2008 Woodie Awards
Get Stoned! With Curling
Matt Fuller
Issue date: 4/5/02 Section: Opinion
Now that the intense hubbub of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics has passed over our quiet state, I think it is high time that more people learned about the noble sport of curling—my personal favorite.
People make fun of my favorite sport because it looks funny. In an attempt to educate the public about the true nature of curling—not the media-drenched, super-hyped, dramatized version you see today—I offer you a brief history of the sport.
Curling was invented four years ago for the Nagano Olympics when the International Olympic Committee decided that the games would benefit from having more sports that combined fairy tales and situation comedies. Curling—obviously—was the lovechild of "Cinderella" and Cheers. Not only does it include the high-intensity sweeping action of poor, mistreated Cinderella, but, also, all the players have the physique of postal worker Cliff from everyone's favorite sitcom bar.
However, curling has not always been the succulent roast ham on the smorgasbord of events that we call the Winter Olympics. Its rise to non-stop media exposure and national popularity was hardly meteoric; indeed, the sport suffered many a setback before overtaking basketball as the most-played sport by eight to twelve year old American children. In 1998, shortly after curling was invented, the Worldwide Association of Curlers (WAC) launched an advertising campaign with the aim of exciting and educating the public about curling. Unfortunately, the tagline "Curling: We Made Shuffleboard Even More Dumb" and successor slogans such as "Curling: Shuffleboard With Heavy Rocks!" did little to incite the public to curl.
The WAC next tried to appeal to niche audiences, hoping to gain an underground following by taking a more "X-Treme!" approach to their advertising. "You sweep and sweep but there's nothing to clean, / it's an obsessive-compulsive's dream," sang the Misfits on one WAC commercial. The "Don't be whack—Join WAC!" campaign was intended to inspire the urban poor to curl and featured on-the-street testimonials by minority youths, one of which claimed that "curling is so chill, all you need is a 44-pound, smooth, polished stone with an attached fiberglass handle, two four-foot hard-bristle camel hair brooms, and a regulation-size 90 foot patch of perfectly smooth ice. I play over on 84th street. Word to your mother. Ice out."
People make fun of my favorite sport because it looks funny. In an attempt to educate the public about the true nature of curling—not the media-drenched, super-hyped, dramatized version you see today—I offer you a brief history of the sport.
Curling was invented four years ago for the Nagano Olympics when the International Olympic Committee decided that the games would benefit from having more sports that combined fairy tales and situation comedies. Curling—obviously—was the lovechild of "Cinderella" and Cheers. Not only does it include the high-intensity sweeping action of poor, mistreated Cinderella, but, also, all the players have the physique of postal worker Cliff from everyone's favorite sitcom bar.
However, curling has not always been the succulent roast ham on the smorgasbord of events that we call the Winter Olympics. Its rise to non-stop media exposure and national popularity was hardly meteoric; indeed, the sport suffered many a setback before overtaking basketball as the most-played sport by eight to twelve year old American children. In 1998, shortly after curling was invented, the Worldwide Association of Curlers (WAC) launched an advertising campaign with the aim of exciting and educating the public about curling. Unfortunately, the tagline "Curling: We Made Shuffleboard Even More Dumb" and successor slogans such as "Curling: Shuffleboard With Heavy Rocks!" did little to incite the public to curl.
The WAC next tried to appeal to niche audiences, hoping to gain an underground following by taking a more "X-Treme!" approach to their advertising. "You sweep and sweep but there's nothing to clean, / it's an obsessive-compulsive's dream," sang the Misfits on one WAC commercial. The "Don't be whack—Join WAC!" campaign was intended to inspire the urban poor to curl and featured on-the-street testimonials by minority youths, one of which claimed that "curling is so chill, all you need is a 44-pound, smooth, polished stone with an attached fiberglass handle, two four-foot hard-bristle camel hair brooms, and a regulation-size 90 foot patch of perfectly smooth ice. I play over on 84th street. Word to your mother. Ice out."
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