Chapter 4 Jamie Dopp Out of the Ordinary Curling in The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon and Men with Brooms

The Devil and Willie MacCrimmon

The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon is a novelization of W. O. Mitchell’s play The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, which premiered, in its full-length form, in 1977. According to Ormond Mitchell and Barbara Mitchell, The Black Bonspiel began as a short story written (but not published) around 1947, then was adapted over the years into “almost every other medium—radio, television, [and] stage” before the full-length play and subsequent novelization (2009, 1). When the novella came out in 1993, Mitchell was a beloved figure in Canada and near the end of a long and successful literary career, with his best known work, the 1947 novel Who Has Seen the Wind, a Canadian classic.

The Black Bonspiel is a comic retelling of the Faust legend, perhaps inspired by Mitchell’s familiarity with Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 story (and later play) “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (Mitchell and Mitchell 2009, 3). Benét’s story, like Mitchell’s, is about someone who makes a deal with the Devil but manages to escape, in contrast to tragic and cautionary versions of the legend, like Washington Irving’s 1824 story “The Devil and Tom Walker” and Christopher Marlowe’s classic sixteenth-century play Doctor Faustus. A related text would be George Abbott and Stanley Donen’s 1958 film Damn Yankees—another sport-themed version of the Faust legend. Damn Yankees centres on a frustrated Washington Senators superfan, Joe Boyd, who says he would give anything to beat the Yankees, which leads the Devil—in the form of a smooth-talking man named Mr. Applegate—to appear with an offer.

Willie MacCrimmon, the eponymous main character of The Black Bonspiel, is a resident of Shelby, Alberta, “a community of five thousand, many of them devout curlers” (3). Willie is the “most dedicated” curler in town. He began playing at the age of ten during his Scottish childhood, coached by his father. Now, after the death of his wife and the closing of his beloved Presbyterian church, curling remains “his only active religion” (6). One day Willie indulges in an extended daydream of curling glory and swears that he would “gi’e anything . . . utterly anything . . . for to skip the winning rink in the Brier!” (44). The Devil, in the guise of a travelling salesman named Mr. Cloutie, duly appears, proclaiming, “That’s a bargain, Willie MacCrimmon” (44). The Devil’s proposal contains a twist on the standard “soul-for-fair-recompense” arrangement: he wants Willie’s soul not just to have it, but so that Willie can curl third for him in Hell.1 It turns out that, as badly as Willie wants to win the Canadian Brier, the Devil wants to win the Celestial Brier (49–51). Rather than dismiss the Devil’s temptation as his Presbyterian faith would counsel, Willie makes a double-or-nothing counter-proposal. He offers to play a one game challenge: Willie’s current rink against the Devil’s. If Willie wins, he gets to not only skip the winning rink in the Brier, but also save his soul. If the Devil wins, Willie’s soul goes to Hell to curl third for the Devil, and Willie doesn’t skip at the Brier (51–52).

Willie’s agreement with Mr. Cloutie sets up a number of jokes in The Black Bonspiel about Hell and the Devil. Many of these jokes are simple wordplays in which the words Hell and the Devil become ironic because of the literal presence of the Devil in the story. A few jokes work by inverting what is typically assumed to be ordinary or extraordinary. For example, when Willie reveals that the Devil recently brought him a pair of curling boots to be repaired, Mr. Pringle, the local United Church minister, exclaims, “A Devil bringing in a pair of curling boots?” and Willie replies: “Aye. It’s a wee bit unusual. Most curlers just use overshoes” (31). The Devil himself is made comic in the novella by his obsession with curling, which seems a trivial concern for someone dedicated to the cosmic struggle between Evil and Good. The Devil is also plagued by ordinary concerns. Hell, it turns out, has a single-resource economy much like Alberta’s, and, like Alberta, Hell has not been able to diversify. As a result, the Devil is worried that “when the brimstone runs out . . . I don’t know what—in Hell—we can do” (48). He also explains the apparently extraordinary fact that there is ice in Hell in the most ordinary of ways: Hell’s curling rink uses “artificial” ice (47).

Various details in The Black Bonspiel stress the ordinariness of curling, of the places in which it is played, and of the players who play it. The novel’s small-town setting—Shelby, Alberta—taps into a long tradition of using small-towns to represent “ordinary” Canadian identity. Like other such locations in Mitchell’s fiction, Shelby is populated with small-town types. The most explicit indicators of ordinariness are the other players on Willie’s rink. Each of them is named Charlie Brown. Each Charlie Brown is distinguished by a nickname based on his blue-collar occupation: “Malleable” (blacksmith), “Cross-cut” (carpenter), and “Pipe-fitting” (plumber). Nobody on this team is an athlete in the conventional sense. Willie is sixty-nine years old; Pipe-fitting and Malleable are both fifty-two and have Ed Werenich–like physiques, being “built for comfort, with comfortable front porches” (134).

There is also something ordinary about Willie’s desire to skip the winning rink in the Brier. To win the Canadian Curling Championship brings only limited fame (despite curling’s popularity in Canada) and very little fortune. Even in 2020, after significant increases in prize money over the years, the winning rink at the Brier only received $105,000 to split four ways (Bamford 2020). For comparison, the 2021 prize for first place in the Masters golf tournament is $2,070,000 split no ways at all (Luciani 2021). Willie’s fantasy includes meeting the Prime Minister and the Governor General, with the Prime Minister inviting him to dinner at the Senate restaurant and the Governor General saying, “Let me pick up the check” (42). That Willie bets his soul to satisfy such humble desires seems so ordinary as to be comical.

The contrast between the ordinariness of curling and the extraordinariness of the Faustian bargain runs through The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon. The comedy inspired by this contrast echoes the high culture / low culture coupling often found in sports comedy. Such couplings play on the assumption that sport is, by definition, a low-culture activity, so any high-culture references in relation to it will be comic. A famous example is Paul Quarrington’s King Leary (1987), which uses a jokey mix of references from Shakespeare’s King Lear and the life of King Clancy to underpin a tragic-comic tale about an early hockey star. In The Black Bonspiel, the Devil’s front end is made up of Guy Fawkes and Judas Iscariot, and his third—the player whom Willie is slated to replace if he loses his bargain—is Macbeth. Macbeth’s speeches in the novel are quotations from Shakespeare with curling references inserted. When Willie’s rink first encounters the Devil’s rink, Cross-cut Brown overhears the Devil’s third muttering to himself a parody of lines from Macbeth:

Compare Shakespeare’s original:

Note how the comedy here combines high and low: the seriousness of Shakespeare creates an ironic contrast with the triviality of curling.

But is curling really trivial compared to Shakespeare? A fascinating thing about jokes based on high-low combinations is that they invite us to think not only of contrasts but of similarities. One of the earliest and most celebrated works of sport literature, Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural, works this way. As Michael Oriard has pointed out, The Natural treats baseball “in a consciously mythic way” (1982, 212). It does this both by incorporating into the life of its protagonist, Roy Hobbs, many events from baseball history that have been elevated to the status of myth, and by associating Hobbs with the heroes of classical literature. Hobbs, for example, has a magical weapon like King Arthur’s sword Excalibur in the form of a hand-carved bat named Wonderboy that he keeps in a bassoon case. The mythic echoes can be understood to satirize America’s obsession with baseball; they seem to make fun of the impulse to elevate such trivial events to the status of myth. Yet the echoes also work in reverse. Who gets to decide what is important enough to be elevated to mythic status?

Myths, as Karen Armstrong has noted, are rooted in the human need for meaning. From early in our history, we have invented stories to connect ourselves to “a larger setting” or “an underlying pattern” in order to reassure ourselves, against a lot of evidence to the contrary, that life has “meaning and value” (2006, 2). Literature is one way we have done this, religion another, and sport yet another. All of these activities have an underlying mythic component, which means that comparisons between them will capture not only differences but similarities. Take another common high-low combination: religion and sport. This combination is often invoked ironically. To say that someone’s favourite sport is their “religion” can seem like a statement of disapproval, as if to have a religious attachment to a sport means the person must be shallow. Yet the seemingly exaggerated responses people have to sports are not fully explained by the competitiveness of players or the tribalism of fans. Sports are also symbolic activities in which humans act out desires that are fundamentally religious in nature. Michael Novak makes a strong argument for this in his 1967 classic The Joy of Sports. “[T]he underlying metaphysics of sports,” he writes, “entails overcoming the fear of death. . . . A game tests considerably more than talent. A game tests, somehow, one’s entire life. It tests one’s standing with fortune and the gods. . . . To win an athletic contest is to feel as though the gods are on one’s side, as though one is Fate’s darling” (47). What better way to test whether or not you are “Fate’s darling” than by engaging in an athletic contest with the Devil?

Though The Black Bonspiel carries the theological implications of Willie’s contest with Old Cloutie lightly, the Faustian environment hints at life-and-death issues beneath the ordinary surface of a curling match. One explanation for why curling is Willie’s “only active religion” is that he is a widower: his wife, Mary, died of breast cancer ten years before (6). The match, then, has a subtle aura of Willie challenging death, perhaps even expressing his defiance of it—Satan, after all, is the one who tempted Adam and Eve to sin, and thus made death part of being human. More immediately, Willie uses the match to cope with his loss of faith in non-curling religious consolations caused by Mary’s death.

Faustian narratives tend to highlight two critical questions for humans. The first has to do with how much a person is willing to—or must—give up to achieve success. The second has to do with how to define success itself. The implications of these questions are well set out in Marlowe’s original Doctor Faustus. At the beginning of the play, Faustus is a gifted but restless man who cannot settle on the kind of career he wants. He considers a series of traditionally esteemed professions—doctor, professor, minister—but rejects them all. The problem, he feels, is that even if he achieved the greatest success at one of these professions, he would still remain “Faustus and a man.” What he truly craves—and why he makes his deal with the Devil—is set out in these lines:

Faustus, then, is attracted to magic—and, ultimately, makes his bargain with Mephistophilis—with the hope of acquiring a god-like power over life and death. If there is a reason to bargain your soul, this might, perhaps, be the one. Sadly for Faustus, the power he acquires, like many magical wishes granted in fairy tales, turns out to be ephemeral: he can trick other humans with his illusions, but ultimately the illusions are no more than that. A key moment in the play is in Scene XIII when Faustus has Mephistophilis raise the spirit of Helen of Troy and orders her to “make me immortal with a kiss” (XIII 114). With the kiss, however, Helen’s lips “suck forth [his] soul”—suggesting that the “spirit” of Helen is in fact a demon in disguise (XIII 115).

There is something especially poignant about Faustian bargains when it comes to sport, since athletes often make enormous sacrifices, and pay significance costs, for possible success. The rewards of sport are also highly variable. Some sports promise mythic-level wealth and fame; others—like curling—offer little. That Willie is willing to bet everything on a sport as non-commercial as curling suggests the imaginative power that sport has. No sport can make a person truly immortal, even if it feels like you are “Fate’s darling” at the moment of victory. Yet athletes and fans are often seduced by the promise that sporting success can bring a mythical—or magical—transformation: from zero to hero with one great victory. The extreme ending of The Black Bonspiel satirizes this magical promise and hints at other ideas for what sporting success might bring. Before I examine the ending in detail, however, let me turn to another text that satirizes the ordinary Canadian sport of curling.

Forty-two Pounds of Exploding Granite

Men with Brooms, the 2002 film by Paul Gross, signals its intention to play with tropes of Canadian identity from before the opening credits. The theme music on the DVD index is “O Canada,” first on an organ, as if at a hockey game, then on a wailing electric guitar, reminiscent of Jimmy Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” As the film itself begins, credits flash against a dark screen with forest sounds in the background—a loon, a moose—until the title appears to the sound of a bagpipe drone. Fade in to a shot of a rushing northern stream, then the bagpiper himself, kilted and astride an outcropping of granite. As shots of the stream and the piper alternate, the piper’s song resolves itself into “Land of the Silverbirch.” After a verse through on the bagpipes, the ersatz-Indigenous chanting of the song begins. Then a manly group of men begin to sing:

As if to complete the montage of Canadian tropes, the scene shifts during the singing of the song to a group of beavers industriously chewing through the trunks of trees. A large beaver completes its work and rises on hind legs, seemingly to call “timber!” Its gnawed tree tilts and ultimately falls down a slope towards a lake, upon which is revealed a white motorboat—the location of the film’s first scene.

This first scene involves an old man, Donald Foley, and his daughter Amy. Amy surfaces from the lake in diving gear and gives the thumbs up to Donald, who begins to haul something up on a winch. A shape appears in the water, at first blurry and mud-streaked, then revealing itself to be a curling rock. To readers of Margaret Atwood, this rock-hauling sequence will bring to mind the climactic scene of Surfacing (1972) in which the protagonist dives into a northern lake to discover the submerged traumas of her life. The curling rock, indeed, turns out to represent submerged trauma: it is part of a set thrown into the lake ten years before by the story’s protagonist, Chris Cutter, when he renounced curling after a series of personal and on-ice failures. The excitement of discovering the lost rocks is too much for Donald. He has a heart attack and dies on the boat in Amy’s arms. Then a voice-over begins, as if Donald is narrating from the afterworld. To a montage that introduces the setting of Long Bay, Northern Ontario, and that introduces the main characters, Donald speaks of his love of curling and family. His voice is eventually revealed to be coming from a video played at the reading of his will. The video contains a last request: that the rink he used to coach, skipped by Chris, reconstitute itself and seek to finally win the Golden Broom curling tournament, using the lost-and-found rocks seeded with his ashes.

After the set-up, Men with Brooms proceeds like a typical sports redemption story. Each member of the Cutter rink has a flawed life in need of fixing. Neil Bucyk, the lead, is a reluctant undertaker trapped in a loveless marriage. Eddie Strombach, the second, is in a very loving marriage, but his low sperm count prevents him and his wife from having children. James Lennox, the third, left Long Bay years ago only to become a drug dealer. He returns with a rent-a-girlfriend named Angela, whose name he keeps forgetting, pursued by a four-hundred-pound giant of a gangster named Stuckmore, to whom he owes money. Cutter himself has multiple issues to deal with. The immediate cause of his renouncing curling was that he failed to call a burned rock during his rink’s last tournament.2 The shame he feels about this, the film implies, drove him away from Long Bay and the game. But this dishonourable act is only one demon he has to exorcise. Related to it, in an unspecified way, is the fact that he abandoned his fiancée, Julie Foley—daughter of Donald and sister of Amy—at the altar. He is also estranged from his father, Gordon Cutter, whose own fanaticism about curling caused him to neglect Chris’s mother when she was dying.

The plot then continues on two tracks, one having to do with the Cutter rink’s preparation for the tournament, the other having to do with their personal lives. The scenes of preparation combine jokes about Canadianness with jokes about curling. Early on, for example, the members of the rink attempt to re-establish their bond by jumping naked from a cliff into a lake. The image of them leaping parodies the idea, epitomized by Molson Canadian’s 2010 “Made from Canada” beer commercial, that Canadians are a hardy people who have turned their wild northern homeland into a playground. The water is so cold, however, that the naked curlers scream in shock and their manly parts retreat into their bodies (23:45). The first warm-up game the newly reconstituted rink plays is against a team of elderly men. On the way to the game, Cutter reminds his teammates to play with “honour and dignity” and not to mention “incontinence.” At the beginning of the game, however, Lennox trash talks the other rink by vowing to “sweep those diapers right off your arses” (27:00). The elderly team, inevitably, trounces the Cutter rink—an instructive illustration of the “democratic” tradition of the game.

Alongside jokes about Canadianness, Men with Brooms plays with the small-town and populist roots of curling. When the Golden Broom tournament begins, an announcer describes the curling rink in Long Bay in religious terms: “In the Mecca of Long Bay, there may be a dozen churches, but make no mistake, this is where everybody comes to worship” (53:30). The people shown are working class in appearance and the arena itself is the size you would expect in a small town.

The Cutter rink loses the first game of the tournament. Afterwards, Chris’s father Gordon—played by Canadian acting icon Leslie Nielson—gathers the rink in an outdoor sauna and lectures them on the history and spirit of the game:

In the town of Stirling, in the country of Scotland, a man took a granite block, cut it, rounded it, and carved a date in it. 1511. The first known curling rock. Since that day curling has been a game of the people. It has forgone trappings of commerce, embraced all comers, and cherished the truth that all who play the game on any rink, on any given day, can be victorious. (1:08:00)

Gordon Cutter’s sermon stresses not only that curling is a “game of the people,” in which anyone can be victorious on “any given day,” but that the game’s populist roots impose an ethic: to forgo the “trappings of commerce.”

The rink to beat at the Golden Broom, skipped by Alexander “The Juggernaut” Yount, embodies “the trappings of commerce.” The team members make their entrance in silver, spacesuit-like uniforms, backed by a soundtrack of hip-hop music, a fireworks display, and an entourage of Dallas Cowboy-style cheerleaders, which leads Gordon Cutter to call them the “Empire of Evil” (55:00). To top it off, when Chris Cutter offers Yount the traditional expression of pregame sportsmanship—“Good curling”—Yount responds with trash talk: “Whatever” (55:30). Yount represents a hypermodern, celebrity-culture version of curling divorced from the traditions of the game, yet in the preliminary match, it is ironically Cutter who violates curling’s traditions by failing (again) to call a burned rock. This appalls his father, who sees what has happened from the stands, and leads to the sauna sermon. Afterwards, Cutter and his mates renew their commitment to the true “honour and dignity” of the game by, among other things, switching to traditional corn brooms. Then they run the table in the rest of the preliminary round to earn a chance at redemption in the championship match against Yount.

Extreme Endings

The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon and Men with Brooms both have endings that are, in various ways, extreme. In the case of The Black Bonspiel, Willie and his rink, after falling behind, come back to defeat the Devil’s rink. They do this with two tactics. First, Pipe-fitting Brown reminds Macbeth that if the Devil’s rink wins, he will be replaced as third by Willie. This throws Macbeth off his game. Second, Willie repairs the Devil’s curling boot with a silver tack. At the crucial moment of the game, the tack bites the Devil’s foot, which responds with excruciating pain (since the Devil is allergic), and the Devil hogs his shot (129).3 Shortly thereafter, the Devil disappears—a sore loser in more ways than one.

Defeating the Devil (and, by association, death) is an extreme feat, but in a comic text Willie’s victory is less an adrenaline rush than a cause for laughter. A more extreme feat, in the context of the story, is the transformation of Cross-cut Brown’s wife, Annie. Annie Brown is a caricature of a small-town puritan, a later version of Mrs. Abercrombie, the bullying antagonist in Who Has Seen the Wind. Annie wants to ban Shakespeare and Chaucer from the schools (10–11); she reports on the local doctor for visiting a brothel (despite the fact that he visits to assist a woman with appendicitis) (13); and she is trying to reinstate prohibition (21). Most importantly for the story, her puritanism extends to her championing an ordinance that bans curling on the Sabbath. When she gets news of Willie’s match against the Devil, she bullies Reverend Pringle, the local United Church minister, into going with her to shut it down.

Annie Brown is a difficult character to accept from a gender point of view. She is so obviously the stereotype of a small-minded, small-town woman. Ormond Mitchell and Barbara Mitchell explain that her creation was “influenced by the spate of censorship incidents across Canada” in the 1980s, which included the attempted banning of Who Has Seen the Wind by Pentecostal Christian groups (2009, 4). W. O. Mitchell, in The Black Bonspiel, gets a measure of revenge about this by making Annie so odious. Her presence in the story also adds a sly twist to the Faustian narrative because, from her point of view, any game played on the Sabbath is by definition a deal with the Devil.

Annie’s transformation at the end of The Black Bonspiel is as magical as possible without the actual casting of a spell. Once she gets to the rink, she gets caught up in the action. After the Devil’s rink injures her husband with a dirty play, she flips from the scolding Puritan she has been throughout to a diehard fan. More than this, despite trying to get Shakespeare and Chaucer banned for their profanity, she calls out profane encouragement to Willie: “I want you to give [the Devil’s rink] the shit-kicking of their curling career—’specially their skip!” (115).

The extreme nature of Annie’s transformation suggests something shallow, even hypocritical, about her narrow-minded puritanism. In his writing, Mitchell consistently contrasts characters who, like Willie, affirm life in all its earthly wonder against those who, for whatever reason, do not. Annie lacks the spirit of fun necessary to enjoy life (no pregame dram for her!). She also fails to appreciate the value of imagination (enough to want to ban Shakespeare and Chaucer!). Willie, on the other hand, lacks neither quality, which helps to explain what might seem like a contradiction in the text: Willie is said to be not very religious, yet he argues in favour of a literal Devil and Hell, which, he claims, are the only basis for a true religion (27). Why would he make this argument? In a nutshell, because belief in a literal Devil makes a better story (imagine Hamlet without the ghost of Hamlet’s father, or Macbeth without the witches).

The ending of The Black Bonspiel, then, plays with ordinary and extraordinary in revealing ways. It demonstrates how a game that is the embodiment of ordinariness can create extraordinary effects. Sports always do this: they take ordinary human activities (running, climbing, throwing a rock) and turn them into something greater—something with mythic possibilities. At the same time, the ending of the story, by its very extremity, is a reminder that sports always involve an element of sheer fun—and that we should be careful about taking it (or ourselves, if we are the players) too seriously.

Though the ending of Men with Brooms doesn’t involve any obvious supernatural forces, it is even more extreme than the ending of The Black Bonspiel. The climax, as is conventional in sport literature, has to do with a championship game. Chris Cutter and his mates face the Yount rink again, this time in the championship of the Golden Broom. Predictably, they fall behind early but claw their way back into contention. The climactic sequence occurs in the tenth end.4 Cutter is down one and has the hammer, but the Yount rink builds up a seemingly impenetrable wall of stones to prevent him from scoring.5 Scoring two to win is out of the question; as Cutter prepares to throw his last rock, he has no other rocks in the house.6 The best he can hope for is to make a miraculous shot to score one and fight on in extra ends (with the disadvantage that Yount will now have the hammer). Cutter makes the one-in-a-million shot, but, during the sweeping, his front end burns the rock (again!). This time, Cutter, having made peace with the spirit of the game, calls the foul. Under normal circumstances, this would mean his defeat, but Yount, in a surprising act of sportsmanship, allows Cutter a do-over. Cutter, realizing he is unlikely to make a one-in-a-million shot twice, tries another approach. He throws the rock (which is still loaded with the ashes of Donald Foley) hard down the middle of the sheet. It hits the wall of Yount rocks and explodes, sending fragments into the air. Two fragments land near the button, which gives the Cutter rink two points and the victory.7 One extreme aspect of this ending is its violation of the official rules of curling. Section 4.5 of the Canadian Curling Association’s Rules of Curling for General Play, published in 2022, states: “If a stone is broken in play, a replacement stone shall be placed where the largest fragment comes to rest”—which means that Cutter, despite the amazing good fortune of the exploding stone, should only have scored one. That the film plays fast and loose with the rules, however, is consistent with the extremity of its ending. The exploding stone, which scatters Donald Foley’s ashes in a way that must please his eternal curler’s spirit, not only gives a miraculous victory to the Cutter rink but causes a series of other miraculous fixes. Cutter, of course, redeems the various faults of his life and finds true love in the arms of Amy Foley. Neil Bucyk escapes a loveless marriage and finds true love with Angela. Eddie Strombach and his wife conceive a child. Julie Foley, Amy’s sister and Chris’s ex-fiancée, heals her broken heart and gets a chance to fly into space. RCMP Officer Frances Dart finds true love with a waitress at a local diner. In addition to all this, the beavers from the opening sequence show up to parade through town!

The most revealing fix, though, has to do with James Lennox. At the height of the celebrations after the exploding rock, Stuckmore, the giant to whom Lennox owes money, reappears. He rushes across the ice. Lennox, trapped, braces for an assault. Instead of attacking him, however, Stuckmore gives him a big hug and forgives his debt. He explains: “I can trace my lineage back through twelve generations of curling men, and even if Yount is gracious in defeat, his shiny suits and lumpen cheerleaders represent all that is corrupt in God’s greatest game” (1:33:00). Forgiving the debt turns out to be Stuckmore’s thanks for Lennox’s role in helping to preserve the traditional, non-commercial version of curling to which he—like so many others—remains attached.

The transformation of Stuckmore is as extreme as the transformation of Annie Brown. With its over-the-top nature, the film’s satire has a way (along with all the other life fixes at the end of Men with Brooms) of sending up the idea that a great sporting victory can transform a life. But the satire, like all satire, is double-edged. While it makes fun of the magical potential sometimes ascribed to sport, it doesn’t discount this potential entirely. If there is a serious message at the end of the film, it is much like the message implied by the ending of The Black Bonspiel: there is something strange and beautiful in the human need to play, and when we create games, we take what is ordinary and create something potentially extraordinary. Though sport cannot give us magical solutions or the immortality craved by Faustus, it does have the power, like literature, to stir our emotions and imaginations—and to create a bit of life-affirming fun. Perhaps the most serious moment in either The Black Bonspiel or Men with Brooms is when Cutter describes to Amy the potential in a curling rock. Let me end by quoting his speech in full: “Forty-two pounds of polished granite with a beveled underbelly and a handle a human being can hold. And it may have no practical purpose in itself, but it is a repository of human possibility, and if it’s handled just right, it will exact a kind of poetry” (23:00).

Works Cited

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