“Smooth over ice,” reads the banner above the ice at the Lake Forest College recreation center. It’s the slogan for Glayva, the Scottish liqueur sponsoring the ninth World Ladies’ Curling Championship, and a pun on the festivities. On March 22, the first day of competition, about 1,000 spectators shiver in the 30-degree temperature of the ice rink, not a large crowd as world events go, but curling is not a major spectator sport in the United States.
Sedate enough for little old ladies to play. On a Wednesday morning at the Chicago Curling Club in Northbrook, 32 mostly gray-haired ladies pump across the ice sweeping in that characteristic curling stutter step. The curling season runs from October until March, and even if it’s technically a winter sport, it’s been 40 years since any Chicagoans have played it out of doors.
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“The only outdoor curling I ever saw in Canada was when we used to jam-pail it,” says Betty Duguid, my guide through the peculiar sport. Betty’s still got a trace of a Canadian accent, an “oot” when she says “out,” though she’s lived in Wilmette for 19 years. “We used to do it in junior high school because we were a little too small for curling stones. We’d get a jam pail that had had raspberry jam in it, fill it with cement, put a hook in it, and throw it like a curling stone.”
Betty runs me through a dozen dry runs without the stone to get the feel of the ice. The stone is an impressive piece of polished granite about 14 inches in diameter with a handle on top and a concave “running edge” on the bottom. At $700 a pair, one stone is worth more than my living room couch. With that in mind, on my first real delivery, I forget to let go of the stone, and it pulls me down the sheet on my face, like a fat man with his fingers stuck in a bowling ball. On my second delivery, I throw it with the force of a bowler’s strike and watch the stone sail past the target, or “house,” and slam into the berm at the far end of the sheet.
Betty grew up in Manitoba, Canada, started curling when she was ten years old, and competed while in junior high school. She began competing in earnest in 1960, and in 1967 played on the Canadian national championship team. She and her husband Gerry ran a public curling facility with 24 sheets in Winnipeg, then 19 years ago, came to Wilmette to run a facility there. It went out of business, and they moved to the Exmoor Country Club, where Gerry still works. Betty is now assistant lakefront manager for the Wilmette Park District, competes out of the Wilmette Curling Club, and teaches at several clubs in the area.
Sweeping in those days served the much more basic purpose of keeping snow off the ice. “No curling schedules could be maintained because of the vagaries of the weather,” Charles Sprowl wrote in a newsletter from the Skokie Curling Club, “but whenever the weather was right, the curlers were always on hand, and on many occasions matches were played off at two or three in the morning.” Tea Long, a bustling octogenarian who started curling in 1948, remembers that Exmoor and Indian Hill put tents over their outdoor curling ice, but “everybody hated to come to Glenview because the wind blew and there were twigs on the ice. They’d call you at dinner and say ‘Come! There’s ice!’ People would come along and see us curling and say, ‘We may be crazy, but we’re not stupid.’”
It was no surprise victory. Canada has won the event five times in nine years. In Canada, curling is a major sport. There are about 20,000 curlers and 130 clubs in the United States, most of them in states bordering Canada, according to Frank Rhyme of the North American Curling News. “Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota are the three largest states in terms of curlers,” he says. “Illinois is probably fourth.”
