HOOK: Curling: the greatest obscure sport since tetherball?

I don’t know why, but I get the feeling I made a couple of enemies with my column from last week (“HOOK: My readers are filthy, disgusting pigs,” Apr. 5, p. 25.) Specifically, I think it was the comment I made about how much I hate sports that really rubbed people the wrong way. I should clarify: I don’t hate all sports. Just the ones you like, you filthy disgusting pig.

And read me loud and clear: I hate everything about sports. Watching them, playing them, reading about people who play them, talking about playing them, talking about people who play them, talking about people who talk about people who play them, etc. Oh, the sports I hate. Soccer: There’s nothing like a game where a 1-0 score can constitute excitement. Or baseball: You know what the problem with baseball is? Not enough games. Teams should play two – no, three – games every day. Four on Saturdays. Football: at least its name is apt. I like the part where every 10 minutes they play for 10 seconds. I also like when there’s a penalty and everyone sits around some more while the referees abuse their TiVos as zealously as my father does during an episode of The West Wing. (“What? What did he say? They’re talking too fast.”)

Playing sports is just as awful. In elementary school, it was the perfect opportunity for the dumb kids to point out how slow and uncoordinated the kid with the Wishbone T-shirt was. It’s not fair: We smart kids never got to gloat about being able to crush the “jocks” with our minds. Why should they be given time twice a week to humiliate us? Do we go to school to learn or to get over a perfectly natural fear of being struck with a spherical rock-like object traveling half the speed of sound? Leave that to my therapists, please.

Then there’s college sports. Remember that former BU sports star who went on to cure tarantism? Yeah, me neither.

But like I said, there are some sports that I think are perfectly wholesome: There’s American Ninja Challenge, American Gladiators and the one that’s like basketball but with trampolines (trampsketball?) Hell, I even enjoy a good round of Bozkashi as much as the next guy. See, I’m normal. In fact, here’s a little known fact about me: I’m actually on a real sports team. Well, technically it’s a club.

I’m not making this up, like I did with my column from two weeks ago (“HOOK: My experience helping the homeless,” March 29). Yes, I actually am a member of the BU Curling Team . . . club. For those of you who aren’t familiar with curling, let me explain exactly what it is: shuffle board on ice. Played by gods.

More specifically: There are two teams with four members each. During each round (or “end”), each member of the team takes a turn sliding (“delivering”) a stone (“a stone”) down the ice, while two of the others sweep the ice to control the speed and direction. At the other side is a large target. Whichever team gets its stone closest to the center wins the end. What I’ve just given you is like the baseball equivalent of saying, “You hit a ball and run the bases and score when you reach home,” or the Beatles equivalent of saying “All you need is love.” Obviously, there’s a great deal more to it than that. You need more than just love. What would you eat?

I was first introduced to curling the same way many young men are introduced to eating mushrooms or stealing cars: through video games — specifically, from Nagano Winter Olympics ’98 for the Nintendo 64. Maybe it was my instinctual curling ability, or maybe it was the fact the game designers didn’t expect anyone would sit through a three-hour, 10-end game, but somehow, I always came out on top. And my mother said I’d never amount anything in life — ha!

Boy was I glad then when I went away to school and found out that BU had a curling club. Playing the game in real life is the next best thing to playing it on the Nintendo. Sweeping the ice is almost as fun as sweeping the kitchen! After playing with the club for six or seven years, we became a finely-tuned machine and were good enough to compete. And so, this Spring Break, BU competed in the College Curling Nationals.

You probably didn’t hear about our Cool Runnings-eqsue rise to curling dominance from your school paper, which was probably too busy covering oh-so-important hockey or some height-based discrimination crap (“HOOK: Awkward men everywhere demand recognition,” Apr. 3, p. 13) to cover our conquest of the mighty Minnesota Beavers. But that’s OK. My people have been oppressed for centuries, so it’s no surprise that this biased paper [does such a good job reporting on everything from the GSU to Rhett the Terrier!] Go [have a nice day] yourselves, FreeP.

Well, if this paper feels curling isn’t worth covering, I won’t try to usurp its authority by telling you how we did. Needless to say, we were pretty, pretty good.

Editor’s Note: Two BU teams competed; Hook’s team suffered a humiliating defeat after being beaten mercilessly – like a red-headed stepchild. For information on joining for next season, email curling@bu.edu.

Justin Hook, a junior in the College of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at jbhook@bu.edu.