Curling

Not being from Scotland, Canada, or apparently Bemidji, Minnesota, I wasn't introduced to the sport of curling until I was in junior high. For reasons that are still unclear to me, my dad came home from work one day with a video all about curling. He then forced my brother and me to watch the video about this exotic and seemingly rudimentary sport, where all the people who played it wore jean shorts and said "eh" at the end of every sentence. It was then that my love affair with curling began.

Granted, it's not as dangerously sexy as the luge or the skeleton. It doesn't have the star power of speed skating. It doesn't have the WTF factor of the biathlon. It doesn't have flair and fabulous costumes like men's figure skating. But I couldn't (and still can't) resist the allure of someone called a "skip" sliding a 40+-pound stone down a sheet of ice, where several people use brooms to manipulate the stone's path until it reaches its final destination.

I only got a taste of it in '92 at Albertville, since it was only a demonstration sport, but not a full sport. Curling was noticeably absent from the '94 games in Lillehammer. Finally in '98 at Nagano, the IOC wised up and put curling back on the slate as an official olympic sport.

My white hot love for curling came to a rolling boil during the '02 games in Salt Lake City. Along with my roommates at the time, Ryan "Pissed Off" Christoff and Tradd "The New Albanian" Fromme, we vowed to one day bring home curling gold for the US of A, probably in 2010 in Vancouver. After that, of course, we would parlay our fame into a somewhat successful rap music career under the name Stone Throwaz. Our first album, "Broomz and Stonez," is set to be released by Interscope Records sometime in July 2010.

It looks as though curling won't even need Stone Throwaz in order to get the attention and respect it deserves. This year in Turino, curling is finally primed to take center stage. The US Men's team is still feeling the bitter sting of what could have been. You see, in 2002 at Salt Lake, the men lost heartbreaking and demoralizing round-robin matches to Germany, Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, and eventual Gold Medalist Norway by a combined 7 points, despite the aggressive play and near-demonic stare of US skip Tim Somerville (shown to the right). This year's team is a coalition of northern Minnesota good ol' boys, led by 37-year-old skip Pete Fenson, who has been described by many as the Don of US Curling, an obvious reference to the fact that he owns two pizzerias.

The women's team, led by the surprisingly attractive and always volatile Johnson sisters, Cassie and Jamie, look to build off of their silver medal finish at the 2005 World Championships in Paisley, Scotland. After being embarrassed in the Bronze Medal match by Canada in '02, the women should be poised for a medal this year. If that happens, I predict that the Johnsons will become the darlings of the 20th Winter Olympiad.

For the men, their road to glory begins on Monday 2/13 at 9am TT (Torino time, which is apparently 3am EST), as they battle the wily yet dimwitted Norwegian team (known colloquially in curling circles as "the jocks with rocks"). The women will first go up against Norway's women's team, a collaboration of erudite Osloans and cunning Laplanders, the same day at 2pm TT (8am EST).