• Failed Accountant   • Toast Master   • Admiral in the Alabama Navy

Welcome to The Official Site of the Scocce League of North America!

Newsflash - Scocce Team 2006 World Champions

Newsflash - Canadian beaten on ice with his own broom!

"Think winter shuffleboard; think bowling on ice; think bocce in the frozen food section and you’ve got curling- the strangest sport to make the Olympics since synchronized swimming!"

Only a nation confident in their manhood to wear plaid skirts and wooly knee socks could slide great chunks of granite along thin ice armed with nothing but (a hipflask of whisky and) an old broom to keep them standing!

The same country that calls golf and game and bagpipes music has brought us into the Olympics with Scotch on ice! It’s brilliant!"

In an attempt to explain the wonderful sport of curling to my mostly Italian neighbourhood I told them to think of Scottish boccee, and since we were consuming whisky at the time - 'Scocce' was born! 

At first the Italians did not like a sport that sounded like what their wives did at the hairdressers, wait till I told them they had to hold a broom and sweep the ice for me!  

The ice is actually called a 'sheet' because that is the sound you make when you slip up on it (remember that you are wearing one bowling shoe!) SHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTT!

However, a few whiskies later and I had them in rip-a-way kilts and see-you-Jimmy red hair hats and we have a waiting list to join the North America Scocce league

!

We have a two sheet rink and meet on a annual basis to slip around like over-weight middle-aged men with lower-back problems! 

Now men in skirts sliding around on the ice may sound ridiculous to you, but just get out there on the ice and you will be hooked as well! Its addictive! 

You have to hear Robin Williams on how the Scots invented golf to appreciate how they could come up with curling!‘Och no 18 times! Yer gonna have to slide around the ice wearing one bowling shoe! Noo, we’ll no call it the ice – we’ll call it the sheet, cos that’s what you’re gonna scream out when you slip up on it with your hands in yer pockets!! Sheeeet!! Ha! Ha!

Stones? Fffuh! No! We’ll do it with huge rocks that are so big you canny even lift them and have to get squat right down so your pants rip! In fact we’ll get everyone wearing skirts!

There is so much finesse to the sport that starts with a yoga stretch as you rock back and forward like a bobsleigh captain. Amazingly, you feel in perfect equilibrium. One hand grips the handle of a smooth chunk of Scottish granite in the shape of a pot bellied kettle (without the spout)! In the other hand, you find yourself balanced on a broom stick like Harry Potter!

The result is pure magic! Your feet are set in a sprinters chocks, so as soon as you launch yourself with a easy kickback you glide forward like a space probe in the tundra.

Now the stone takes over for you feel like you are being pulled along by this great pregnant hockey puck as it trundles off down the runway. You keep gliding behind it, hand outstretched, as if frozen in that final aim, head bowed in reverence to the amazing grace of granite!

Now here is the part that blows bocce straight into the dust – the Scots add the ultimate curve ball – the stone spins! As you let go of the handle you give it slow turn – a farewell kiss from fingertips, and the rock rotates like a satellite moving smoothly through space in a slow orbit.

You have now officially ‘delivered your stone!’ terminology normally accompanied with screams from a hospital bathroom!

TERMINOLOGY
You may have thrown a grounder, or put a 'double take-out', 'through a port' with 'front-house weight' -  what ever the skipper decided. He is the one who decides the strategy and is the only one allowed to stare at the stones, stroking his stubble like a late night chess player!

He does have control of the situation however, for he actually controls the speed of the stone’s arrival. Yes, you guessed it, the detail that most people remember. Just mention curling and people will laugh – ‘that’s when the guys do that broom thing!’

Yes, as if all this wasn’t enough to tantalized your senses, out comes the comedy - boys with the brooms! The skipper calls it, and the crazed crew mop madly like muscled sailors on the pooped deck! They lean into the brush scrubbing like manic pool attendants with a compulsive disorder, swabbing down the deck hockey with epileptic speed!
SOUND
However for me the best is yet to come! I could curl with my eyes shut, because for me, the real beauty here is the sound of stone on ice, rock on water a full octave below a cat scratching glass! Its the same sound that turned the head of the lookout on the Titanic! 

You have heard the same sound if you ever tried to squeeze your mother’s car out of the garage! A slow painful, graunching noise – the sound of your allowance slipping through your fingers! 

It is that same seductive growl you first heard in a Clint Eastwood movie, where the barman slides a glass of whisky down the length of the mahogany until it comes to rest perfectly in the target of his outstretched fingers with a quiet rumble. (Of course in the movie, Dirty Harry’s other hand has had time to pull the trigger at the bad guy on the balcony and lands uninvited into the card game below!)

Its all there! The yoga, the chess move, the ballet, the low rumble, – and now the thunder! The sound of 84 pounds of granite connecting – a clunking of mountains. Anyone remember seeing Tetris triangles break off like chunks of iceberg will know the look as they knock together. 

OH CANADA!
Canadians have never looked this graceful! A nation that pronounces ballet as if it rhymed with mallet have adopted this as their national sport. Well it was the only one that gives a home advantage to people who can think in cold weather! The perfect way to pass time as you are drinking weak beer and staring into ice holes for frozen fish. (But then many forget that it was those flap-capped Canadians who gave us Pamela Anderson - and we’ve all seen her on ice!)

They only have to share the medals with the British, who haven’t looked this good since the ice-capades of Torville and Dean!

THE HISTORY 
It was the Scots who came up with this wonderfully daft and addicting sport. From the country that gave us Shena Easten, golf, shinty, deep- fried frozen marsbar and the bay city rollers! 

I am sorry but do you ever get the feeling that it was the result of a dare like many things in the culture! Take the national dish for example - Haggis – all the meat we couldn’t sell to the English! You can imagine it started with one bored Scot daring the other to eat it!

Click here for the rest of the article - The History of Curling 

Click here to see our team defeating the World Champion Team