Broomtown

When the Olympic Games begin, Bemidji will be watching. The city is home to America’s curling teams—and a place where almost everyone knows how to slide a stone. Even the guy who made your pizza.

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THIS IS HOW IT WORKS in Bemidji: parents pass curling down to their children, who pass it down to their kids years later, like a family heirloom. Tim Johnson learned the sport from his parents, and he and his wife, Liz, have played for decades. They still have the punch-bowl-size trophy their team won at the national mixed championship in 1980, while Liz was five months pregnant with her first child, Jamie. Tim is a six-time national champion, having won four mixed titles with his wife and two men’s titles on a team with Baird and Fenson in the early 1990s. The Johnsons’ daughters, Cassie and Jamie, are the family’s fourth generation of curlers.

The Johnson girls got an early start in the sport, joining the club’s popular junior league on Sunday nights while they were still in grade school. The youngsters used sawed-off brooms and lighter plastic rocks. “My parents were the ones who showed us the basics,” Cassie recalls. “Then we played mini-games against other kids once we were old enough.”

In 2002, the Johnsons won junior national and world championships and finished third at the Olympic trials. Last year, Team Johnson, rounded out by Maureen Brunt of Portage, Wisconsin, and Jessica Schultz of Anchorage, Alaska, bested two more experienced teams and won the trials. They went on to take the silver medal at the world championships to establish themselves as medal contenders for Turin. (The team later added Duluth’s Courtney George as an alternate.)

“We played out of our minds,” Brunt says. “That was amazing.”

On a Thursday a few months ago, four of the five women met to talk in the bar at the Bemidji Curling Club. Huge color woodcuts of Paul Bunyan and Babe dominate the back wall of the long room, which overlooks the club’s ice. The old jukebox, tucked behind the wide-screen TV and the red upright piano, boasts a diverse mix of selections: Louis Prima, Pete Fountain, Dire Straits, Alan Jackson. Cheap draft beer and soft drinks are available from the bartender; those preferring hard liquor can bring their own and store the bottles in their lockers. Most days, the aroma from a popcorn machine fills the room.

The women ordered pop and bottled waters and fell into an easy banter, like old friends. Brunt, 23, who waitressed at an Irish bar in Madison, Wisconsin, while a University of Wisconsin undergrad, relishes her standing as the social butterfly of the group. But Schultz, 21, a radiology student at Lake Superior College, can match Brunt’s gregariousness. The group talked about the pending Olympic competition and the pressures of training for the Games. Before the final match at trials, Schultz remembered, her hands shook so terribly she couldn’t drink from her water bottle.

Preparing for the Games is time-consuming, requiring a careful balancing of priorities. While Schultz withdrew from Lake Superior College to get ready for the Games—a common decision among Olympic athletes—Cassie chose to finish her bachelor’s degree in design technology at Bemidji State. (She graduated in December.)

“I only needed five credits to graduate, and I figured, what the heck, I’ll work with my teachers around it,” Cassie says. “They’ve been really good at letting me miss classes and make up the work. I didn’t want to sit out a year and then come back for only five credits. I want to jump right into my career after the Olympics instead of going back to school.”

If camaraderie is the key to success in curling, Team Johnson has it down. They live in adjacent apartment buildings not far from the club—Cassie and Jamie in one unit, the others in another. Jamie will be marrying Nate Haskell, a stock broker, in June, and the whole team is in the wedding party. As with the best sports teams, the identities of the individual players seem to have merged into a collective character—especially as the Olympics loom. “My aunt likes to crochet,” Brunt says. “She made us all red, white, and blue scarves. At some point, we have to take a picture with them on and give it to her.”

FOR MORE THAN A YEAR NOW, Mae Polo has pictured this scene in her mind.

She’s standing in the Olympic Stadium in Turin on the opening day of the Winter Games. Maybe it’s snowing. Maybe it’s just cold, the wind whipping off the Alps. But there she is, squinting through her tears to find her son Joe among the hundreds of beret-wearing U.S. athletes, marching and waving in the Olympic opening ceremonies.

On February 10, when the Games actually begin, Polo will be in that stadium. She doubts she’ll be thinking about the $17,000 that she and her husband, John, got as part of a home refinance to cover travel costs: multiple members of the Polo family will need airfare, lodging, and rental cars during the 16 nights they spend in Italy. Tickets to events also can be expensive. At last check, the only passes to the opening ceremonies that Polo could find were selling for $1,200 apiece.

But as Mae Polo cheers, she won’t be thinking about the costs or the cold or the chapping wind. She’ll be thinking about her son’s hard work, his team’s prospects. And she may even forget about Joe’s new tattoo.

Joe Polo is the free spirit of Team Fenson, and the only one who didn’t learn curling from his parents. A friend got him into the same Sunday night junior league as the Johnson girls, and Polo’s parents dropped him off at the club each week while they went bowling.

“My parents started after I did,” Polo says. “They were watching me curl one weekend, and my dad said, ‘Why didn’t you do this and this and this? You would have won.’ And I said, ‘You go out there and try to do that.’ So he did.”

Polo wasn’t as successful talking his teammates into joining him at the tattoo parlor in Duluth. Getting Olympic-themed tattoos as a unity-building exercise is the rage among American Olympic athletes, and Shawn Rojeski said he’d be willing to join Polo—but only if the entire team, including straight-arrow Pete Fenson, got tattoos as well.

“I thought there was no way Pete would even consider it,” Rojeski says. “If somebody had bet me, I’d have thrown my money clip on the table and said, ‘No way.’ But he said, ‘Maybe,’ and I thought, ‘Son of a bitch, I’m gonna get screwed.’”

Rojeski lucked out, though: Fenson never did commit to the tattoo idea. So Polo went to the parlor in Duluth alone, returning with an image on the back of his right shoulder: the Olympic rings, a curling rock in front and, below, the words Torino 2006.

He’s marked now—as a curler and as one of the few American athletes who bear the title Olympian. “I tell people I’m going to the Olympics, and they say, ‘Great, what sport?’” Polo says. “I say curling, and they go, ‘Oh…what’s…that?’ They don’t respect it as much as something they know, like downhill skiing.

“But there are always going to be jokes about curling. You just try to accept it. When people put it down, I just say, ‘Go and try it. See if you can do better.’” MM