View from the North 40: Clever is as clever does

It’s not the type of headlines you expect to have blowing up the internet: “Controversy over the advertising of sex toys at curling Olympic qualifier cancels televised coverage in U.S.”

I would like to think that you have at least heard of the sport of curling, but in case you’re in the dark, curling is that team sport played on ice with a 42-pound polished granite stone. One person, with a push maneuver, kind of launches the stone down a 150-foot lane. The teammates frantically scrub at the ice with Swiffer-like brooms creating a thin water layer on the ice to help guide the stone to the target or to the opposing team’s stone to knock it out of the scoring area.

I’m guessing, but I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying this: The terms curling and sex toys had never before been used in the same sentence in the entire linguistic history of either term until 2021.

What, pray tell, happened?

At the final Olympic curling qualifier in Amsterdam, U.S. mixed doubles team of Chris Plys and Vicky Persinger, among others, were were scheduled to duel for a place in the Winter Olympics. The event organizers had advertising displayed on the ice for their sponsor EasyToys, the adult paraphernalia website — and that’s where things slid sideways.

NBC was deeply offended on behalf of the American curling viewing public.

The ads were described as tasteful and downplayed but, The Associated Press said in a Dec. 9 article, the “ads could be seen in four spots on the playing surface, and its name was printed along the hog line that determines where curlers must let go of the stone.”

NBC and its affiliate stations were supposed to be televising the event but missed the first three rounds of play in which Plys and Persinger went 3-0 because the broadcaster was worried about leading astray all, what, 1,457 curling fans nationwide who were going to be watching. No offense to the curling people intended.

In fact, I think curling is great.

I got to try it once while I was interviewing people in the local club. It’s super technical, fun and surprisingly physically challenging, and it inspired me to following curling in the next Olympics. Did you know that it takes the stone 16 to 17 seconds to travel the length of that lane? I mean, that’s — well, that’s really so very slo-mo. So slow.

In fact I would describe curling from a spectator’s perspective as a combination of slow-motion adult marbles, plus darts, floor-duty chores and watching live animal-cam footage of squirrels while they hibernate. It’s just rife for being a drinking game, a super-polite drinking game.

In the time it takes your opponents to prep, shoot and scooch their stone all the way down the ice, you could consume an entire beer or sip an espresso or suck up through a fat straw one of those boba teas with the tapioca jelly balls, whatever wets your whistle. The point is you could down that drink in such a leisurely fashion even your mother wouldn’t slap you upside the head for being rude.

Nothing about the sport makes me think, “Now that’s hot.” Well, OK, maybe the intensity in the shooter’s face while aiming, then the next 17 second of interminable waiting kills the feeling. I don’t see Right Said Fred reimagining their song “I’m Too Sexy” as the curling anthem anytime soon, like “I’m too sexy for my ice / Too sexy for my ice / So sexy, and nice.”

So promoting sex toys with curling? NBC said, “No way, Jose. That’s the kind of behavior we expect from a sport like hockey or football or NASCAR, y’know, sports with lots of adrenaline and testosterone and some wink-wink, nudge-nudge talk in the locker room. Not a snooze-fest like curling, uh, erm, we mean a sport better associated with a family night out.”

Which, interestingly, is the point EasyToys was trying to make.

AP reported that organizers of the event said the on-ice ads just had the EasyToys name and a non-explicit logo. In a move to associate their brand with a wholesome sport. And yet there was trouble.

The resulting brouhaha made the EasyToys-World Curling Federation partnership the winner of this year’s best advertising dollars bang-for-your-buck deal. Tens of thousands of print and visual media outlets covering the controversy have just made EasyToys and the sport of curly exponentially more well-known.

And interesting.

I see what you did there, and I approve of your methods.

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FYI, Plys and Persinger qualified for the Winter Olympics at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .