Curling: Hammer it home

I have a deep, dark secret to share -- I like watching curling on TV.

I know, I know. But I can't help myself.

First there's all the screaming:

"HURRY! HURRY HARD! OFF! OFF! SWEEEEEEEEEEEP!"

Then there's the foreign language you're forced to learn.

"Skips. Leads. Shot rock. The Hog Line. The T-Line. Draws. The hack. Biter. Draw weight. The Hammer."

There's something about this game I find particularly mesmerizing.

Maybe it's the sheen of the ice or the multi-colored targets that look suspiciously like a giants bull's-eye from overhead.

Perhaps it's the fact that it truly is a game anyone can play. Assuming, of course, you live in a northern climate or at least have access to refrigeration.

Maybe it's the fact that the winning team has to buy the beer and I'm not any good.

Perhaps that's why I laughed during "Men with Brooms." (Even if that Paul Gross guy is really, REALLY short.)

It could be that as I enter my middle age I've come to the realization that if I ever want to go to the Olympics as a competitor I probably only have one sport left!

Most likely it's simply because an elegantly simple game can be so tremendously difficult. The first time I picked up that 45 pounds of polished granite and tried to "draw to the button," I think it made it 15 feet down the "sheet" (you play with a rink, not on a rink) before coming to a screeching halt.

My fellow players told me to hike up my skirt.

The second time, and in an attempt to restore some semblance of manliness to my outing, I put all my strength into the shot only to watch it scream through the "house" and come to rest on the far "bumper."

At least the beer was cold and I didn't have to pay.

No one can say definitively where curling has its origins.

The first hand-written record of what could be called an early curling game dates from February, 1540, when John McQuhin of Scotland noted down, in Latin, a challenge to a game on ice between a monk named John Sclater and an associate, Gavin Hamilton.

The first printed reference to curling appears in a 17th century elegy published by Henry Adamson, following the death of a close friend, M. James Gall.

Not that curling hasn't had its own share of scandal. Records from a Glasgow Assembly of Presbyterians in 1638 accused a certain Bishop Graham of Orkney of a terrible act: He was a curler on the ice on the Sabbath.

By the 18th century, curling had become a common past time in Scotland. Both the poetry and the prose of the era provide numerous records of bonspiels, curling societies, and curling as a great national game.

To add to the puzzle, archaeological evidence of a curling stone (the famous Stirling Stone) inscribed with the date 1511 turned up, along with another bearing the date 1551, when an old pond was drained at Dunblane, Scotland.

The true origin of curling is lost in time. There is no doubt or dispute, however, that the Scots nurtured the game. They improved equipment, established rules, turned curling into a national past time, and exported it to many other countries throughout the world.

You can laugh at me all you want, but you have to admit it. You too have your own dark secret. You're also watching.

Don't worry. I won't tell.