Doug Phillips-Hamblett of the Border Curling Club coaches Lake Region student Kyrie Buck on the finer points of sending a 35-pound granite stone down the ice. Photos by Chris Braithwaite
BEEBE, Quebec — Curling?
If you decide to try the sport, expect your friends to laugh at you.
I’m not sure what it is about curling that amuses people. Maybe it’s the sight of grown men and women scooting along in an odd, sideways, crab-like scuttle, frantically sweeping the ice in front of a rumbling chunk of granite.
Sort of an Olympic event for janitors.
Canadians know better. They’ve embraced the sport with a passion that goes far deeper than the teams that frequently dominate world championship tournaments, down to modest strips of brightly painted artificial ice in small towns like Orangeville, Ontario, and Beebe, Quebec, and out onto the prairie ponds that Canadians call sloughs.
My father talked about curling on frozen sloughs with “rocks” made by sticking a simple handle into a big tin can and filling it with cement.
When I mentioned that to Aline Patterson the other night she recalled the “jam can bonspiels” that enlivened the holiday season in Winnepeg, Manitoba, where she grew up.
“It was great,” Mrs. Patterson said with a smile. “The kids used to love it.”
I started curling in about 1960, after the good citizens of Orangeville pooled their resources and built a rink at the county fairgrounds (it doubled as a sort of Floral Hall in the summer).
Given the Canadian affection for the game, it’s not surprising that many of the curlers who cross the line to play at the Border Curling Club in
Jamie Retchless calls a take-out shot for his father, Andrew Retchless, in the Industrial League. Jamie, one of the club's youngest curlers at 15, plays third on the team his father skips.
Beebe are, like me, engaged in something of a homecoming.
Emerson Humphrey has lived in Newport since 1963. But he lived north of the line in 1955 when he helped convert an old mansion to a clubhouse and add a curling rink, established the Border Curling Club, and served as its first president.
There are, however, exceptions to the rule among the roughly 40 U.S. residents who belong to the club. Some of them had no idea what the sport was about until they stumbled, or got dragged, into it.
Jonathan Kuniholm of Newport got dragged. He’s a dentist, and one of his patients in 1974 was Dick Hodge, president of the curling club.
“Dick literally dragged me up here by the hair,” Dr. Kuniholm recalled.
It was a Saturday, and the veteran and his novice had the ice to themselves. “He gave me some instruction, then we played one on one,” Dr. Kuniholm said. “I made a few good shots. Once you make a few good shots, you’re hooked.”
“It makes the winter go by a lot quicker,” he says of curling. “Just about the time golf is over, curling starts.”
Club members are quick to note that curling costs a lot less than golf. A pair of curling shoes is a common, but not absolutely necessary, investment, and serious curlers buy their own brooms rather than use those provided. But that’s about as much equipment as it’s possible to spend money on. (The beautifully polished granite rocks, worth about $700 each, are supplied by the club.)
A year’s membership costs $195 Canadian, and new members get in at the bargain rate of $125. Beyond that, there’s no fee for a night’s curling. Juniors are urged to join at the remarkable rate of $35 a season, instruction included.
Andrew (right) and Jamie Retchless plan a critical shot late in an end against a team skipped by Raymond Langevin (left in the background), who looks on with his third, Normand Gelinas.
Dr. Kuniholm currently skips a team in the Industrial League that plays on Thursday nights. It’s a league reserved for more serious players, selected by invitation. “In this league,” says Dr. Kuniholm, “more shots get made than missed.”
That’s not necessarily true of the Friday night mixed league, where I play on a team with two Americans, Jim Lynch of Newport and Pat Vana of Derby, and our Canadian skip, Ramsey Williams.
There is an institutionalized friendliness imposed on the competitive spirit of curling. Before each game, all the players exchange handshakes and wish their opponents a good game. Everybody shakes hands again after the game, for good measure.
But there’s a real friendliness that runs much deeper. Curlers congratulate their opponents on their good shots, and never sneer when a player who’s called on to make a key take-out “breezes” a shot that misses its mark and slides harmlessly through the house.
There’s a club tradition that the winners will stand the losers to a round of drinks, and much of the fun of the game happens off the ice, in the club’s comfortable lounge. Senior members take turns tending bar without much formality, and there’s good Canadian beer on tap.
Our team has a one-win, three-loss record at this writing. Our problem is Harriet Phillips-Hamblett, an avid player and willing substitute who has figured in all three of our losses.
Ms. Phillips-Hamblett plays with style and great good humor. She and her husband, Doug, stumbled into the game in 1998 on an outing arranged by the Wellness Center at North Country Hospital.
Club president Gale Palmer gives Mr. Phillips-Hamblett credit for a resurgence of U.S. membership in the club.
“He’s the ambassador of curling,” she says.
Mr. and Ms. Phillips-Hamblett were among the club members who demonstrated the basics of the game to a bemused crowd of students from Lake Region Union High School on December 17.
They were the latest in a series of lifetime phys ed classes brought north by physical education teacher Gerry Cahill.
“I like to give them as much new information as I can for lifetime recreational opportunities,” Ms. Cahill explained. “This is right next to our
Gilbert Cote demonstrates the backswing delivery that is now out of fashion in the sport. On the right, Jamie Retchless waits his turn. The club lounge is behind the glass in the background.
hometown and nobody knows anything about it, which is too bad.”
Jim Lynch, the Phillips-Hambletts, and another American couple, Bob and Janet Smith, took the students through the basics.
Key to the game, they explained, is a graceful, sure-footed slide out of the “hack” as the rock is sent on its way. The hack is a small foothold frozen into the ice at each end of the 140-foot-long sheet. Modern players crouch over the rock, pull it back to the toe of the foot that’s in the hack, and kick forward into a slide, releasing the 35-pound rock just before they cross a hog line painted across the ice.
That came as a shock to me. When I curled 40 years ago in the Orangeville District High School league, curlers drew the heavy rock back and up into an arc that left the ice in the backswing, and used that momentum to control its speed down the ice.
When I showed up at an introductory session at the Beebe club this fall, I was quickly identified as an “old back-lifter” by our instructor, club vice-president Andrew Retchless.
But when I consulted him after that session, Mr. Retchless advised me to stick with the old-fashioned technique, and so I have.
I’m not entirely alone. Subbing on an Industrial League team, Gilbert Cote, a French-Canadian curler of 40 years’ experience, demonstrated a back-swing delivery that delivered soft, precise, draw shots time after time.
A good draw shot is a wonderful thing to watch. The ice is “pebbled” by sprinkling it with water between games, and that provides a surface that will put a decided curve on a slowly spinning rock, as it makes its way down the ice. The slower the rock, the more it curves, and a good draw shot will breeze past the guards that the lead players have left in front of the house and tuck itself in behind them, out of range of an opponent’s faster, and therefore straighter, take-out shot.
Guards and good draw shots set up the game’s strategy, which is a bit like a game of pool, played very slowly at very long range.
Angles are calculated precisely and the skip, having “read” the ice on earlier shots, will put his broom where the rock should be aimed, indicate the spin with his other arm, and call for a shot that will set up a ponderous chain reaction that turns a losing position into a winning one.
I’m not sure how he did it, but I watched Andrew Retchless send a rock into a crowded situation that had his opponents scoring one. When everything finally stopped, his team was scoring four points.
(The “house” is an eight-foot target of concentric rings. In each “end” of a game, a team scores one point for each rock that is closer to the center than any of the other side’s rocks. A total of 16 rocks are thrown, by alternating teams, in each end of an eight-end game. The first three players on each team throw two rocks in turn, and spend the rest of the time sweeping. The order of play corresponds to the level of skill. The “lead,” typically a duffer like me, is generally called on to put guards in front of the house. The second and third will try and do something strategic with those guards, or knock the opponents’ rocks out of play. The “skip” calls the shots from his position in the house, and is then expected to win the end with the final two rocks.)
There are other changes in the game since I left it four decades ago. The long straw “witches” brooms have been replaced by smaller rubber gadgets. And curlers who find it impossible to handle a rock in the traditional deep crouch now use “sticks” that allow them to launch the stones from a standing walk.
That brought founding president Emerson Humphrey back into the game after a bad back put him out of action for about 25 years.
The club, he recalls, “called me to an annual meeting almost five years ago, and gave me a life membership.”
Mr. Humphrey said he wasn’t sure why they bothered, since he could no longer play the game. But they introduced him to the stick, which came into general use about six years ago. After he got used to the gadget, he said, “I find I’m more accurate with the stick than I ever was without it.”
He now curls three or four nights a week, and describes the rink in Beebe as his second home.
Of the club membership, he says, “this is my second family.”
