COVID-19 quarantine has been a rather interesting period for sports fandom. The pandemic — and the associated shutdown of most social institutions, including pretty much all professional sports leagues — had roughly the effect of a parlor trick pulled off by a lackluster magician; we pretty quickly exposed that the tablecloth-pull of normalcy wouldn’t actually leave all of our regular establishments and conventions standing unscathed. (This effect, unfortunately, permeated into pretty much all walks of life, but that’s a little heavy, and beside the point; I’m writing about offbeat winter sports, here.)
At first, this shutdown sent most of us scrambling to find the ever-paradoxical “new normal.” In the sports vein, this got requisitely weird pretty quickly. What’s a diehard basketball fan to do when the NBA not only ceased operations, but also potentially acted as the catalyst that galvanized society to finally take a global pandemic seriously? As it happens, you find out that you’re not the only one that’s filling the sudden void in your life by staying up until 3 AM to watch the Taiwanese basketball championship, featuring Team #1 — led by a 7'5" guy who basically washed out of the NBA because he couldn’t keep his playing weight under 400 lbs — versus Team #2, led by a guy who was really good at basketball, but had experienced the unfortunate circumstance of growing up to be the height and weight of an average human being, which does not buy you an admission ticket up the beanstalk into the NBA. (This was a very strange game to watch for multiple reasons; big tall guy was barely in playing shape, and his teammates would often wait for him to lumber down the court and join them, at which point he would park himself under the basket, receive a pass, and usually miss a layup or two before either scoring or getting the ball stripped, which was a very effective impersonation of any late-elementary or early-middle-school basketball game featuring the one kid who hit puberty a year or two earlier than everyone else. Meanwhile, talented guy was playing pretty well, but was occasionally missing shots, hindered by being shorter than not only his singular, giant, ringer opponent (fair), but also any of the 8 random Taiwanese guys who were on the court at any given time. His team won by like 50, though.)
Being as this was their championship game, Taiwanese basketball also halted operations, and — for a while — we were left with the absolute cessation of any reasonable sporting events, leaving only the cockroaches-after-a-nuclear-winter stragglers that could’ve easily qualified for ESPN8 (The Ocho). Some people turned to cornhole. I briefly watched the world axe throwing championships. (I’m fudging the timeline here a bit, but it makes for a better story. I will note that the axe throwing championships are pretty much exactly what you would expect; in the championship, one guy had a custom-made t-shirt with “Killshot” written on the back, and the other guy was named Mike Kump, which is so so so close. They both threw like 60 axes that perfectly hit their target, until Mike Kump threw an axe that perfectly hit the target but didn’t actually stick in the wood, which had been destroyed by the accumulation of prior perfect throws; not sticking meant the shot didn’t score, and he lost. Axe throwing could probably stand to have a higher skillcap.) After enough time, however, nature began to heal; the NBA held an abbreviated playoffs in a bubble, while the NFL and MLB decided that money was reasonable to prioritize over health, safety, and general common sense, and proceeded with their seasons, undeterred by occasional team-wide mass outbreaks of a historically deadly virus. (Undeterred is technically inaccurate; they did cancel a few games.)
The real gut punch for me, however, was the cancellation of curling. I’m an amateur curler, and had 2020 teed up as the year I was going to travel and participate in a bunch of bonspiels. (In an exercise in not knowing the correct level of detail to convey to a non-existent audience: “bonspiel” is the word for “curling tournament.”) For obvious reasons, this did not happen, and of course the professional (read, interchangeably: Canadian) leagues also cancelled their seasons and important spiels, in line with the general social collapse (with which you are presumably familiar, but that I have helpfully also described in brief, above). “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” might be a dumb cliche that I would never use as a point of rhetorical comparison in a blog post, but I was very excited when Curling Canada announced that the two most important Canadian tournaments — the Scotties Tournament of Hearts (women’s) and the Tim Hortons Brier (men’s) — would return in 2021, held in a bubble in Calgary. I’m an extremely passive observer into the world of pro curling, and can’t pretend I followed it religiously pre-pandemic; the closest brush (not a curling pun, I promise) I had with the pro scene was spending a very patriotic 4th of July weekend at Four Foot Curling Camp in Kelowna, BC, where the coaches included several former and current pro players (including Mike McEwen, a skip for one of the higher-tier teams that recurringly plays in the Brier). However, I was very enthusiastic for any sort of contact with this relatively obscure (at least, American-obscure) obsession of mine. (Part of this feeling probably comes from the fact that curling was one of the last normal activities I remember doing before the world shut down; I heard the news that the NBA canceled its season while I was sitting in a bar in downtown Oakland, hanging out with opponents after our club’s weekly league. It did not take long to go from “maybe we should name our team curlronavirus” to 100, real quick.)
As a general sports fan with very little bias or rooting interest when it comes to professional curling, diving headfirst into an ecosystem with which I have only passing familiarity triggered extreme field-researcher vibes. For one thing, I experienced the always-enjoyable process of picking players and teams to root for or, alternatively, villainize, mostly dependent on completely reasonable and definitely not arbitrary criteria. I, of course, was rooting for my aforementioned best friend and closest confidante Mike McEwen and his Wild Card team; this was actually backed by reason (he was a genuinely nice guy). Elsewhere, I chose to root against the Nova Scotia men’s team, because their skip looked like a guy I used to work with who was kind of a dick. (I feel reasonably confident that this particular assessment was also high on the rationality scale.)
As you might imagine, this was not a perfect process. Sometimes the teams made it easy for me; I watched a game where the Saskatchewan men’s skip missed several shots, conceded the game, then immediately walked away from the ice (and his team) and slammed his broom on the ground with enough force to pop off the brush head. This did not seem like an action that would cultivate a supportive environment with good camaraderie, and I quickly decided that I would not be a Saskatchewan fan during the Brier. The Prince Edward Island skip, in a potential nomination for the salt-mine Hall of Fame, substituted himself out of a game they were losing 8–1 halfway through. (I was rooting for his replacement, who actually did mount a small comeback of sorts, but unfortunately not one that was the requisite level of miraculous needed to actually win.) On the flip side, I gravitated towards my Scotties rooting interest very quickly; 15 seconds after I tuned into the first game featuring Québec, I watched their skip, Laurie St-Georges:
- miss a shot
- smile
- say “Oopsie,” followed by a stream of French that, while expressive, did not sound like invective
At this moment, I instantly became a Québec fan, and I’m pretty sure I also realized that one of my life goals was to become Laurie St-Georges. It didn’t hurt that Québec had by far the best jacket colors in the tournament (teal blue); it was extremely unfortunate that the two clear best teams, Team Canada (the returning champions) and Team Ontario (basically the Canadian Olympic team from 2018), had possibly the worst colors in the tournament (Team Canada went for mostly bright-white with red-and-yellow arm and back accents, as if they had commissioned their uniforms directly from Ronald McDonald’s tailor, at a discount; Team Ontario went for a shade of tan that I heard generously described as “burlap sacks”). Team Québec also had the extremely Québécois trait of having at least one team member who did not speak French and making half of their strategy calls in French anyway, which I genuinely enjoyed, in a commitment-to-the-bit type of way.
Québec, unfortunately, were much too wholesome of a team to actually make a competitive run in the tournament; they did far better than expected during initial pool play, then promptly lost all their games in the championship pool. (Laurie St-Georges, deservedly, did win the tournament’s sportsmanship award.) I felt rather bad for them, and decided that I would probably prefer to exit a tournament along the lines of what happened to Team Zacharias, the reigning Canadian junior curling champions who had qualified as team Wild Card #2. “Reigning junior champions playing in the major pro tournament for the first time” meant that this was obviously the sports-anime-protagonist team of the tournament, but — as tends to happen to the plucky underdog sports-anime-protagonist in the show’s first season — they immediately got stuck with one of the toughest draws in the entire bracket, losing their first two games against the reigning (and eventually repeat) champions and the eventual 3rd place finishers. While they lost enough games to get mathematically eliminated relatively early, they won their last game in decisive fashion by hitting a pretty sweet double takeout for 4 points and a win. Having played in spiels where we qualified for a high bracket after pools and subsequently got steamrolled, and also ones where we closed out by styling on a fellow team in the dumpster — the latter is far more enjoyable; “not leaving with a bad taste in your mouth” is underrated, as far as feelings go.
By the time we got to the Scotties final, I was relatively set in my rooting interests. The final, between the two prohibitive pre-tournament favorites (the aforementioned Canada and Ontario), was really Rachel Homan (Ontario skip) — whose side hustle, apart from being an excellent curler, seemed to be attempting to set new records for on-ice austerity, almost never smiling or showing any emotion whatsoever, really — vs. Kerri Einarson (Team Canada skip), whose only attribute that fostered an inherent rooting dislike was that she, and her team, were often too robotically good at curling. While “not missing shots” is an extremely annoying trait in earlier rounds, when it’s much more fun to root for eccentric teams who actually screw up on occasion, this is not a valid rooting disqualification for the grand finals, and hence I was Team Einarson all the way (also informed by my vague knowledge of Homan having apparently summarily dismissed one of her better players a few years ago out of basically nowhere). It wasn’t until the tournament was over that I realized that I may have made a mistake. In the last several ends — as Team Canada’s vise closed around the game, tantalizingly just far enough ahead of Team Ontario to make a comeback unlikely, yet not far enough ahead to merit concession — Homan cracked a little. A half-smile here, cutting the deficit from 3 to 2 with 2 ends to go; a hopeful, almost full smile stealing 2, tying the game going into the final end; a rising tide of actual emotion, quelled instantly when she completely missed her final shot, which would have given Team Ontario an outside chance at victory, and instead lost them the game (and the tournament) on the spot. When the camera panned to Homan talking to her team, the other three members were emotive, talking seemingly reassuringly. Homan was nodding, responsive in the technical sense of the word, but her eyes were staring off into the distance. For the first time in the entire tournament, I empathized completely with Rachel Homan’s emotional steeliness; the sinking feeling of going through the motions while your mind won’t stop replaying the thing that you just screwed up was all too relatable. I should’ve been rooting for her earlier; she played the entire tournament while 8 months pregnant, which is extremely fucking impressive.
I was somewhat worried that, despite the week-long gap between the two tournaments, the segue to the Brier would induce curling fatigue of a sort, and I wouldn’t get into it as much. Shockingly, it turns out obsession isn’t that easy to break; it helps that the men’s and women’s game (and personalities) are different enough to have their own enjoyable quirks. I took immeasurable disappointment in losing small treasures from the Scotties broadcast, such as the 5th-end intermissions extremely briefly showing the halftime snacks each team brought in Tupperware containers; literally orange slices, Powerbars, and various other fruit, and at one point it sure looked like one of the teams even had poutine, although I realize this is immensely unlikely. (The Brier teams mostly have generic sport water bottles, which is much more boring.) However, my day was brightened with the realization that the Brier had its own eccentricities, such as continual Ogre Voice interruptions. Technically, Ogre Voice is a cross-sport phenomenon; it occurs when the normal proceedings of the sport are interrupted by hot-mic interruptions from someone that sounds like they smoked about 10 too many packs of cigarettes per day. Think Tom Thibodeau yelling “ICE” from the sidelines in the NBA, or any time Ed Orgeron talks. Curling is singular, however, in that it’s usually the skips — the team leaders, who are generally expected to be coolheaded and strategic — who, upon a curling stone detaching itself from the thrower’s hand, immediately transform from “stoic team captain” into “angry pirate captain”, yelling “HARRRRRD” as loud and aggressively as possible. This is a valid strategic call; you want your sweepers to translate direction to movement with as little mental in-between as possible, and yelling aggressively is a pretty good way to get some action potentials to fire, out of a combination of shock and muscle memory. Less valid strategic calls occasionally heard during the Brier include “HARD WHOA”, which is two polar opposite instructions given essentially within the same breath, and “CURL CURL CURL”, which — while technically valid instruction, in that it is indirectly telling the sweeper on one side of the stone to sweep such that it curls away from him/her — really just sounds like they are yelling at the stone, in the vain hope that it will eventually do what they want. (Speaking as a skip: there is a reasonable chance this is, in fact, a large portion of their motivation.) Ogre Voice guy manifests in the best possible way during the Brier, where — amplified by the complete lack of crowd noise in the 2021 edition — occasionally the peaceful game you are currently watching, in which stones are calmly sliding across the ice without incident, is interrupted by the dulcet tones of someone off-camera, two or three sheets over, going absolutely apeshit trying to will their desired shot into existence. It’s high entertainment. (A Brier-specific bonus: Manitoba’s Jason Gunnlaugson pulls off the rarely-heard combination of being an ogre with a really high-pitched voice.)
One phenomenon that didn’t actually change between the two tournaments was the intermittent tendency of teams to make bafflingly incorrect strategic decisions. I can’t overstress how jarring this is to watch, because for the most part, professional curlers are excellent at making the choices that result in good outcomes in the sport they’ve played for thousands upon thousands of hours throughout their lives; as a viewer, you get lulled into a sense of security, and for the most part, it’s not false. You’ll see a snap decision to play a shot, and it’ll be executed with ridiculous precision; and again; and again; and again, until hey wait a minute what are they actually hoping to get out of this shot I don’t think that angle’s there — oh wow, that totally missed — what were they thinking? It happens so fast that — unless you’re intensely concentrating on the game with a backseat-skip’s-eye-view — you’ll almost blink and miss it, and all of a sudden someone’s given up a steal of 2, and only sometimes does this actually get called out by the announcers. (Who, in fairness, can be absolute savages when they do notice; in the Scotties, Alberta made an inexplicable attempt to make a double takeout where the angles ensured that one of the stones they were attempting to remove was guaranteed to run into their own stone instead of leaving play, causing the announcers to quip that it was “time for them to buy a pool table.”)
The oddness of watching professional strategist-athletes make decisions well, right up until they don’t, is exacerbated slightly by the fact that the Platonic form of curling might actually be a degenerate sport. If you’re an avid curling fan — or just if you’ve watched the Netflix mini-documentary episode of Losers about the partial history of curling — you know that the sport actually had to change its rules in the early ’90s specifically to prevent degeneracy; teams got so good at removing stones 1-for-1 that every game basically became “remove every stone in play until you score a point with the last one.” Skynet — or maybe AlphaStar — as a curler would remove every stone in play, then throw the final stone of the final end as close to the button as possible, resulting in a 1–0 victory. Despite the rule changes (which prevent early rocks in play from being removed until several shots into the end), teams have gotten so good at removing all the other team’s stones — routinely hitting double or triple takeouts with ease — that extremely high level games tend to be low-scoring, swung by a singular end in which someone makes a colossal mistake that allows their opponent to score multiple points. There have been several games in this year’s Brier where the broadcast flashed a graphic claiming that someone was shooting 100% for the game. (In the very first showcase/televised game of the Brier, Brad Gushue — the skip of Team Canada — shot 100% over 18 shots; their opponents conceded in the 9th end, and the cameras caught them laughing about it, in a manner something like, “what were we supposed to do about that?”) This makes the snap-bad-decisions even more magnified, since their downside is giving up multiple points, which is usually tantamount to nearly instantly losing; it’s like watching a professional chess player confidently play out every move, right up until they blunder their queen with the same confidence they employed throughout the rest of the game. Then again, I imagine it’s quite stressful to have games constantly hinge on making nearly every shot perfectly; maybe this is why Kevin Koe (four-time Brier winner, 2021 Wild Card #2 skip) has perpetual “resting-worried-dad” face.
As of the time of writing, Brier pool play is still ongoing, meaning that I don’t really have a thematic capstone to the curling part of this post. I did, however, want to find some space to note that someone’s coach (who came onto the ice during a timeout in the Brier) was wearing a fake Groucho Marx nose-and-moustache face mask.
No true field researcher report about offbeat Canadian sports would be complete without a riff of some sort on the culture surrounding the event, which — for all the eccentricities of curling itself — is perhaps best exemplified by the ads, which are (extremely unfortunately) mostly gated by the legal methods with which you can watch the Brier and Scotties. If you live in America, like me, your option is an ESPN3 restream of TSN Canada, which will mostly show American ads that have bought space on digital restreams. However, you will get a couple Canadian ones here and there, and — as a loophole — when the broadcast returns to the start of an end, during the first couple shots, they will simulcast the last few Canadian commercials of the break. You get just enough of a drip feed to greatly appreciate Canadian ads, especially the ones that believe that you are a Canadian who watches curling. Highlights include:
- the Tim Hortons ad where they get a bunch of people to try their new dark roast coffee, and their facial expressions and reactions are like “hey, this is… not awful?”
- the other Tim Hortons ad where they’re advertising their improved breakfast sandwiches and the Tim Hortons worker tells the lady in the drive-through “I’m gonna try something new with your breakfast sandwich, if that’s okay”, which would maybe be the absolute last thing I want to hear when ordering a breakfast sandwich at a drive-through
- Canadian reality shows are apparently “let’s go build homes in underserved communities”
- “When I think about Calgary as a fishing destination, it’s everything I could ever want”
- I have never farmed in my life, but thanks to the New Holland ads I’m pretty sure I can make strong arguments for what qualities I would truly desire in a combine harvester
- If you asked someone to riff and come up with a fake Canadian company, there’s a non-zero chance they would actually come up with “OK Tire”, and additionally specify that their ads have early-2000s 3D CGI
- Similarly to above, an improv exercise to come up with a tagline for Home Hardware Canada (basically Canadian Home Depot, but cooperatively owned, which is tight) might legitimately produce “This one’s for the Flanagans”
I greatly appreciate all of these — not just because they’re funding the sport, but because there’s a genuineness that’s, in stark contrast, missing from the American ads that preface them. I’m admittedly a little biased due to novelty, but it’s also tough to go from Shaq uninterestedly pitching printer cartridges or Peloton trying desperately to convince me that I should pay them $2000 to exercise to something that just says “you know what? If you want to buy some heavy-duty farming equipment, here’s why you should buy ours.” I’m not sold when Nissan tries to convince me that the experience of driving their sedan, backed by a jaunty pop song that’s inoffensive the first time you hear it and incredibly grating by the 100th, will start flowing color into my otherwise starkly bland surrounding world; I am convinced when OK Tire tells me that they sell pretty good tires and their local salesperson is probably someone from my Canadian neighborhood. To wit: I wouldn’t buy the car, but I might buy some OK Tires for it.
That genuineness permeates, and is — to come full circle — possibly one of the reasons that I’ve enjoyed the Scotties and Brier so much. It helps that I’m obviously very into the sport itself, but the small social courtesies that mark pretty much all of its exchanges — compliments, well-wishes, no trash-talk, no denigration of your opponents (or your teammates) — carry a little more weight in a social climate still stripped of most conventional interaction. It lends itself to a cozy atmosphere, running directly counter to the general collective trend of feeling on edge about nearly everything. Opponents will give a deserved “nice shot, buddy” after a well-thrown stone; teams will group high-five after a good end; curlers will say hi to their mom and dad after the game, when they know the camera has panned to them. It’s uplifting — not in a sweeping (still not a curling pun, I promise), grandiose manner, but in a way that makes you feel just slightly, reassuringly, better about ordinary human interaction. Even if it might be hard — once again, and for the last time, not a curling pun — we’ll get there.
