good. This game was following the same pattern as game two. Take a few ends to feel out the competition, then exploit their weaknesses and keep stealing points. We were up three with three ends left to play. Ninety percent of the time, the team who’s up by three with three ends left will win. All we have to do is play conservative and not give up big ends.

Oops.

They scored two in the next end. Had we been a tad more conservative, we might have held them to one. Feeling all Big Johnson, we went for a knockout and forgot about the counter-punch.

No problem. Only two ends left, and we’re up one with the hammer. If we score two, they’ll have to score three. Early in the end, we got one near the button that they couldn’t do anything with, and we guarded it. There were a couple times we could have tried to get a second rock in, but instead we just guarded the fuck out of that one rock. Once it was secure, we tried to get a second rock in, but the guards work two ways. We probably waited too long to try to get that second point, but whatever, we go to the final end up by two.

They score two. Fuck a duck.

Our skip was heavy on two draws in a row that would have cut them to one. If we cut them to one, we win the game. In the grand scheme of things, if one person is going to hit their shots and the other is going to miss, you want the lead missing and the skip hitting. Not vice versa. As games two and three demonstrate.

So what do you do when a curling game ends in a tie? The skip on each team draws to the button. The closest one wins.

I hate this practice, but it’s a necessary evil, especially in knock-out bracket play. I coordinate the league at our home club, and I give the loser of a draw to the button the equivalent of the NHL’s overtime loss. It’s worth one point instead of two. A team that is 3-3 with a DTB loss is better than a legitimate 3-3 team, worse than a 4-2 team. Because, especially at our level, a draw-to-the-button a brutal crapshoot.

I had no faith in my skip making the draw to the button, having been heavy and outside on his last two shots. But, DAMN, he got it within five inches of the button (Thanks to my phenomenal sweeping). Five inches is nothing. I’ve scored many of these competitions, and twenty or thirty inches is usually good enough to win. Hack, I’ve seen seventy-two inches win (seventy-three is the maximum, meaning you missed the house entirely). So five inches, we’re punching our ticket to A Bracket.

The other team got within three inches.

Fuck a duck.

Welcome to B Bracket.

We played well, even excellently at times, for one hundred minutes. For fifteen minutes at the end, we fell apart. Such is a bonspiel.

Hey, guess who we’re playing in the morning? The two people that the skip and I played with last year, that we separated from to go our own way. Grudge-match extraordinaire. At least we’ll finally figure out which two people on last year’s team deserved the accolades.

Again, I promise I did not add this shit in to the top to add suspense.

Interlude Two.

I wasn’t in much of a karaoke mood after that last game. The guy that runs it even came up to me, said I killed it last year, and wondered what my first song would be. I told him we had just suffered a gut-wrencher and to give me a little time.

Fortunately, the spirit of curling brought one pitcher our way via the loss, the double-takeout balloon gave us another one, and then I was finally ready to sing.

I started with “As Good as I Once Was,” by Toby Keith, at the request of my skip, who was not feeling as good once as he ever was after that last game.

I followed it up with “Baby Got Back” and “Chocolate Salty Balls.” Then it was home to (write this up and) get ready for tomorrow morning. Did I mention our first game is at 8:00 AM?

Game Four.

Boy, am I glad I didn’t punctuate last night’s come-from-ahead, two-inch loss with some form of “I’d rather get blown out in a game than lose such a close one.”

I was definitely thinking it, but I wasn’t stupid enough to write it. Maybe even thinking it was a bad idea.

Game four started off bad, then got worse. In the second end, we gave up three points even though we had the hammer. The two flashes (when the stone hits nothing and sails right on through, waving like the beer bottle in the Laverne & Shirley credits) that our vice had were bad enough, but the two flashes that our skip had right after definitely didn’t help. Four misses in a row tend to be problematic.  When a quarterback throws four interceptions in a game, that hurts the team’s chances of winning. Our opponents only had one rock in play when we missed the first shot. By the fourth, they had three.

But the fun wasn’t over, as we gave up one more point the following end, and before our bodies had acclimated to the ice, we were down 5-0. In our defense, we battled back to 5-3, but down two without hammer in the final end doesn’t give you a lot of options. But hey, at least we were hitting some of our shots. And our skip’s final shot, going through a port smaller than the one I had hit in game two, in order to almost knock out three opponent stones, was a helluva shot and almost brought us back from the dead!

New team motto: Playing best when it matters least!

I remember reading, a long, long time ago, before the Cubs and Red Sox ended their respective curses, about the different types of painful sports losses. There’s misery and agony. Agony is acute, misery is more pervasive. The Cubs have tended to have more misery. Usually in last place, losing ninety games a year with no big prospects or future or hope. The fans don’t expect to win and wear their “lovable losers” badge with a sense of pride. The Red Sox, on the other hand, were usually a good team, fighting for division crowns, often making the playoff. Yet every time they thought this was the year, Bucky Dent happens, Billy Buckner happens. Agony.

After this weekend, I can speak from experience. Neither is great. The misery route sucks more while you’re on the ice. Slumped body language, looking at the clock to see how much longer you have to endure, trying to be a good sport when really you want to scream expletives at the top of your lungs through sobs in the corner.

But the good news about sucking is that, by the end of the game, you’re already resigned to the fact. Even though that last game was against people we know, with every ounce of pride on the line, and even though I will be reminded of that loss umpteen times whenever I curl against them, or even see them, in the future, this shitty showing ain’t going to be the one that I remember when I look back on this tournament.

Giving up three, then losing by two inches? That one’ll stick with me for a long, long while.

Billy Buckner was a career .289 hitter with over 1200 RBI. Ask him what he’s remembered for.

Conclusion

Two and two. 2-2. W, W, L, L.

Doesn’t matter how I write it, it doesn’t look any better.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ended a bonspiel with that exact same record. And in that order. If I did it in the opposite order, two losses followed by two wins, I’d be called the C-Bracket or D-Bracket champion. But win, win, loss, loss usually equates to some bullshit title. In this case, we were called the sixth place team. The seventh-place team got a pin for winning the B Bracket. Kinda like College Football, it’s all a matter of getting those losses out of the way first.

At least they made this bracket so the 2-0 teams weren’t eliminated if they lost their third game. Been there, done that. Nothing’s worse than watching the teams that played horribly still alive on Sunday while you’re eliminated because you had the audacity to win early.

Not sure why my teams tend to start strong then finish weak. In theory it’s because the competition gets harder as the weekend goes along, but in practice, that’s not always the case. Hell, the final was between a team from our sister club (who we’ve beaten more times than we’ve lost to) and the team that beat us by two inches. And the way they both played that final game, I think we would’ve had a damn good shot.

Then again, it’s always easy to make your hypothetical shots when you’re sitting in the warm room with a beer in your hand.

Maybe it’s a fatigue thing. We are well into our thirties and forties, after all. Maybe it’s that other teams adjust better. Not sure. If we lost the same way each time, that would be one thing. Sometimes the front end (aka me) falls apart. But this weekend, the best player on our team lost his touch and didn’t get it back.

I guess that’s why sports exist, though. If we played the two-inch team ten times, we’d beat them seven or eight. The Patriots would probably have a similar record against an Eagles team with a back-up quarterback, but who is the Super Bowl champ?

And all things considered, going 2-2 in a curling tournament ain’t such a bad thing. Hang out with friends, drink lots of beer, get more than my money’s worth. At least that’s what I’ll keep reminding myself over the next few days when I’m hobbling around like I’ve been doing lunges all weekend long. Oh wait, I HAVE been doing lunges all weekend.

Obviously, I didn’t post this multiple times over the weekend. Something about getting back to the airbnb at midnight after a few pitchers might be conducive to stream-of-consciousness drivel, but not for editing and publishing. I’ll go back and clean it up a little, but I promise, all of the entries (before this one) were written in real time. I wanted to capture the ups and downs of a bonspiel, because my bonspiels typically go through these highs and lows. The good shots linger for a short time, while the misses get scorched in your brain for longer.

It’s like ol’ Blue Eyes said, you’re “flying high in (3:00 PM on Saturday), shot down in (seven hours later).”

But the real bonspiel experience was the plane ride home. My club sent 23 people from Sacramento to Seattle this weekend. Eighteen of us were on the same flight home. First at the bars and restaurants, then sitting at the gate, then walking down the aisle, there were familiar faces everywhere. Here are the husband and wife who beat me and lost in the B Final. Over there are members of a team that went 0 and 3 in their very first bonspiel away from home. Right behind me is a family of three who shifted their lineup at the last minute because their fourteen year-old son wanted to play on an all-teenager team. The teenager’s team went 2-2, winning the middle two games, while his parents went through a grueling 1-3 weekend, their only win coming in the E Bracket against the team I had played first – the ones with three years of experience combined. Who even knew they made an E Bracket?

Maybe I shouldn’t complain too much about my 2-2 weekend after all.

Olympic Curling Guide

· February 10, 2018 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , · No Comments

It’s the Most! Wonderful! Time… of the year.

Christmas? Bah! Valentine’s Day? Nope. Live Punxsutawney updates? Umm, maybe, but that’s not what this specific post is about.

It’s Curling-on-TV season!

You might know this, incorrectly, as the “Winter Olympics.” But there’s really only one reason to watch the Winter Olympics.

Okay, maybe two. Matt Hamilton’s porn-stache and the Norwegian team’s pants. But both of those will only be seen during curling matches.

As many of you long-time readers (ie people who know me in real life) know, I took up curling four years ago this month. You can read about it here, but here’s the tl;dr: it had always fascinated me and while watching the last Olympics, I decided to google if there was any place I could curl within, say, a hundred miles. Turned out that, yes, they curled about five miles from my house. Who knew?

So I did my very first Learn-to-Curl in February of 2014. Since then, I’ve become a league coordinator and drawmaster (“schedule dude”) for a number of bonspiels (curling tournaments). I’ve curled six different places in California (again, who knew?) and have traveled to Seattle and Vegas to compete. I’ve won two different bonspiels (not the A-Bracket, but if I get my picture taken with a trophy, it’s a fucking win).

I’ve met and competed against former Olympians. I even beat one! Once. Out of six attempts. I’m now 1-5 against Edie Loudon (she lives nearby, so I see her often). And maybe 0-4 against all other professional curlers.

The trick to beating an Olympic curler? Beat the other people on their team. It also helps if you catch her on the last day of a double-bonspiel, meaning she’s curled about eight times over the last 48 hours. I know it doesn’t look like it on TV, but curling is tiring.

I even met Olympic gold-medalist Kaitlyn Lawes and she let me touch her gold medal. And no, that’s not a pervy euphemism. She literally let me touch her literal gold medal. Look:

Gold Medal.jpg

I think I was even more excited by that picture than if she had let me “touch her gold medal.”

Professional curlers are very nice. Kaitlyn even said I could take a picture with just the gold medal. I figured she should probably be in the picture, because a) she’s cute, and b) she earned it. But man, if that were my gold medal, I wouldn’t let somebody touch it, much less take a picture with it around their neck. You try to take that thing from me, you better be an Olympic biathlete.

And now it’s another Olympic year. The requisite “Hey, check out this quirky sport” stories are running in media outlets everywhere. We love it at our club. A year ago, we couldn’t beg enough to get a mention in local media. In the past six weeks, we’re getting contacts from newspapers, radio, and local TV (the NBC affiliate, naturally). Our Learn-to-Curl program, which often has only one or two customers, is booked solid. We’ve put 100 people through a LTC in the past two months, and the Olympics hadn’t even started yet. We even added a second class most weeks and people are willing to come out at 7:45 Sunday morning to try it.

So yay, curling on TV.

Of course, I can usually find it any time I want. ESPN3 shows most of the upper-tier Canadian curling. American curling is a little harder to find, but that’s okay, because it’s not as good. I know it’s ironic that Canadian curling is easier to find in the U.S. than American curling, but there’s a reason the Canadians dominate the sport. It makes it a little hard on my Olympic rooting interests, but the Americans usually make that easy by being in last place.

But there’s still something special about watching in the Olympics. It’s the one time NBC doesn’t fuck up the flow of the game with asinine editing. During their normal broadcasts, “Curling Night in America,” they jam a three-hour game into about ninety minutes. So they’ll finish one end (like an inning in baseball), take a commercial break, and when they come back, there’s already six stones in play in the next end. Or they skipped an entire end. Imagine watching the World Series and, after the first inning, they jumped ahead to the sixth and said “Oh, by the way, the score is now seven to five.” That’s how the average curling match goes on NBC. Also, since it’s edited to fit into two hours, a lot of the drama is gone. Are they going to tie it up and force an extra end? Oh, it’s 7:50, so I guess not.

I’m not saying NBC doesn’t fuck up coverage in the Olympics, but at least it’s fucked up in the normal way. They show two ends, then go away for twenty minutes of luge, then come back. That’s just Olympics 101. At least they have an app now.

This year, they’ve added a new round of curling called mixed doubles. In it, each team only has two players instead of the usual four. Each end only has five stones, instead of eight. So the games take about half as long.

I’m undecided on mixed doubles. It’s not real curling. It’s a made-for-TV sport. But maybe that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve tried mixed double before. Well, maybe not mixed doubles, because I was curling with another dude, but “open” doubles. It’s a weird beast. In normal curling, you have your skip making a target with his broom at the other end of the sheet. Then you have two other team members to sweep your rock. In mixed doubles, you only have one other teammate, so one of those vital pieces are gone. You’re either aiming at nothing or you have to sweep your own rock.

When it was first designed, the assumption was that people would still want a target, so they would sweep their own rock. It’s not that difficult. Most mediocre curlers can jump up and follow their rock. A lot of us jump up and follow our rock, anyway.

The first time I tried mixed doubles, the person holding the broom said I was coming out in the right direction, but something was happening to the rock when I released it. Turns out I was subconsciously clipping my release in order to jump up and sweep. Add to that the fact that I’m losing about fifty percent of my sweeping power because one of my shoes has a Teflon bottom, which isn’t great for leverage. I also have a tendency to start sliding faster than my rock, so pretty soon I’m sweeping backward.

I guess I wasn’t alone, because the next time I saw professionals playing it, their strategies had changed, too. Now many of them opt to have their teammate sweep their rock instead of providing the target. Depends on the curler and depends on the shot.

So that’s a little “inside curling” you can wow your friends with. Watch for when their teammate is right next to them and when they’re at the other end. If the former, they care more about weight than location. If it’s the latter, they’re probably trying to draw through a smaller port.

Mixed doubles works better for TV because there are more rocks in play. An end in team curling can last twenty minutes and resolve nothing. I’ve seen a number of matches where one team throws a guard, the other team hits that guard out, and the first team throws another guard, for six shots in a row. That can get tedious. Then with the final shot, there’s one rock in the house (bulls-eye), and the skip hits it out to score zero because that’s a sound strategy. In mixed doubles, you almost never see a blank end (no score). Usually there’s six or eight rocks in the house.

In addition to those “This Crazy Sport” articles we see this part of the quadrennial, I’ve seen a fair number this year that lead with “It’s not as easy as it looks.” Um, yes and no. Is it a difficult sport to learn? No. You can do it in an hour or so. But at the Olympic level? Yeah, that’s tough. They’re good. Again, compare it to baseball. Is swinging a bat and making contact with a ball difficult? No. Most five-year olds can do it. But I wouldn’t like my chances standing in against Justin Verlander.

Curling’s the same way. The professionals play at an entirely different level. They see angles that don’t exist at the amateur level. Sometimes I’ll wonder why they are calling a certain shot. Then they’ll ricochet off three stones, just as they planned it, and I realize “Oh, they called that shot because they can hit that shot. I would’ve knocked my opponent’s stones in if I tried that.”

That whole “knowing what they’re throwing,” is one of the great reasons to watch curling on TV – you can hear them discuss their strategy and sometimes the two of them will debate what to throw, giving the viewer insight we don’t get in other sports. The catcher and pitcher use secret signs to debate their strategy. We don’t get to listen in on an NFL huddle. But in curling, they’ll say where they want to hit a certain rock and what they think it’ll do if they hit it there.

So check it out. Listen to the skips.

And trust me, it’s just as easy as it looks. Come on out to your local club and we’ll show you just how “easy” it is 😉

Blog at WordPress.com.