Known Unknowns

It may be spring, bit there's still curling on TV. The Players' Championship is showing that curling is the latest sport whose popularity has caused it to overflow its appointed season.

It used to be that the only curling you saw on TV - even here in Canada - were the Canadian and World Championships. But when someone noticed that a curling tourney could be a cheap ratings grabber, they invented a bunch of other events patterned after golf's majors or tennis's grand slams.

What I find interesting about this phenomenon is that although curling is a spectator sport in Canada but nowhere else, many competitors from other countries are good enough and well known enough that they get invited to these Canadian-based tournaments too.

So now people like David Murdoch, Eve Muirhead and Niklas Edin are better known in Canada than in their own countries. That's got to be strange. They probably have to keep explaining to their friends and relatives what this hobby of theirs is. Then they come here to curl on TV. And how do they explain why they keep flying to Canada every few weekends? I remember hearing that a Canadian curler working in Europe had trouble explaining to his boss why it was really important that he have a week off to play in the Brier. Imagine trying to ask your manager to find someone else to fill your shift at the Volvo factory so you can go to some place called "Kamloops" to vigorously sweep ice in front of a thousand people. Okay, it’s Europe, they get five weeks off, never mind.

Other than those awkward moments, it must be a great life: mostly you're just leading the average existence, but a few times a year, you travel off to a strange place where everyone knows who you are and is interested in what you do.

I know there are some cases where it's gone the other way, and Canadians have become more famous elsewhere. For instance, Canadian snooker players have made it big in Britain. So if you're looking for a sport to become world-class at, why not look elsewhere in the world? Consider handball, or Finland's variation on baseball, or that Afghani sport they play with a headless goat. Or you could try Aussie rules football. That's what I did.