Curling Rocks!: Chronicles of The Roaring Game, by John Cullen
Long considered fusty, curling is enjoying a comeback. This book has the game's how-to’s and history – and is sheer fun, besides.
My Toronto high school friend, Susan Holladay, took figure skating lessons. Of course she did. It was the girl thing to do. However, Susan wasn’t a starry-eyed would-be Barbara Ann Scott or Peggy Fleming. While doing bunny hops, she cast curious, wistful glances toward the opposite end of the Granite Club’s rink—at the curlers.
Fast-forward 30 years. When a friend offered to get Susan into curling, she, well, hopped at the chance. Now she and husband Scott are, her words, “mad curlers.” As Sue explains, “The wonderful thing about curling is the community! Every shot made requires every player. The skip places the broom and calls the weight. The thrower throws the rock to the target, and the sweepers communicate with the skip and guide the rock down the ice. Curling is the ultimate team sport.”
As a non-curler, I sort of understood. Skips, though? Sweepers? And, what, a rock?
That’s where John Cullen’s good-humoured, easy-to-understand, and frequently funny Curling Rocks!: Chronicles of The Roaring Game swept to my rescue. The Canadian comedian, podcaster, and semi-pro curler explains the how-tos of curling, along with its history, and anecdotes from his own experiences.
The sport is simple, he says, “like shuffleboard, but with lots of screaming. It’s like bocce, if people ran out with small lawnmowers to treat the grass as the ball was in motion. It’s like hockey, except instead of a puck there’s a rock, and instead of a stick there’s a broom, and instead of a skate there’s a shoe with Teflon or stainless steel attached to the bottom of it.”
Like my friend Sue, Cullen started off in a more conventional ice sport. Being a boy, he—another of course—went into hockey. Possibly from being a gifted kid, and therefore a bit geeky, he didn’t quite fit in. The blast of the buzzer unsettled him. In turn, his geekiness unsettled other players. “If you’re a gifted kid on a hockey team, try not to say ‘thus,’” Cullen advises.
The school he attended offered electives, e.g., making stuffed animals, learning circus stunts, skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. One day, a teacher took a group of kids curling.
At hockey rinks, when not in practice or a game, Cullen always enjoyed sliding on ice patches. Slamming into other kids was part of the fun. Alas, sliding was frowned upon. You were supposed to stay off the ice until the custodian sanded it.
But curling! You “are not disallowed but, in fact, encouraged to slide on the ice… and there’s no adult around who is going to sand it down. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Cullen recalls.
Again, like my friend, he cites the feeling of belonging. “Maybe it was something as simple as noticing that everyone who curled looked like me. …there they were: poorly clothed, with jackets and pants sagging off, glasses fogging up with the intensity of the games, talking to each other.”
People still snicker about curling being an old people’s game, ineptly played between gossip and glugs of stale beer. The game itself is old, to be sure. Cullen notes that Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicted it in his 1565 paintings “Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap” and “The Hunters in the Snow.”
However, curlers may have the last laugh. The sport is decidedly not, Cullen says, “your grandfather’s curling anymore.” More than 1.5 million people play, and it has hundreds of millions of fans, “as evidenced by the fact that in every Winter Olympics it ranks among the top sports searched for and talked about on various social media platforms.”
As Cullen points out, “For a game whose goal is ultimately as simple as ‘push a stone down a sheet of ice toward a stationary target,’ there’s a lot going on.”
About the Author
An award-winning semi-professional curler, Calgary-based John Cullen has worked as a comedian, writer, and teacher, and curling analyst. His podcast Broomgate: A Curling Scandal earned acclaim from Vulture, Forbes, and The Economist, among many others. He’s also a returning guest on CBC Radio’s The Debaters.
About the Reviewer
Melanie Jackson is a freelance Vancouver writer/editor. She’s also the award-winning author of middle-grade/YA suspensers, including Orca Books’ Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, and several chillers set in amusement parks. Visit Melanie’s page at The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Book Details
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Publication date: October 14, 2025
Language: English
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1771624558