Curling: you know, that sport, with rocks — really heavy rocks — brooms and played on ice. Not any kind of ice, you see. No. It has, above all things, pebbles.

For the first three decades of my life, I subscribed to the ideology that any sport — a legitimate sport, at that — involved skates, not black thingies you put on over your feet.

And then, goodness gracious, they’re not even tied up in knots.

Sticks. Not brooms.

Little pieces of rubber — pucks, which can be flung, here, there and everywhere all over the ice, not a rock that needs that tractor Uncle Pete parks behind the red barn for only the real big jobs.

My dad curled. But I wasn’t a big fan.

That all changed, though, in May of 1992 over a two-hour lunch at the Royal Glenora Club with one Kevin Ray Martin.

The Canadian Cancer Society had a new fundraising event — The Longest........

© Edmonton Sun