Byline: Jon Fox
Mar. 22--JENKINS TWP. -- Only half of the Brazilian curling team showed up. The pre-game activities at The Tipsy Turtle, a nearby bar, had claimed two of their crew. One member was lost to a treacherous parking lot. He hit a patch of ice and 'went down like a bag full of curling stones,' explained Jonathan Loiselle, one of the two remaining Brazilian players. Another teammate bailed on the Sunday night curling session to continue a conversation with a girl at the bar, Loiselle said. Such is the topsy-turvy world of recreational curling.
It's important to note that neither Loiselle nor David Degnon, the two guys wearing the green Team Brazil shirts, hail from Brazil.
Degnon's from Tunkhannock and Loiselle's from Taylor. But they did trade e-mails with the Brazilian consulate, and both had Portuguese phrases written on cards and taped to their wrists. 'It started off as a joke,' Degnon said on a recent Sunday at The Ice Box skating rink. Brazil didn't have a curling team in the winter games, so the friends figured the field was wide open to represent the South American country. Degnon, like a lot of the other players at the third meeting of the Scranton Curling Club, had seen the game televised during the Turin Olympic Games. For two weeks that seemed heavy on ice dancing, curling, sort of like a version of shuffleboard on ice, became the most interesting thing to watch, he said. For Team Brazil, it was a second try at the game that seems to be more of a punch line than a pastime in America. 'It was a joke but I tell you what we came here last week and we had a great time,' Degnon said. Dave Cawley, 39, launched the Scranton Curling Club with his brother-in-law in hopes of capitalizing on a post-Turin wave of enthusiasm for a game he grew up watching on television in Buffalo. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wasn't beaming hockey games across the border, it showed curling, Cawley said. The 16th century Scottish game played with 42-pound granite stones has nearly 900,000 players in Canada, but hasn't caught on south of the border. But Cawley might qualify that statement with 'yet' -- as in 'Curling hasn't conquered America, yet.' The Pittsburgh curling club draws 80 players each week, and has a 500-person waiting list to get on the ice, Cawley said. A club in Plainfield, N.J., had 1,000 people pop their heads in after the Olympics. At a club outside Boston, 1,200 people recently lined up to try the quirky sport. 'With the Olympics, people are flocking to curling,' Cawley said The local club leased 32 used stones from a club in Utica, N.Y., and trucked them down in the back of a pickup.
Each brand new stone could have set them back a couple of hundred dollars in price and shipping from Scotland, where they are hewn from especially dense granite. The game is played by teams of four, sliding the stones across a sheet of ice. The goal is to park the stones closest to the center of a bull's-eye, or the 'house' in curling parlance.
One player, the 'skip,' points to the target for the benefit of the slider and two sweepers brush the ice in front of the stone to keep the throw true. Brushing the ice can allow the stone to slide an extra 15 feet and prevent it from curving or curling when it slows, a property that lent the game its name. It's a game that's beginner friendly, kind of like pool, Cawley said. And there's no need to know how to ice skate. 'Anyone can learn to play pool in five minutes but you're not going to be a super expert.' Pool, however, doesn't involve covering one's shoe in duct tape and sliding toward something called a hog line while propped up on a broom. The tape is 'the handyman's secret weapon,' Cawley said. It's also, incidentally, very slippery on the ice. Players normally use Teflon covers for their shoes, but a sudden increased interest has made the covers temporarily unavailable. 'This is the cheap way of doing it for now,' he said. 'We're going to be getting some sliders soon. The place we ordered them from is a little backlogged.' A couple weeks into his curling club experiment, Cawley says things are going well and he hopes to keep enough interest in the sport to keep sliding until April, the traditional end of the curling season, before resuming play in the fall. Loiselle expects to turn out a third time to represent his version of Team Brazil, but he's not ready to say he's hooked. 'It's not the crack of sports here,' he said. 'I wouldn't say twice is an obsession or an addiction.' ------------ more photos from a recent meeting of the Scranton Curling Club go to www.timesleader.com [http://www.timesleader.com] . --For more information about the club, go to www.scrantoncurling.com [http://www.scrantoncurling.com] . Jon Fox, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7219.
Copyright (c) 2006, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Times Leader
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