Someone should name a cul-du-sac or something after Gushue’s sweepers (He already has a Cresent named after him), 110% effort on their part to get fully in the 8"
If you don’t watch curling, you should.
The powers that bee took down the video, here is another…
And people think our sport is weird…
Wow, I had heard of ice curling, and had a vague idea that it was somehow distantly related to shuffleboard, but I had never actually watched it until seeing this video. Truly bizarre! The name of the hero, Gushue, evokes a Chinese dish with pork in it, and somebody’s screaming “Hard! Hard!” while two guys are ferociously sweeping the floor in front of what looks like a slowly coasting, wholesale-sized block of Parmesan cheese.
Then the Parmesan slowly comes to a halt, and the crowd, which fills the stadium, goes berserk and starts waving flags that I have never seen before, some of which look like a bit like the one used by the Basque nationalists or the Tibetan separatists or maybe some British colony that never actually existed. The whole thing is almost like some sort of alternate universe, quite possibly a happier one than the one we are currently living in, but definitely different.
A place called Canada. 
There’s a rather sad spectacle called Curling Night in America that runs on NBC Sports, nothing like what I’ve seen on Canadian video streams or between the better teams in the Winter Olympics.
I have a very distant memory of James Taylor being interviewed by David Letterman, who for whatever reason brings up curling and people on ice sliding rocks that look like cheeses. James pauses for a moment with a puzzled expression then says, “They look like Jesus?”
I think it is good to be reminded that most sport is probably intrinsically ridiculous, it is just that some kinds are familiar enough that we have stopped noticing.
For the last few years in Canada matches in the Briar (Men’s Championship) and the Tournament of Hearts (Women’s Championship), received about the same average or slightly higher ratings (watchership?) compared to regular season NHL games.
I don’t think I need to tell the world how crazy Canadians are about hockey, but the ratings go to show we are nearly as crazy about curling. Personally, I would watch a curling match over a Hockey game any day, any time.
What sports do your home areas get excited about that the rest of us don’t necessarily know about?
I suppose it depends what you call a sport. In a small nearby town they like to run around carrying barrels of flaming tar once a year. https://youtu.be/G1saVxEzqpU
I love watching curling we just don’t get much coverage here in the Midwest. I like to believe that it was created by some folks like me with a lot of time on their hands on a cold winter day after to many adult beverages.
We have a curling club here in KC but my shift at work will not allow me to check it out or be involved.
We used to holiday regularly in a small town on Loch Goyle in Scotland, where they had a curling team, but we were never there in the season.
The burning barrel thing seems like something university students would have done from the 70s to the 2000s, before all those kind of traditions got shut down for “safety reasons”.
Played my last game in the campus competitive league today. Only went 4 ends due to time restraints.
This was the last shot of the game. We were blue with shot rock, Red had second rock, and the score was tied 3-3
My thoughts exactly!
Hmm. Well, there are various extreme sports that come to mind, though traditionally all end in an encounter with law enforcement, from base jumping off the new World Trade Center, to climbing the New York Times building, to subway surfing, to jumping from one subway platform to another. Philppe Petit, who walked a steel cable between the two towers of the old World Trade Center, said that the most dangerous part of the day was when the cops handcuffed him afterwards and threw him down a flight of stairs.
The police presence at the Coney Island pier that is meant to prevent jumping was compared to Checkpoint Charlie by a local newspaper. One summer evening I was out there and saw five cops and a lieutenant with some barricades. Their mission, other than enforcing capitalist rule, was solely to prevent jumping. The moment they left, a teenager came charging out of nowhere and knocked down one of their barricades, then about 40 others immediately came running out behind him, and they all started jumping into the ocean. All of them go in feet-first, though, so with one nice swan dive, you become an instant celebrity. Later the pier was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy, and then rebuilt with handrails that are much harder to climb.
So, I went to a Rush game yesterday with some friends from Germany. A couple of them were really quite naive about what the game was going to be like and it occurred to me that professional box lacrosse might be more obscure than professional curling.
Some highlights from yesterday’s game:
If you squint it kind of looks like hockey played on a green rink 
Funny how they switch over so seamlessly to being boxing announcers when the fight breaks out!
Lacrosse is an indigenous sport, isn’t it? In the NYC area, it has become mostly an upper crust prep school phenomenon, but my impression is that in the Upper Midwest and Canada it has quite a different base and is a lot more popular.
Yah, Lacrosse is an Iroquois game. As far as I know it’s the only sport where a north american first nations is recognized as separate from Canada or the US for the purpose of international competition.
Some people might be surprised to hear that field lacrosse is and always has been Canada’s national sport. Hockey was added as a 2nd “winter” national sport in the 90s.
Lacrosse isn’t played much at the lower level in Saskatchewan. We are really heavily biased towards Canadian Football, Curling, and Hockey, with a healthy spattering of Broomball, Soccer and Golf.
With a championship team (The Rush) in the province I have a feeling that box lacrosse will be getting much more popular as an amateur sport in the next few years.
My thing is speed skating, which I both do and watch. I don’t suppose anyone else here does, there are like 20 people in all of California that I know of, somewhere around 0.0000005% 
Ice, indoor inline, outdoor inline? I only skate outside on wheels, but I’d love to try a real ice oval if there was one anywhere near and there isn’t. And no one has ever mistaken me for someone speedy but I try to skate at least once a week. I’ve done as much as 50 miles on the road a couple of times. We’ve got a couple of local hero Olympian skaters too. Joey Cheek is from here and Heather Richardson Bergsma is from High Point, which is within unicycling range.
I did a speedskating clinic once from a guy named Eddy Matzger, who lives in Virginia these days but at the time was from out your way. Dunno if you’d know him but he’s a really good teacher and an incredible skater.
Well, self-determination on the playing field (or in the playing box??) is better than no self-determination at all, I guess! The people I know who live on an Indian reservation are always being harassed by the court system, the cops, Child Protective Services and all sorts of other nastiness. Having your children and grandchildren taken away by the state has become a Native American tradition, and I have heard the same goes for Australian aboriginal people.
Since you asked us about local sports earlier, I also thought of this video, which is from a nearby park. There is not much that is inherently local or even regional about extreme calisthenics, and some of its practitioners belong to associations with branches all over the world, but this sport is always shaped by local environment and climate.
Bodyweight exercise is similar to unicycling in that the amount of stuff you can learn is almost infinite. First there’s the headstand, then the forearmstand, the handstand, and so on. Currently, I am learning to walk on my hands, one or two additional steps at a time. Anyone who remembers learning new unicycling skills would find the process familiar!
Short track or long track? Do you use clappers or fixed blade? A lot of hockey players here in the Juniors also speed-skate. My all time favorite Olympic moment was probably the short track final in 2002. The Canadian TV studio was right next door to the Australian one and you could hear them through the wall on the TV. The excitement was contagious even if our skater fell with the others.
You probably aren’t as alone as you think, I chose my screen name as I felt like the only unicyclist in Saskatchewan.
Canada has been making some ground on reconciliation, but every once in a while someone like a senator says something really stupid, then follows up with more stupid comments. We have a long way to go.
That calisthenics thing is pretty cool. I like how they are all about strength, skill and control without being all showboaty about it or adding unnecessary danger.
Cool beans guys, anyone else have fringe sports or locally popular sports they want to share?
whoops
lol I totally forgot that I posted here, so I forgot to check back. I do short track, which means fixed blades. I’m not really great or anything, I haven’t been doing it for a very long time. And saskatchewanian, I was about to turn 2 during the 2002 olympics, so… OK, just got back from youtube, WOW that was a weird race.