Curling, Etcetera: A Whole Bunch of Stuff about the Roaring Game

I'm not sure what it is that draws me to semi-obscure sports... at least sports that are semi-obscure to the average American. I got hooked on curling during the Olympics a few years back, and now I'll sit and watch a match if it happens to be on (which is rarely). I saw the book Curling, Etcetera: A Whole Bunch of Stuff About the Roaring Game by Bob Weeks and thought it might be a way to learn a bit more about the history and game. While the book is most useful to those who are heavily into the sport, it was still an entertaining read. Weeks is a journalist/sportswriter who has covered the game for nearly two decades. During that time, he's collected a huge storehouse of trivia and facts about the game that go beyond who won and who lost, where the game was played, and other such statistical information. Rather than continue to sit on all that knowledge, he wrote Curling, Etcetera to get it some of it out on paper. The results is a fast paced book that sheds plenty of color and light on curling, both the history of the sport and the players who give it life. Curling has its own version of the NFL's "Heidi game", when the network switched to a different program before the end of the match. The CBC never did that again, and in fact put in a new policy that said all curling games would be covered from start to end, regardless of time. When do you retire from curling? Possibly never... the oldest living curler is 93, and there was once a regular competitor who was a spry 102. It used to be that curling had no clocks to regulate play. Matches could take hours (and often did). An experiment to try "speed curling" based on a chess clock was tried in 1983, and again in 1986 during a nationally televised skins game. By 1989, many jurisdictions were using the clock to regulate play, and now it's a regular part of every event. And you know you've made it to the big time when your sport starts to appear in television commercials, sponsored by such companies as Cialis, Labatts, Scotties tissues, and Office Depot... A fair number of the factoids revolve around legendary names in the sport, but they are not names that would be known much outside of curling circles. Therefore, I think that actual curlers would get more from the book than I did. Still, I enjoyed the stories and history, and Curling, Etcetera did nothing to dampen my enjoyment of the game.