Every four years, patrons of the city’s sports bars try to deduce the rules of curling—a sport that’s been called “chess on ice”—by studying Olympic matches on wall-mounted TVs that they can’t hear. Last month, the members of the Ardsley Curling Club, one of three dedicated facilities within an hour or so of the city, held a series of open houses for people who wanted to try to play. The club promoted the sessions, in part, with a video that appeared on pumps at area gas stations. More than six hundred people showed up—and that was before the U.S. men’s team had bankrupted Canadian and Swedish bookies by winning the gold.

“The club was founded in 1932,” Pam Politano, a member, said before one of the sessions. She was wearing a T-shirt from a curling tournament called the Maine-iac Bonspiel, and she’d come straight from work, at A+E Networks, in Manhattan. “I started fourteen years ago, at an open house like this one,” she continued. “My daughter was five, and I thought I ought to be able to do something for myself.” A couple of years later, her daughter began playing, too. “She almost went to college in Maryland, because that’s one place where you can study marine biology and curl. She ended up in Florida instead, but she plays when she comes home.”

Curling is harder and more exhausting than it appears to be on TV. One player slides a heavy, lozenge-shaped stone down an ice sheet toward a target, called the “house,” and other players attempt to control the stone’s velocity and path by fiercely scrubbing the ice in front of it with long-handled “brooms.” “You’re not officially curling until you fall down,” one of the instructors said, consolingly, to the second-youngest member of a family of four from Glen Rock, New Jersey.

A curling stone weighs forty pounds, plus or minus. Almost all the stones ever used in the Olympics, and most of the ones used everywhere else, including in Ardsley, have been made from granite quarried on Ailsa Craig, an uninhabited volcanic stump eight or nine miles off the coast of western Scotland. There’s a famous golf course directly opposite, in Turnberry, and caddies there sometimes tell golfers that if they can see Ailsa Craig it’s going to rain, and if they can’t see Ailsa Craig it’s raining already. The golf course, along with the resort it’s a part of, was bought in 2014 by Donald Trump, and ever since then Ailsa Craig has been wreathed in the sulfurous black exhalations of Mordor. Or so it is said.

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Aysha Williams, who teaches math to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in New Rochelle, said, “I first saw curling on TV, maybe two or three Olympics ago, and I was just, like, ‘What is this?’ ” She had come with a friend, Angela Pace, whom she knows from an adult basketball league. Both women played basketball in college, and Pace recently finished her sixth year as a professional, in Germany.

“There are still some things I haven’t figured out,” Pace said, after her lesson. “From end to end, the sheet is a lot longer than it seems on TV.” She and Williams were sitting at a big round table in the club’s “warm room,” a loungelike area with a bar, a fireplace, and terrific views of the ice. “We’ve always played basketball during the winter, so we never got into any other winter sports,” Williams said. “But I like it.” Both women were studying membership applications.

When Williams arrived at the club that evening, she was surprised to see Derek Kayser, a neighbor. Kayser, a retired building contractor, said later, “I coached Aysha in basketball when she was a kid. At that point, I’d quit curling, because my children were young, so she didn’t know I played.” He himself first curled when he was thirteen. “My father was a golfer, so he had nothing to do all winter,” he said. “Then one day he came home, and he was ecstatic. He was shouting, ‘I just found the greatest sport! These old men are throwing rocks on the ice!’ ”

Kayser returned to curling four or five years ago, after a twenty-year hiatus. “I did it because of my daughter,” he said. “She’d joined AmeriCorps, and she was transferred up to Rochester. She told me she didn’t know anybody—but there’s a curling club up there. So she went, and all of a sudden she had, like, a hundred and fifty friends.” He said that curling, in addition to being addictive, is like a fraternity, or a family, and that in high school he’d had friends at curling clubs all along the Eastern Seaboard. “As far as I’m concerned, everybody should be playing it,” he said. ♦