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I have curled just once in my life.

I wasn’t any good at it, but alcohol helped. About five drinks in, I achieved a passable simulation of a proper curling crouch. The beers kept coming and the curling kept improving. It was the most Canadian I’ve ever felt. My body was coursing with drunken patriotism.

There are a lot of muscles in the human groin. As it turns out, I had pulled just about every one of them. The next morning I had to be dragged out of bed as far as the couch, where I lay pinned for the next few days.

That’s what two hours of curling without any experience plus a couple of pitchers of Labatt 50 equals – shocking, shocking pain.

Regular curlers would say I did it wrong. Sure, have a drink. But don’t go nuts. Maybe stretch beforehand, as you would for any serious sport.

But unlike any other sport, curling feels the need to constantly justify itself. It bubbles up in the global consciousness once every four years at the Winter Olympics, at which point every citizen of the planet feels the need to weigh in with a zinger.

So when a Canadian team featuring several top players, including a former Olympic gold medalist, turns up for competition blind drunk and runs amok, it’s not the case of a few guys embarrassing themselves. It’s bigger than that. They have undermined the sport’s decades-long mission to be taken seriously outside this country.

For some time now, curling has been trying to shed its reputation as a moderate physical activity for booze-hounds. Like darts, but without the sense of humour.

When you are in the company of elite curlers, many feel compelled to remind you how hard this is, how fit they are and how much time they’ve devoted to their craft. Believe me, I know. Because of my groin.

Paunches and loose-fitting clothes have been replaced by six-packs and Lycra. Many of the top men and several women are as buff as bodybuilders.

The new generation of Canadian stars have dropped the relaxed public style of their predecessors and adopted the robotic argot of NHL players. Sometimes the manner of speaking is so self-serious it verges on satire.

The Swedes, Danes and Americans don’t carry themselves this way. They’re easygoing because they are curlers, for God’s sake. But Canadian curlers are often wound up as tight as a coil.

You don’t need to be Freud to figure out what’s going on here: ‘You don’t think we’re a real sport? We’ll show you. We’ll be the muscliest, clichéd-quotingest, sportiest sport you’ve ever seen.’

So what’s the problem if it’s somewhere between billiards and decathlon on the ‘Real Sports’ meter? Things needn’t be taken seriously to be serious. The difference is a matter of self-confidence.

Curling doesn’t have much, and it shows.

If a basketball team had entered a tournament drunk and been disqualified, we’d be talking about the team. After 2014 Sochi champion Ryan Fry & Co. had 30 to 40 beers, plus shots, and then made a show of themselves out on the sheet in Red Deer, Alta., last weekend, we’re talking about the sport.

That’s the undercurrent of all the coverage – Curlers! Drunk! Again! How droll.

The story has caught global attention because it is so on the nose, and so Canadian.

We’re known for about a dozen things around the world: Justin Bieber, Mounties, hockey, moose, a Tiger Beat cover model for a leader and, somewhere in there, curling.

When someone puts the words ‘drunk’ and ‘curlers’ together in a headline, it creates a thought chain of clichés for foreigners – “Canadian rubes on ice at it again, but determined to be polite about the whole thing.”

Unlike most modern sports scandals, nothing awful happened here. No one was hurt. A few people were offended, but not so much. Some brooms were broken, some naughty words uttered and some mess was made, then everyone felt bad and apologized. I imagine that’s a pretty typical Saturday night in Red Deer (or anywhere else).

Yes, it’s true that you oughtn’t show up to work hammered, but it’s also hilarious when someone else does that. Once. And not if they’re a trauma surgeon.

That’s the spirit in which Canada has taken this thing – a self-deprecating eye roll.

Curling can’t do itself the same favour. Judging by the apologies made by those involved, you’d think they’d stolen a car and driven around town firing pistols out the window.

“I have to live with the consequences and will be taking every step needed to guarantee this never happens again,” Fry said in a Twitter post.

“I will be taking steps to ensure this never happens again,” said skip Jamie Koe, and he wasn’t in a fit enough state to play. So, in his case, it hasn’t actually happened the first time.

The problem here is not that they acted the fool. It is that, in so doing, they have confirmed forevermore a pernicious (and occasionally true) maxim – people who curl do so while drunk. Anything you can do drunk cannot be a sport. Ergo, curling is not a sport.

It’s not true. Curling is a sport, just like car racing, ice dancing and skateboarding are sports. But curling is not a sport like soccer or hockey.

It’s a bit weird, is never going to be widely popular and, yes, can be done while wobbly, but not obliterated.

There’s no shame in it. The easiest move would be not caring what other people think. But it often seems that elite Canadian curling’s Napoleon complex isn’t just a feature of its identity, but its whole reason for being.

That may be the most patriotic thing about the sport, which is more ours than any other – that it has assumed the character of the entire country: wanting very badly to be taken seriously by others, and deeply put out when someone ruins it by being so … Canadian.

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