Marcus Hayes: All about curling

"It's all in your hips. So, you're driving your force down, this way."

WHO KNEW curling could be so racy, right?

This R-rated explanation comes, innocently, from Eric Ruth. He's teaching me how to curl - actually, at this minute, how to push off from the starter's blocks, slide down the ice on one foot and approach the foul line . . . without wiping out.

He is failing.

This truth might be self-evident, but ice is really slippery.

I've known ice all my life, raised on a farm near the Canadian border. I know black ice, porch ice, pond ice, rink ice. But curling ice is different; it lulls you, pebbled and whitish, into thinking it's not, in fact, all that slippery.

It is. Especially when you're wearing a piece of plastic on your left foot.

With quadrennial explosiveness, curling soon will assault American television viewers, a bridge between the flying tomatoes on snowboards, the spinning pixies on skates and lovely Lindsey Vonn.

Curling will lead newbies like my instructors, Exton residents Ken Blankenstein, 31, (I call him Kenny B) and Ruth, 34, to places like this, the Philadelphia Curling Club. Here, they will spend an evening or two for 6 months in loud, windowless ice lanes with likeminded fringe-sporters.

Kenny B and Ruth admit that the unexpectedly pretty women on the Canadian and American Olympic curling teams, featured at the 2006 Games in Turin, turned them on to curling. They joined the club with 62 other locals that year; Ken and Eric shared the rookie of the year trophy.

They, like most American viewers, had been ignorant of the Canadian passion born 500 years ago on Scotland's lochs. We're here to lessen that general ignorance. And what better way to explain curling than to learn to curl?

It cost me two bloody knuckles, two sore thighs, an aching calf and documented oafishness (see the video at go.philly.com/curling101).

At that price, we are equipped to detail how curlers get their rocks off.

Kenny B and Ruth meet me and the photographers, still and video, on a recent evening promptly at 5:30, in the club's long, low-slung building just off Route 30 in Paoli. It has two sheets of curling ice, decorated with panache by the club's logo at one end of the ice lanes . . . and Labatt's beer along the sidewalls, icy cold.

I'm dressed in fleece pants and jacket on top of new, silky long underwear. Perfect curling gear, as it turns out. If I ever get to curling.

It takes me about 30 minutes to get on the ice.

I had to sign a waiver. Two waivers, as a matter of fact.

"So you don't sue us," Eric explains.

And, then, I had to don my slipper.

You can buy special curling shoes or you can wear the slippery slipper. It's called a slider, actually. Guess why.

A devilishly slick, sole-shaped plastic piece connects to a 1-inch elastic cloth and wraps around the sole of your left shoe; you slide on your left foot if you throw righthanded.

It takes me four tries to get the slider on. I feel like my 3-year-old.

Finally, slider on, I stand up on the carpet . . . and slip down. Almost all the way down.

"Here you go," Kenny B says, smiling, handing me a prophylactic bootie to cover the slick slider on my left foot. Any rubber-soled shoe will suffice for the "gripper" foot.

And now, carefully, to the ice.

Petrified of falling, my baby steps take me through the kitschy clubhouse. It was decorated, once, in 1966, when the club, formed in 1957, was built here.

I eventually make it down the six steps and into the ice lanes, which are clearly visible to everyone in the clubhouse thanks to the glass at the lanes' west end. Club members can watch their peers perform and wager on the contests. Closed-circuit televisions with cameras placed over the targets on both ends allow the spectators to see who's scoring and who's winning.

Here's how you win:

On a 146-foot ice sheet, sliding on one foot and kneeling on the other, each person on a four-person team "throws," or slides, 42-pound granite stones at a 12-foot bull's-eye called the "house." The thrower must release the stone before crossing near the "hog line," or foul line; it must cross the far hog line to remain in play.

As you release the stone, you twist its handle a bit, which, for reasons physicists cannot exactly explain, causes the stone to "curl," the way a bowling ball hooks. Stones need to "curl" because the strategy of the game, with "guards" and "come-arounds" and the like (self-explanatory) requires precise placement.

It's the world's biggest, coldest game of shuffleboard, bowling or bocce for the snowbound . . . except in shuffleboard, bocce and bowling, you can't alter the surface while the game is played.

The target line usually is determined by the team's captain, or "skip," who uses his broom to "call the shot down in the house"; that is, lining up the shot in the scoring area at the ice's other end.

Two teammates act as "sweepers," equipped with synthetic bristle or sponge-type brooms. They furiously massage the ice in front of the stone, either to straighten its path, coax more speed and distance from it, or both.

Sweeping is exhausting.

Each player - the lead, the second, the third and the skip - throws two stones per "end" or turn, alternating with the other team's corresponding player. Regular matches have eight ends. Olympic play will have 10.

Only one team may score per "end." The closest stone to the center of the bull's-eye, or "tee," gets one point, as does every other stone of that color closer to the middle than the opposition's closest stone.

Simple.

But hard.

"Don't touch your stones."

Again, from Ruth. Again, not what you think.

If a sweeper touches the sliding stones en route to the tee, it is removed. However, in any context, the aforementioned advice seems to apply.

With the brooms - sponges, in this case - two members of a curling squad shuffled alongside the sliding stone, smoothing the pebbled surface in front of the stone.

About halfway down, my arms ache, my breath is labored. I'm going at it about half as hard and fast as Ken Seiverd, 43, my sweeping partner from King of Prussia.

Out of breath, I observe, "This is hard."

"Yeah," Seiverd says. "In a match, you can walk maybe 2 1/2 miles. Burn 300 calories."

Or about two Labatt's.

If sweeping is curling's aerobics, throwing is yoga.

Gingerly, you remove the rubber from your slider. Gingerly, you place your right foot - the "gripper" - in a starter's block, called a "hack."

Slowly, you bend over and, with your right hand, grab the handle on top of the stone, rotating the stone to the 2 o'clock position. With your left hand, you stabilize yourself - usually with a broom, but I use a stabilizer specially designed for novices. Slowly, you rear back, hips high, head up, left foot and leg shooting back behind you.

Smoothly, you flow into the throw, gaining momentum as the left foot slides past the hack, and, with your right foot, you push off the hack, hard and steady.

Awkwardly, you feel the stabilizer skidding left. Painfully, you feel your knuckles scraping the ice. Nervously, you feel the stone drifting off to the right, taking your hand and arm with it. Panicked, you see the surface rising to meet your silly face.

Finally, inevitably, you sprawl, arms out, legs spread, air rushing out of your gut: Oooff.

To reiterate: Ice is slippery. And, it turns out, hard.

"Nice first try," Ken says, sweetly. "Keep your left foot under your chest."

Facedown, cameras still rolling and flashing, I want to tell him where I should put my left foot.

It gets better.

Two more attempts, and, finally . . . I manage to stay upright! I release the stone!

It goes . . . halfway!

"It's heavy, you know," Eric explains. Right.

A couple more tries, and my stones are getting over the far hog line.

A couple more, and my stones are actually "curling," drawing, right to left, settling in somewhere in the tee.

And that's it, for me.

My right calf is cramping. My thighs burn. My knuckles bleed. My back hurts.

The ice on which I have been practicing is scarred; the members, assembling for nightly league play, look on through the glass, frowning.

Enough.

Afterward, we chat about the social benefits of curling, how it gets people out of the house and away from TV for a few evening hours a week, about the upcoming open house on Feb. 27 (www.philadelphiacurlingclub.org). We talk about the sport's finances - $250 for the best shoes, $250 for a new broom, $1,800 for a set of stones, quarried in Scotland and Wales, a shared expense of the club.

When clubs convene at "bonspiels," or tournaments, they do not carry their heaviest equipment.

They play with their host's stones, of course.

It's a very social game. *

Send e-mail to hayesm@phillynews.com