A game with quirk appeal

OGDEN, Utah -- They'll never make the X-Games. They're twice the age of most Olympians. And they're more likely to get an endorsement deal from Fuller Brush than Mountain Dew.

Never mind the screaming teens in the back row with the "Extreme Shuffleboard" poster. Curlers are about as far from radical as it gets.

But even as the adrenaline-filled 2002 Winter Olympics make stars out of snowboarders and speedskaters, this game of rocks, brooms and middle-age men and women is gaining a certain cachet.

Members of the U.S. women's team, who made it into Wednesday's semifinals with a last-minute comeback, are being recognized on the street for the first time ever. Scalpers are selling $35 tickets for at least $50 outside the Ogden Ice Sheet, and the sport is being shown on television more than ever during the Winter Games.

"People don't know what's going on, but they're mesmerized by it," said Rick Patzke, spokesman for the United States Curling Association.

It casts a strange spell, this sport that has been compared with bowling and chess on ice and which begins to the skirl of bagpipes in honor of its Scottish roots.

No lack of intensity

Maybe it's the intense stares of the curlers as they gently slide their granite stones down the ice, or their screams of "Hurry, hurry, harder, harder!" to the sweepers who rush down the ice.

Or perhaps it's just the fact that curlers look as if they could be a next-door neighbor or member of the local PTA.

"Curling's something anybody can do, from 5 to 95," said Jim Henderson of Sweep, a curling magazine in Canada, where the game draws as many viewers as the Super Bowl.

Families play together in curling leagues there and travel to weekend tournaments called bonspiels (meaning "good play") where the winners buy drinks for the losers.

It's also a sport that can be picked up later in life. American women's captain Kari Erickson didn't start curling until she was 17. She's 30 now, with a 3-year-old son and a full-time job teaching swimming in Bemidji, Minn., the hotbed of American curling.

"Not a lot of people have seen" curling, Erickson said.

Easy sport?Not quite

But just because the Canadian Curling Association is sponsored by beer and doughnut companies doesn't mean curling is a sport Homer Simspon could medal in.

The stones -- the best of which come from the same quarry in Scotland, where the game began in the 16th century -- weigh 42 pounds apiece and each player delivers at least 20 stones per match. In between, there's the rapid-fire sweeping that melts the top layer of ice so the stone can move faster as it slides toward the target area, known as the house.

"People don't understand how grueling and tiring it is because it looks easy," said Julie Skinner, a member of the Canadian women's team. "I've taken a lot of good athletes out there on the ice and they can't walk the next day."