The story of our grandson and how early he came to love the game and now plays it very well. He is Matt Dunstone and at age 3-4 he learned about curling on our kitchen floor. We had owned a set of these tiny wooden curling rocks about two inches in diameter with handles. We taped curling circles about 12 feet apart on our kitchen floor – after a few days with us playing with him he couldn’t wait to get back to grandma and grandpa’s and practice his skills. He no longer needed us to play with him so after watching for a while we took off to the family room while he kept up the curling – soon he was setting up rocks and attempting specific shots and it wasn’t long before he would be coming in to and get us to watch him throw some rocks -soon we tired of this and told him we could just turn on TSN and watch his shots on TV. We got a lot of laughs from it as he would come running in every so often exclaiming ‘did you see that shot’ – we would assure him that yes we saw it and the shot was really something.!
As Matt grew older he came across an old tape of our 1980 mixed curling championship and would spend hours watching it. Then he got enrolled in pre-school. You may have heard of show and tell and Matt took this tape weekly until his parents got a call from the school and were advised that ‘show and tell’ was very boring to his classmates. He just couldn’t understand that they weren’t enjoying it as much as he was.
Time went on – at the beginning he wanted to come to every practice of Grandma’s team or Grandpa’s, however it wasn’t long before he was on his way upwards and now we just sit back and look forward to the next game.
Matt’s love of the game has never stopped.
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