Stone cold loving it
Ardsley Curling Club President Jeff Lessuk prepares to deliver a stone.
Â
Â
Â
“Up! Up!”
“Harder! Harder!”
It”™s a game of exhortation and exclamation, this tradition-steeped sport of curling. Witness the talk on the ice on a recent night of league play at the Ardsley Curling Club, the only welcoming haven for curlers south of Albany in the Empire State.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Jeff Lessuk, a financial adviser by day at JPMorgan Chase in Westchester and by night the “skip” of his four-member curling team or “rink” in Ardsley, reins in a sweeper blazing a path over ice with a fabric-padded broom ahead of a sliding 42-pound stone.
“Hold on! Hold on”¦yes!” Skip Lessuk, who is also club president, is pleased as the slowing granite nudges their opponents”™ stone from “the house,” the 12-foot-diameter bull”™s-eye target where he stands.
Three games at the same time play out over eight “ends” or innings on adjoining sheets of pebbled ice at the 42-year-old club, tucked away in a steep ravine on the hilly grounds of the Ardsley Country Club. In the wood-paneled clubhouse, spectators watch the action behind glass from raised rows of seats. On a clubhouse wall, televisions tuned to the Winter Olympic Games alternate with monitors that give spectators close overhead-camera views of the shifting lay of stones on the house on each icy sheet.
“Yes! Please!” Walter Baggett, an accounting and auditing professor in Manhattan College”™s School of Business and Ardsley club member since 1976, talks a teammate”™s curling stone down the ice.
“It”™s starting to break! ”¦Yes! Please! Nicely done, Tim!” (Tim warmed up pre-game with a glass of red wine from the clubhouse bar.) “Beautiful! Perfect!”
Curling, the televised Olympic variety, would begin in Vancouver the next night. The Ardsley clubhouse does have a Canadian satellite feed for members to view year-round live matches from curling”™s northern epicenter. The club, with 195 male and female members in league play and another 30 associate members, is preparing for a post-Olympics surge of local interest in the unfamiliar sport, just as happened four years ago after Olympic curling”™s televised coverage.
“We expect that we could see as much as a 50 percent jump in membership after the Olympics,” Lessuk said. “We”™ll certainly have 100 people sign up for a trial membership.” At $135, “You”™re not breaking the bank,” he said, if the trial ends in an early retirement from a slippery, strategy-heavy precision sport played at room temperatures a few degrees above freezing.
“Some people like it, it”™s fun,” said Lessuk, whose wife also is his rink”™s “vice skip.” “For some people, it”™s just too cold for them.”
For some who stay, mixing a bit of business with pleasure, the club also is a place to network with lawyers, doctors, judges, IT professionals, insurance agents and television producers among its diverse mix of ages and occupations, said Lessuk, who has made contacts for his financial advising services.
Â
Â
“It”™s a silly game,” said Steve Hess, a co-founder and managing partner of Legal Images, a New York City firm that provides courtroom graphics and animated presentations for attorneys. “A hard silly game.” Hess”™ mastery of the game has earned him a skip”™s position at his Ardsley club.
“It”™s a lot easier than ski jumping,” observed an opponent of Lessuk”™s after a brisk muscle-straining sweep down the ice. “Training is beer and Tostitos.”
And losing is rewarded off the ice and around the clubhouse table.
“Tradition has it that the winners buy the losers a drink,” said Pete McCuen, an Ardsley Club past president and former group vice president at The McGraw-Hill Companies. “Then the losers feel they have to reciprocate and buy the winners a drink.”
McCuen got hooked about 15 years ago, after a friend took an adult evening course on curling and recommended the strange sport to him. “I retired about 10 years ago,” said the publishing executive from Ossining, whose email handle is “Curling Pete.” “I spend all my time curling.”
This winter McCuen has been busy organizing the club”™s 74th Annual McKay-Douglas International Bonspiel, a four-day gathering and occasion for camaraderie that begins Feb. 25. “Bonspiel” is the Scottish term for a curling tournament, and a 500-year-old sporting tradition from Scotland will be observed when a bagpiper pipes 24 broom-bearing, kneepad-wearing teams onto the Ardsley ice.
Though no international teams will compete this month, the Ardsley bonspiel in the past has drawn teams from Scotland, Switzerland, Belarus and Canada. “The economy has made it a little tough for people to get teams down here,” McCuen said.
McCuen started and for several years ran the club”™s corporate program, which gives company employees a two-hour primer in the sport during corporate conferences and outings in the area. The Tarrytown House Estate and Conference Center, among other Westchester hosts, has sent groups to the club for winter recreation. The National Basketball Association in Manhattan has sent its marketing and sponsorship group to the club to gain finesse in teamwork. ?“It”™s a good recreational thing, but a lot of the companies also incorporate it as part of a team-building program,” said McCuen. “What I like about curling is that it”™s a true team sport and you can compete at a true team level. Every guy here,”™” he said, nodding at the curlers shedding layers of clothes as they worked up sweats on the ice, “is involved in every play.”
Women are involved too in the play, and make up about 35 percent of club membership, McCuen said. An Ardsley Curling Club women”™s team will represent the Northeast this month at the USA Curling Club National Championship in Madison, Wis. Lessuk”™s wife and vice skip, Robin Gestring, is on the team.
Â
Gestring is a fitting model for Seventh Avenue fashion design companies who commutes to Manhattan. She was introduced to curling by a fellow train commuter from Westchester in 1997, Lessuk recalled.
Â
“One day this guy says, ”˜Hey, my wife and I play this weird game on weekends. Why don”™t you come down?”™ That was at least 12 years ago. At that time almost no one heard of curling” south of the Canadian border, he said.
“It”™s one sport we can play together,” said Gestring. “I”™m just as good as he is.” Her skip and spouse winced, but held his tongue.
“It”™s a finesse game,” he said. Men only have a physical advantage when sweeping, which requires vigorous power, he said.
“We”™re doing this six months out of the year,” Gestring said. Traveling to bonspiels, the couple has forged friendships at clubs in upstate New York, Philadelphia and Maryland ”“ “even Jersey,” Lessuk said.
That too is part of the sport”™s tradition, McCuen said. “There”™s a real camaraderie that goes on. They always say you”™ll always be welcome at every curling club you walk into in the country.”
Ron Stytzer, president of Antun”™s of Westchester in Elmsford and past board chairman of the New York State Restaurant Association, heard about the Ardsley club”™s open house last fall. “I went down there and I loved it,” he said. “It”™s an interesting sport where everybody can do it. You can do it as a 6-year-old. I play sometimes with guys down there in their eighties. In the beginning, it”™s a little scary, but I found out how to do it.”
Stytzer”™s friends and family found it scary when the novice curler, forgetting to slip on a safety foot covering, took a header while sweeping. “I went straight down on the ice and I hit the side of my eye and I blacked out for four or five minutes,” he said. The gash required eight stitches and the curling restaurateur was hospitalized.
“I came back two weeks later” to the ice, Stytzer said.
Â
Â
Â
Give it a curl
Has the recent Olympics coverage from Vancouver warmed you up to the sport of curling?
Anticipating a post-Olympics surge of interest in the game, Ardsley Curling Club officers have scheduled a series of open houses at their club on the grounds of the Ardsley Country Club. They are:
March 2 and 3, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
March 6, 9 a.m.- noon
March 7, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.
The cost is $10 per person or $25 per family. Reservations are required.
For more information, visit the club”™s website at www.ardsleycurling.org.
Â