Shout Out to Curlers

I'm going to indulge myself (like I've never done that before!) and give a shout out to my curling teammates from the Thursday night league at the Detroit Curling Club. They may not, and indeed probably will not, see this blog. But I already told them personally how happy I was with their play, so they know.

We began last night's game playing unusually sloppy. We were down 4-0 after an awful first end (ends are more or less equivalent to baseball innings) in which yours truly hurt the team by overthrowing a takeout (trying to remove an opponent's stone from play) and missing completely, given them an easy four. We scored once in the second when my sweepers kept my last rock going to barely win a point, then forced the other team to take a point (I'll just stop explaining now because it'll get too complicated, but that was a good thing under the circumstances) in the third end and were forced ourselves to one in the fourth. So we're down 5-2 halfway through the game.

Then the boys turned it on. We stole the last four ends to win. 

Okay, one more explanation: last rock of an end is called hammer, because if you play it right you use it to score multiple points. The team with last rock is presumed to have the advantage. You 'steal' an end when you score without hammer. Hammer is sorta akin to batting last, if I may use another baseball comparison. So to steal four straight ends is a significant accomplishment.

I'll admit I wasn't thrilled with our chances after that 4 set us back early, but things snowballed for us. When Jeff, our Vice (throwing third rocks on the team; okay, so maybe I'll squeeze in another aside) drew the top of the button in the sixth end which could not be outdrawn and led us to two for a tie at that point, I knew we'd turned the corner. We stole two in the 7th and 1 in the 8th to win.

Great game, guys. It's why we play, eh?