It's a strange thing to have a sports fandom that operates on something like the same life cycle as a cicada, but I do, and curling is that sport. Even by the standards of Olympic sports that I barely know how to watch, curling is both abstracted and wonderful to me—the opacity of it, the ASMR-adjacent audio experience, the strange and specific mastery required. I wanted to talk about curling before the Olympics go back into hibernation, and happily we were able to get John Cullen—author of the new book Curling Rocks!, host of the award-winning CBC curling podcast Broomgate, among other notable podcasts, and a former elite curler himself—on the pod to talk to us about it.
First we started with some other things, and anyone who wishes to skip past a long discussion of how I came to purchase Barstool-branded coffee at a deep discount, and why I now have it sitting in my home, should start the pod around the 15-minute mark. But those 15 minutes are densely packed, and include a long-awaited peek behind the curtain of my grocery shopping process, a deep reading of the (extensive) text on the package of Dan Katz's signature coffee product, the phrase "positive vibes" as a marker of the exact opposite of positive vibes, and John's experience recording too-spicy-for-TV jokes for a restaurant commercial.
Then it was time to talk curling. We started with the basics, then discussed the technological arms race in the sport, which was the subject of Broomgate and is invisible in every moment of every match: the stones (all mined from one quarry on one island in Scotland!), the brooms, the shoes, and other deceptively ordinary-looking aspects of the sport. John unpacked the Boopgate scandal between Sweden and Canada, and situated it within the broader history of disputes in curling and the sport's load-bearing collegiality. He explained the specific physicality of curling and how reps-based sports defy conventional understandings of athleticism and the familiar beats of sports on television. Jared Allen's long and thwarted attempt to make the Olympics as a curler is mentioned, as are our favorite sadistic Winter Olympic events.
This was followed by nu-metal chat, which looks strange here on the page but makes sense given John's expertise in what he described as "the worst genre of music ever to get popular." He explained why it is impossible to convince someone that nu-metal is "good," and why he loves it. We entered the mind palace of nu-metal guys and considered what it means when Fred Durst is the consensus smartest guy in your scene. Somewhere during this part of the podcast, I believe while I was talking about the Tony Clark affair at the MLBPA, Mitch Marner scored an overtime game-winner to lift Canada's hockey team past Czechia, and John started waving his arms around and celebrating. But because he is one of the great podcasters working, he did so silently. It only seems like a stretch to hang the term "consummate professional" on someone who explained the terms "McDay" and "punishment meal" in answering a Funbag question, but John inarguably is that. The episode benefitted immensely from his expertise, patience, and willingness to do a comically overstated Canadian accent when necessary.
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