Sport: Curling

Last week was Winnipeg's bonspiel. A bonspiel is a curling tournament between clubs. For eight days, wherever you went in Winnipeg, you saw the curlers leaving one rink, on their way to another. Many of them were elderly men, all serious, carrying long brooms and heavy sweaters; they looked up at the sky, which was tranquil, and said gloomily that it might bring baugh ice, meaning a thaw.

On the hard, slick ice of many Canadian cities the curlers use irons, but in Winnipeg, as in Edinburgh and other conservative places they use 35-lb. stones—solid bowls of granite or whinstone, beautifully...