As a person reaches a certain age, they start to think about their 
bucket list. A bucket list is a list of things you want to accomplish before you kick the bucket, and I don’t know about you but becoming an olympic athlete has always been high on my list.
I admire olympic athletes and wondered what it would be like to compete in a sport with the world’s attention focused on you. That’s all I did was wonder.I never attempted to compete in a sport because I am not athletic. As a kid playing baseball, I was always the catcher because I didn’t have to run far and in my husky pants, I made a good backstop. I was too small for basketball and didn’t like any form of pain or discomfort which ruled out everything else. I was in the marching band.
Since I didn’t run fast or have any upper body strength, I did not participate in sports. But I still wanted to be in the Olympics. I had just about given up on my dream when I was introduced to the olympic sport of curling.
Curling is a sport in the Winter Olympics that requires you to do two things, 1) slide a stone down the ice, and 2) operate a broom. I was pretty sure I could do both of those things so I signed up for lessons with my local curling club.
A curling club, I soon found out, was a bunch of guys who gave up video games for the night to slide around on the ice. But, one of the main attractions of the curling club is beer. Everybody brings beer to convince themselves that sliding a stone on ice is a good way to spend a Friday night. There were a few females in the club. They brought beer too. And many of the curlers brought their own brooms.
The broom is an essential part of curling because it is used to keep the ice clean. The cleaner the ice, the better the glide. The guys who brought their own brooms, carried them in cases like pool cues. Some brooms had names.
The other essential part of curling is the 44 pound stone that is pushed toward the target. To push the stone, you have to get down in the starting blocks or “hack” with your pushing foot in the hack and your gliding food resting on a teflon pad that makes it virtually frictionless. You push out of the hack on one knee and release the stone towards the target, which is 114 feet away, give or take a Budweiser.
I got down in the position and attempted to curl a couple of times before my knees, worn from years of marching band, told me not to do that any more. I was afraid that my curling career was over before it started when the teacher brought me a delivery stick. A delivery stick is used to push the stone down the ice, while you remain upright. It was made especially for people like me and I was back in the game.
Now I was able to walk up to the tee line with my delivery stick on my stone (no giggling) and glide my stone toward the target, or “house”, the goal being the little dot in the center known as the button. What I now had, was shuffleboard on ice and my years of working on cruise ships finally paid off. I kicked ass at shuffleboard.
There are a lot of other details involved with the sport, such as the post match broom stacking and beer drinking, and the bonspiel which is like spring break on ice, but all in all, I think I have found an olympic sport that I can compete in…on an amateur level…with a bunch of guys drinking beer. However, if my bucket list wish does come true, look for me at the Winter Olympics in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea. I’ll be the guy with the stick.
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