Rice Lake, Wis.

Forty-two years ago when a friend asked him to play, John Marcon, a founding member of Wisconsin’s Rice Lake Curling Club responded: “I don’t know how to curl. I don’t even know how to skate.”

Marcon, a former teacher, conservation warden, and past mayor of Rice Lake (pop. 8,696), filled in for one game, then a second, his team winning both times. The next morning he had “a heck of a time getting up out of bed,” but he’s been playing the 500-year-old ice sport ever since.

The Rice Lake Curling Club began in the winter of 1967-68 with about 20 couples and two sheets of ice in an old cow barn on the Barron County Fairgrounds. “You had to be careful where you stepped if you went out on the sheet of ice,” recalls the octogenarian.

“It wasn’t always pure white,” chimes in Anne Destache, another founding member.

Ten years later, in 1976-77, the club took on a mortgage, lengthening the 4-H building to make the ice sheets the correct length, and hosted its first invitational mixed tournament or bonspiel.

When the 4-H building burned down Aug. 1, 1988, members knew they had to act quickly to have a place to curl that winter. Construction workers, carpenters, and electricians among the club’s members donated much of the labor, while others spent hours installing 27,000 feet of cooling lines to maintain the ice.

Through a dedicated, team effort, one of Wisconsin’s largest, most modern curling facilities was financed, constructed, and ready for the 1988-89 season in just three months.

Wisconsin is considered the “heart of curling country” with 4,000 of the nation’s estimated 15,000 curlers, and 29 of its 130 curling clubs, according to Rick Patzke, communication director of the United States Curling Association in Stevens Point, Wis.

“Curling’s popularity in the upper Midwest is tied to the region’s heritage and climate, and its fit around the farming season,” Patzke says.

Membership in the Rice Lake Curling Club, the fourth largest club in the state, ranges from 230 to 260. Leagues play six nights a week November through March.

Curling, first played on frozen ponds in Scotland as far back as the 1500s, filtered into the United States through Canada where Scottish immigrants introduced it. In this sport, skill is a function of finesse and concentration rather than size and strength.

Participants, wearing one shoe outfitted with a slider or Teflon-like sole for maximum glide, and another with a spike for traction, “throw” a 42-pound granite stone along a sheet of ice toward a goal, using brooms or brushes to sweep ahead of the stone. Sweeping helps remove debris and warms and lubricates the ice, causing the swerving stone to travel further.

“The faster it goes, the less it curls,” or curves, explains Marcon. “By sweeping, the rock can move 20 feet or more.”

The four players on a curling team are involved in every shot, with one shooting, two sweeping, and one calling strategy. The skip or team captain holds a broom as a target for shots by the other players and studies the ice, anticipating the amount of curl the stone will make as it travels down the sheet. Scoring occurs at either end of the 146-foot sheet in a “house,” a 12-foot circular area. The team whose four stones are closest to the goal wins.

“Most skips try to work with their partners and with another couple,” adds Bill Burdick, another founding club member. “They’ll work with the couple for about three years to make them qualified to become skips so that they can invite social friends to the curling sport. This is how we generate more numbers than other clubs.”

Games begin and end with a handshake. “Curlers play to win but never to humble their opponents,” according to “The Spirit of Curling,” the game’s rules of etiquette and safety.

Following the sociability tradition, “We always bring something to the table after the game,” explains Burdick. “John’s favorite to bring is head cheese. We bring pickled venison heart or venison sausage.”

Ann Hattes is a freelance writer in Hartland, Wis.

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