But Is It A Sport: Curling (Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!)

You might think that with the end of football, I've got nothing more to say about sports. You'd be wrong -- partially -- because the fact is, I've got nothing much to say about sports...but that was true during the football season, too.

With the end of football, I can focus my sports-related attention on other things that aren't necessarily "football" or "making jokes about Packers fans and pointing out how stupid they are," or "pointing out that everyone gets on Brett Favre about ending his season with an interception on 3rd-and-long but things look a little different once Peyton Manning does the same thing, am I right?" Through the long, cold offseason (and, yes, it's always cold in Wisconsin, even in May and June and July), I think about other sports topics, topics like Is that thing really a sport?

That's the genesis of "But Is It A Sport?", another feature of my old, defunct sports blog (it's this now) that I'm resurrecting here. In But Is It A Sport? I analyze whether a given activity is, or is not, a sport. I've done this already in the past for a great many things, but those posts are deleted and so I can do it again, starting all over with the task that falls onto my shoulders -- my shoulders because I'm a natural born authority on everything from possibly-right statistics to words that are so lame they're cool -- the task of determining whether that thing is a sport.




Today's Thing-That-May-Be-A-Sport is... Curling!

The Basics: Curling is like shuffleboard, only slower, and using things your mom handed you when she wanted some help around the house.


In curling, teams of two to four players slide a large stone (or "rock") down the rectangular square of ice (or "sheet") to a target on the other end (the "house".) The game consists of ten rounds (or "ends"), with each "end" being the "throwing" (but not really) of 16 stones (or "God, that's a long round").

One player takes the rock, and kneeling down, "throws" it by shoving gently forward and caressing the rock towards the other target. Once the rock is released, the sweepers jump into action... sweeping. They use specially made brooms (or "brushes") to guide the rock, helping direct its path and extend the throw. (Or "really? They use brooms?") There is apparently yelling during this time, and players may use a stopwatch to help determine something or other.

There are three kinds of shots, which seems impossible given that it's a slow-moving large rock on a straight sheet of ice, so I'll just name them and move on: They are the the guard, the draw, and the takeout.

Once all the rocks are thrown and the ice has been fully cleaned, or something, the score is added up by using math, specifically, geometry, kind of. A team gets one point for each its rocks that are closer to the center of the house (or "button") than the other team's closest stone. Got all that? I thought I gave up those kinds of calculations midway through 10th grade when Mr. Mulrooney stopped teaching to me and focused on the rest of the class.

There's also something about a biter which, sadly, is not an opponent chosen to try to interfere with the sweepers.

How much cooler would this picture
be if that lady in the back was about
to tackle one of the sweepers and gnaw
off her arm. 73% cooler, that's how much.

Does It Use Specialized Equipment That Costs A Lot Of Money? This is one of the first, and most important, criteria for being a sport. Things that don't use lots of equipment and cost tons of money to play can never be sports, because if you don't need lots of money and tons of equipment, then theoretically, anyone can do it, at any time -- like, say, running. Anyone can just get up and run, whenever they feel like it, unless they're being interviewed by Regis Philbin. Or soccer: all that takes is something round, and some space, and you're playing soccer. Or being a lawyer: All you have to do is own a tie, and talk.

That's why none of those things qualifies as a sport, or gets respect. Curling, then, must have specialized equipment that costs a lot to play or it may not make the cut as a sport.

Curling uses rocks and brooms. That's it. And ice. Rocks, brooms, and ice. Or, as it could be paraphrased, life in the upper midwest.

Sorry, curlers: a rock is a rock, even if one does cost $475.

$475: Or about 1/2 an average mortgage payment.

Quite literally free for the taking.

Does It Have Big Names? To have a chance at being a sport an activity has to have big, recognizable household names, the kinds of people kids will hang posters of and who might show up in a cameo role in an Adam Sandler movie. Googling the phrase most famous curler leads one to this headline from this site:

Corner team stocked with famous curlers
Former world champs McCarrel and Tetley on board, Ryan on standby

So there are famous curlers, curlers with names like McCarrell and Tetley, which sound like famous-sports-guy names. The article, though, appears to be not so much about McCarrell and Tetley, but about Corner, and how he was maybe going to retire or something. I'm not sure, actually, what the article is about. I just skimmed it. But I did read this paragraph:

"I was really tired of the game," said Corner, 40. "Tired of competitive curling and all the travel, the time away and never having summer holidays. I'd been doing it since 1988 and I just felt I wasn't getting the same feeling out of the game. The passion wasn't there, so it was time to step back."

In curling, Word Balloons are
mandatory equipment.

And thought, instantly, how there might be a market for a new kind of sports movie, one about curling. It would start with a shot of Corner, standing in his home, staring at all the Purple Hearts he's won (that's the award that you get for winning the Ontario title in curling), and the pictures of those years on the road with McCarrell and Tetley, and thinking about hanging up the ol' rock, when McCarrell calls him up.

"Did you hear?" McCarrell says to Corner, who hasn't heard because he's been pensively staring at things. So McCarrell tells him: "Tetley's dead, Corner. It was a tragic accident. One of the biters on a guard shot didn't cross the tee line, and that was it for him." So Corner decides to have one last round and try to win it all for Tetley. I call it Blank End (after the curling term for an end in which no stones make it to the House.)

But until that, or some other great curling movie gets made, the two most famous curlers in history aren't exactly household names. And one of them might be dead -- that's what I heard on the Internet.

The lack of any great curling movies (I assume; it's Sunday and I'm too lazy to google it) leads me to question whether curling will meet the next test, which is:

Is It On TV? It can't be a sport unless it's televised. You know that old saying about a tree falling in the forest when nobody's around, so we'd all become fishermen or something? Isn't that a dumb saying? But it does go to show that if your activity is not on TV, it's not a sport.

Curling, apparently, will be on TV now that the Olympics are here again. Doesn't it seem like the Olympics have become an annual thing, or something that's always going on? I disliked the idea of alternating the Winter and Summer Games when it was first proposed, and I've been proven right (as always) because the Olympics are no longer a once-every-four-years special event stretching throughout the whole year; now they're always there and they last a couple of weeks and if they don't feature Michael Phelps, nobody cares. (Luckily for NBC, Phelps is competing in the Biathlon this year.)

But curling will be on TV, according to NBC.com, and will also feature a "grandad," a guy who is the oldest member of the US Olympic team -- maybe the whole team, not just the curlers -- and who I was all ready to make fun of being old until I realized he's six months younger than I am.

Plus, he looks like
a movie star.
Jerk.

I adapted to other athletes and celebrities being, for the most part, younger than I am and still told they were old -- like Brett Favre, who's considered old and is a year younger than me. I always figured Well, they only seem old because it's a very physical, demanding thing they do and so it's hard to do that well when one gets into the 30s or 40s. But now, I learn that 41 is old for... sweeping. Great.

I didn't know if curling was only on TV during the Olympics, or whether it was only on TV at those times that channels are desperate to televise something, like Sunday afternoons or opposite the Super Bowl, so I double-checked on ESPN, and learned that the curling matches are already over for the entire Olympics. The Olympics which are, as I write this, 36 hours old.

I can see where this is heading.

Does it have an arcane rule that only a total insider could understand? Great sports have great rules: Football has the tuck rule, for example, a rule that appears not only to mean the exact opposite of what it's titled, but also which makes no sense when you get into the details of it. It's great rules that sound contradictory and make no sense which allow activities to rise to the level of sports, making the presence of at least one arcane rule a necessity to qualify as a sport.

And arcane rules allow one to claim confusion and
get away with certain liberties, right Mr. Belicheat?

Curling seems promising -- the Potomac Curling Club's site has four different versions of rules, including one called Skins Rules, which turned out not to be for naked curling but was instead for a "more aggressive" version of the game. Will it let people hit each other with the brooms? Let's see:

Sadly, no. But they do have a rule which allows for players to use something called "Draw Shot Distance" at the end of pre-game practice to determine who will throw First or Second Stone, and if that doesn't do it, then the teams will use their "Draw Shot Challenge" ranking to decide that, and if that doesn't do it, they toss a coin. That's arcane enough for me, and if a coin toss was enough to determine who would sign first at Appomattox Courthouse, it's good enough for everyone.

Which brings us to the final criteria: Can You Get Seriously Injured Playing The Sport? Anything that's really a sport carries with it the prospect of cool sports injuries, the kind of cool sports injuries that lead fans to go Ooooooh! when they happen, and cheerleaders to dote on the players while they heal up, and eventually, an orthopedic surgeon to get a new condo on Vail.

Did you know that orthopedic doctors used to just be called orthopedic doctors, until Baby Boomers starting getting older and needing orthopedic doctors, only the Boomers (who didn't change the world in the 60s) wouldn't go to an orthopedic doctor, because they felt that was for old people, and, as Roger Daltrey famously sang:

"Hope I die before I suck it up and go see an orthopedist for that nagging knee injury I got when I tried to see if I could dunk the Nerf Basketball in the backyard"

So doctors solved that problem by changing their name to Sports Medicine, and now boomers go happily. Yet another reason to pity Boomers and put them in nursing homes as quickly as possible.

I'm sure the nursing home will have curling.

Anyway, Curling must have at least the potential for injury if it's going to be a sport, and, unfortunately, potential is all it has. Curling seems tailor-made for injury: rocks, ice, and sticks: it could be like hockey, only with a far heavier object to hit at your brother and make him cry. But nothing happens. Here's an amazing shot, by curling standards:



That was a lot of yelling and shouting and all, for what amounted to a bunch of women cleaning up after something. And that was one of the fastest shots I've seen in curling. Most of the time, it's not even that fast. Most of the time, nothing appears to be happening.

The Verdict: Curling is sometimes called "chess on ice," which tells you pretty much all you need to know: Anything that can be compared to chess is emphatically not a sport. Chess on Ice would probably be more of a sport. Especially if it was Live-Action Role Playing Chess On Ice.

How come, in fact, Live Action Role Playing Chess is not already a sport? It's been more than 30 years since George Lucas showed us that little chess game on the Millennium Falcon, the one where the pieces battle it out on the board; how has nobody yet come up with the idea of having actual people dress up like actual pieces on the Chess board, and then battle it out for real? I think Live Action Chess should be added to the Summer Games 2010 roster immediately.

As for Curling: Not A Sport.


Update: After finishing the above, I checked to see if there already was Live Action Chess, and I found out that

(a), there is:



And

(b) That is so the opposite of what I was thinking, and
(c) Seriously, who are those people? And why are there furries there?

Runescape Cursors Are Here.

That little arrow not doing if for you anymore? Tired of giving in to "the man" when it comes to what you use to designate where your mouse landed you on the screen? Want to get a little piece of the number one 3d roleplaying game around there?

Then Runescape Cursors can help you. They've got more than 100 Runescape cursors for you, just waiting to be downloaded in seconds, after which you'll be pointing -and clicking -- Runescape style.

So you can open files with a Barrows' Brothers Spear Cursor. Or set up your spreadsheet with a 300 million GP cursor. Or even use the animated cursors they've got, like the Abyssal Whip animated cursor.

Think of it like getting a tattoo, only for your laptop, not you, so your mom won't get all annoying about it and say stuff like "How are you going to get into a good tech school NOW?" when you show her.

If you're a Runescape player -- and that's pretty much everyone reading this -- then Runescape Cursors are for you; they're pretty much de rigeur (which is wizard-speak for these things are really very cool.) And they're free, and you can download more than one and change them all the time, so head on over there and take advantage of Runescape Cursors' niceness.

A Hunk Makes Me Break A Solemn Oath. (Sweetie's Hunk of the Week, 49)

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming after Sweetie took me to see Avatar Thursday. This week's Hunk is:

Sam Worthington.

You don't know him without: I don't know. It's hard to say you know Sam Worthington if you saw "him" in Avatar since for most of Avatar he's a blue cat guy with a ponytail that plugs into things and that is not exactly how he looks in real life.

Not exactly.

But I don't know what else anyone would have seen him in. He was in Terminator: Salvation, but I never saw that, and if I haven't seen it, it can't be very good, right? Or popular? (That's the theory, anyway.)

So I'm not sure how you'd know Sam Worthington, who can probably walk around anywhere he wants and not get recognized because most people think he's a 9-foot-tall Cat Person, and I'm pretty sure he's not.

Also, Sam Worthington is kind of bland-looking. He's got the kind of looks that would make you not realize that you know him when you run into him a second-time. The kind of guy who you'd say "Oh, hey, hi, we haven't met" and introduce yourself, and he'd say "We have met, actually, last week." And you'd say "Oh, yeah, right, how've you been," but you wouldn't mean it, at all, you wouldn't actually remember him, a point that would be made right then when he said, in response to your question about how he's been, "I have a fatal brain cloud, remember? God, why would you ask that?" and he'd burst into tears, while you were still shaking his hand, and then you wouldn't know whether you should stop shaking his hand, or maybe grip it comfortingly, or turn to the guy to your left and make a comment about the weather.

You can see why I do not make friends easily.

Also, if Sam Worthington did introduce himself that way, I bet even I would remember him the next time. He should do that even if he doesn't have a fatal brain cloud.

(Sam, if you do have a fatal brain cloud, then I apologize for making light of that fact.)

(Or anyone reading this, who might have a fatal brain cloud. I'm sorry for your plight. I didn't know.)

(Wouldn't it be incredible if Sam Worthington read this? I bet he does. Say Hi to Sweetie in the comments, Sam!)

[Spoiler Alert!] As it turns out, it would not
be so incredible if he read this... read on.

I ended up, I think, on "you'd know Sam if you have the uncanny ability to somehow picture someone as a 9-foot-tall blue cat, but otherwise, you wouldn't know him at all." Let's move on to

Things That Make You Go Hmmm About Him: How about this? I think he's kind of a pretentious dink.

Remember that I don't research these in advance; Sweetie tells me who the hunk is and I dive in and start writing. So when I got to this point, I tried to find out something interesting about Sam Worthington, and in that quest, I just read this whole article about him. The article left me with the impression that Sam Worthington isn't worth spitting on -- not even if he's lying below your face, and not even if you really, really have to spit. Like, say, you were eating Skittles and now you have Skittle-mouth and feel all gummy and need to spit, and Sam Worthington has fallen just below you. Even then I wouldn't waste the effort. That's the kind of impression I got from one interview with Sam Worthington.

I started reading the article because I got a link there in which it said that Sam Worthington, just before he was cast in Avatar was about to go on walkabout-- apparently people do that, or say they're going to do it, and some people are serious about doing that even though anything that's been done by Paul Hogan in a movie can't be taken seriously in real life -- Sam was going to go on walkabout with his clothes and a duffel bag full of books. I read the article hoping to find out what books he was going to take.

And I left with the impression that the books would be something like The Complete Idiot's Guide To How To Be A Jerk-Off, or maybe "I'm An A-Hole, What Of It?" You read that article, and that's the impression you get.

Sam says, at the start of the article: "Oh, isn't it cool? It's so cool being an actor! It's so cool having my face on a bus. That's bullshit. I hate people like that." But later on, he says he'd name his kid "Avatar" if it helps sell the movie. So, you're a jerk if you think having your face on a bus is cool, but you're an upstanding guy if you'd sell out your kid for commercial success? Got it.

"But I wouldn't glue my kid to the side of the bus.
I have standards."

Sam also said, about some role or other:

"Hopefully I'm bringing more complexity to it than Jean-Claude Van Damme does. No offense to the dude." Yes. You want to see good acting? Watch Avatar, and wait for the scene where a completely-CGI-created "Sam Worthington" bites into a completely CGI-created "interplanetary fruit" and says how good it is. That is complex acting. I totally believed that his fake 9-foot-tall-cat-creature found that fake fruit delicious. It was way more complex then when Ms. Pac Man would eat the cherries and then turn the ghosts blue and eat them, too.

Sam is also known for his on-set BS: He caused so much trouble on one show that he shut it down. Sam thinks that's great, because his concern was to "elevate" matters. I'm sure his fellow actors, as well as the crew of that show, felt elevated as they waited for unemployment checks. Fellow actors call him a shouter, and Worthington describes that as his professionalism. He's proud of his professionalism, describing how he's never been afraid to throw a tantrum rather than do a scene he disagrees with.

"Professionalism," in Worthington's world, is synonymous with throw a tantrum. Which makes my 3-year-olds incredibly professional.

And which makes Sam Worthington a loser.

(So, Sam, I'd just as soon you didn't comment here.)

Reason I Assumed Sweetie Liked Him: We can scratch personality off that list, right? That's one reason why I hate reading about actors. You get this image of an actor or actress, based on their character, and you think you like them, but what do you know, right? You're just assuming that Harrison Ford is like Indiana Jones, only then you see him on David Letterman and he's not, he's a weird, dumb guy. Or you think Jennifer Aniston is like Rachel, and she's actually a vapid chain-smoking tanaholic. Producers and directors should never let actors out in public. They should require, as part of their contract, that actors and actresses not talk, and not be interviewed, and not make retarded comments about their professionalism and how the process works and how intellectual they are.

It's acting. It's exactly what Mr Bunches does when he pretends that he's Wall-E and runs around his bed buzzing and beeping, and then falls down. That's your "process." Get over yourself.

I had this idea, after Avatar, that Sam Worthington might be okay, only he's an ass who's full of himself. So I'd have been better off if Sweetie hadn't named him hunk of the week, or if, instead of reading about him, I'd have just tried to find a clip of him in a barbershop quartet on Youtube or something.

But the damage is done. Schrodinger's Cat never comes back to life, and Sam Worthington is dead to me. So I'm just going to say who cares why Sweetie liked him?

Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "He's got a cute baby-face."


Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: Picture that baby face saying these actual Sam Worthington quotes:

"I'm still yelling and screaming and don’t know what the fuck I'm doing, but at least I'm now standing up for myself a bit more.” "It was some shit, fucking bullshit, that. It was the most drunkest movie I've ever done in my life." "But I don't ever feel that there's a pressure of a suit going, 'If this fucks up, it's because of you,' because I'll go, 'You hired me, dickhead!'"

And I'm so sick of Sam Worthington, I'm going to take a drastic step and reveal that he's an android sent to kill John Connor in Terminator: Salvation.

I never wanted to see the movie, anyway.

Thanks, Sam Jerkface Worthington-- you made me violated my [SPOILER ALERT!] oath -- one of only two vows in my life I'd ever taken seriously.

(Yes, Sweetie, the other one was our marriage vows.)