VANCOUVER — The sports arena filled with the roar of “O Canada,” the national anthem reverberating against the walls and roof like 5,600 bass drums.
This wouldn’t be worth noting in these Olympic Games if the arena was Canada Hockey Place. However, it happened during another sport, one that is just as Canadian, in outreach if not in intensity.
Curling.
Even Canada’s Marc Kennedy, ready to throw the stone, had to put down his broom and laugh.
“I thought the right thing to do was to pause and let everyone finish,” Kennedy said. “It was nice to hear. That kind of excitement in a curling arena is pretty special.”
“O Canada” and curling go together like hack and house. Those are curling terms as familiar to Canucks as ball and strike. Canada is simply curling crazy. It’s not just over the Canadian men’s and women’s Olympic teams, which have beaten all but one opponent in front of delirious sellout crowds on their way to Thursday’s semifinals.
It’s this: From a craggy, 50-year-old curling club in Vancouver to a single-sheet rink in the Northwest Territories, curling clearly is part of a Canadian’s DNA.
“It’s for everybody,” said Carolyn Darbyshire of the Canadian women’s team. “We lived behind a curling rink in Portage (Manitoba, pop. 13,000) and I grew up there. We were there from Monday to Sunday pretty much, one or two days off.”
She’s far from the only one. There are 1.5 million registered curlers in the world. One million live in Canada. There are 1,400 curling clubs in Canada, 21 in Winnipeg (pop. 500,000) alone. Metro Denver (pop. 2.8 million) has one: the Denver Curling Club in Littleton.
That maple leaf on the flag could easily be replaced with two brooms and a round, 44-pound stone.
“The reason it’s a social sport is the athletes are normal people,” said Ben Hebert of the Canadian men’s team. “None of us are millionaires. None of us get rich in this sport. We’re all average people with average homes.”
There is nothing average about Hebert and his four teammates. They are the best out of 1 million people. You don’t have to know curling to appreciate Canadian skip Kevin Martin. The bald, affable 43-year-old from Edmonton, Alberta, looks more like a Maytag repairman than arguably the best curling has ever known.
In Monday’s 7-2 dispatch of the last-place U.S. team, Martin once hit the button (the bull’s-eye in the “house” or circle) without even help from his sweepers. The sellout crowd at 9 a.m. roared.
It was a warm-up throw.
On the other end of curling’s Canadian arctic polar axis is the Marpole Curling Club.
Located on a dimly lit side street near Vancouver’s airport, the faded yellow building houses six ice sheets. They’re all observable through the huge windows in the vast second-floor bar which, on the rec level, is as necessary as a broom.
“I love the social aspect of it,” said Stew Enge, a computer operator who has curled for 30 years. “I don’t care whether I win or lose. After the game, I’m with my opponents, we shoot the (breeze) and have a good time.
“I close the bar down every time I play.”
On this Sunday night, 12 four-man teams cover all six sheets in the Sunday Mixed League. Leagues play six nights a week here and you could take the census from the cross section of Vancouver society.
There’s Harry the machinist and Ward the librarian. There’s Helen the saleswoman and Ken the retired businessman. They’re all wearing a variety of stocking caps and hooded sweat shirts to ward off the 43-degree temperature.
Scott Wells, a portly fellow in a Roberto Luongo Canadian hockey jersey, is sweating profusely from sweeping for 30 minutes.
They will all drop their brooms Thursday. Canada’s men are the biggest favorites for gold on the entire Olympic team. Canada’s hockey team has more of a grip on its nation’s heart, but curling has a grip on its heartland.
“I’ve been to a lot of playoff games in hockey and we’ve played before 18,000 in curling before,” Martin said. “But this is loud!“
