A framed quote hung in the Elk Point Curling Club lobby back in the 1970s and ’90s, saying, “Give me courage and lots of class… To match the wizards behind the glass.”
Although I know perfectly well that I have become one of the individuals that quote referred to, I still would rather be out there on the ice, hurling rocks toward the broom and sometimes even succeeding.
That rink is where I first learned to curl, a year and some months after we came north and after serious persuasion to give it a try, although I had made a decision back in high school to never try a sport where people yelled at each other. Other than watching the school teams compete just one afternoon, my only other knowledge of the game was from a song that I’d heard on a CBC morning radio show as a child that went “Don’t go curling tonight, Mother, Stay home with Daddy and me!”
My husband was more familiar with the sport and had curled in Calgary with friends from work, and when his fellow Elk Point Elks Lodge members invited him to bring me to the Elks and Royal Purple funspiel, he convinced me to give it a try. That probably wasn’t a good idea, because having tried it and liked it, I was soon involved in the ladies’ afternoon curling, and later joined him to curl in the mixed league. I went to a training session or two, learned skills like throwing a rock through a port, and decided that sport was for me.
I curled in Elk Point’s afternoon league as long as there was one, and when that was shut down, hit the road to Lindbergh, where I gained the muscles necessary to curl on natural ice and throw the powerful missiles we called “Lindbergh shots”.
Although I was definitely not skip material, I gathered up a team and curled in bonspiels, curled with the Royal Purples in their bonspiels in various communities and ended up curling in the Farmerettes Bonspiels in St. Paul for many years, doing much better when I could play third than when I skipped the rink. I even curled in a Sea Cadets and parents bonspiel with our youngest son once, one of our games against a team that included a young cadet named Marcel Rocque, who later became the lead on Randy Ferbey’s Brier-winning team.
When league curling no longer fit with my workload, I took some time off, and when I was persuaded to go back, I did so because the club was having a shortage of curlers. Curling with people I had never curled with previously, I learned some valuable new skills and kept on curling, until I had eye surgery. I quit before the end of the season that year, and have only curled a few times since, as s spare. The last time I curled was last year at a Ladies’ Night event, where I learned that if I wanted to continue, I’d need to learn to stick curl, something I had only tried once at the Farmerettes when each team had to give it a try for a single end. But I did give it a try, at that Ladies Night - they let me skip, and we won our game.
What I have held on to is my love for curling, and that includes watching every possible game on TV. I see them call the shots, I know exactly where that shot should go and how hard it needs to be sent down the ice, and it annoys me no end when the player sliding out of that hack doesn’t do what I would have! I definitely could give them a great deal of advice about shots that would never work, but I also cheer for shots that look impossible but get the job done. I especially like to see them make my favourite through-the-port shots, and the sound of rocks crashing into other rocks is music to my ears, whether it’s on TV or from the ‘wizard’ side of the glass at the Elk Point Curling Club.
Guess I’ll always be a curler at heart!
