Curling, Etcetera_ A Whole Bunch of Stuff About the Roaring Game - Bob Weeks [37]
Advertiser: Scotties tissues
A woman is shopping and places a box of Scotties tissues in her cart. As she walks forward with her cart, two women appear, one with a corn broom, the other with a push broom. They sweep the cart toward the cash register, stopping once, then restarting and concluding when the cart reaches its destination. They look at each other and nod in satisfaction. A voiceover states: “Scotties, proud sponsor of women’s curling for over 25 years.”
Advertiser: Office Depot
An advertisement that aired in the United States prior to the 2002 Olympics showed a man in what appears to be a lounge, watching television. A close-up of a rock being swept appears on the screen, and the obviously confused man says: “What is that?” The screen then shows the words “But, if life was like Office Depot…” The same scene is repeated, only this time, U.S. curler Don Barcome responds to the man’s question by placing a curling rock on the table in front of him and saying: “Curling, an ancient Scottish ice sport played with a 42-pound stone.” The scene then cuts to an Office Depot store, where an announcer says: “If you want expert answers whenever you need them, come to Office Depot.” At the end of the commercial, a tag points out that the retailer is a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic team.
ROCK BOTTOM
There are curling rocks in unusual places but perhaps none stranger than the several crates of stones that rest at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. How did they end up there? According to Doug Maxwell in Canada Curls, in the early 1800s there was a challenge issued by a group of Scottish soldiers stationed at Long-Sault to a group of Scottish ex-pats living in Lachute, Quebec. The difficulty was that there were not enough curling rocks to hold such a match and so an order was put in to the homeland to ship 16 to Quebec. Unfortunately, the ship carrying the rocks sank off the Grand Banks, dropping the bits of Ailsa Craig granite to the bottom of the ocean.
DEADLY BUSINESS
Curling has played a small role in two tragic and notable events. The first was on April 30, 1912, 20 days after the sinking of the Titanic. On April 17, the Mackay-Bennett set sail from Halifax with the grim job of recovering bodies from the sinking of the ocean liner. Over the course of the next few days, men on the ship pulled in 306 bodies and after sailing home, delivered them to the Mayflower Curling Club, which served as the morgue. While the ship was at sea, coffins had been piled high at the club awaiting the grim arrival.
The second event was on December 21, 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland. Many parts of the plane fell on the town, and the first medical officer on the scene was Dr. Graeme Adam. Just a few weeks earlier, Adam had won the Scottish men’s curling championship and was soon to leave for the world championships in Milwaukee,Wisconsin. But his practice time was cut short for two reasons. First, he was busy dealing with the accident, and second, as in Halifax, the local curling club was transformed into a morgue to house the bodies of those killed in the crash. The curling ice was understandably not available for curling.
Adam went on to finish with a 5-4 record at the world final.
PURPLE RAGE
Curling has a great deal of tradition, and as one organization found out, curlers don’t want to lose that.
In 1980, when Labatt took over sponsorship of the Brier from Macdonald