CURLING
Jim White
In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays a character who constructs a baseball stadium in the middle of the prairies after a series of ghostly advisers have delivered the opinion that “if you build it, they will come”.
Hamilton McMillan Snr was similarly moved to build himself a sports stadium in the middle of nowhere. McMillan is the owner of the Northwest Castle hotel in Stranraer, a town that most people pass through only to catch a ferry for Ireland. And back in 1970 he bought some land abutting his hotel and built an ice rink.
On it he invited paying customers to play the local winter sport of curling, perhaps the only game recognised by the International Olympic Committee that involves domestic implements.
And since he built it, they have been coming. Every winter McMillan’s hotel is packed with curlers. From across the curling map Switzerland, Scandinavia, Scotland and beyond enthusiasts turn up in droves, skimming what appear to be kettles across his ice while frantically brushing away at the rink with kitchen brooms. It has been an economic triumph.
But McMillan got more than just a healthy bank balance from his rink. He got a world and European champion curler, a man in with a shout of landing Britain’s first gold medal at the winter Olympics since Torvill and Dean Boleroed to victory in 1984. His son Hamilton McMillan Jr, universally known as Hammy, is the captain of Britain’s curling team for the Salt Lake games. And when it comes to curling Hammy has had a slight advantage over his rivals: this is a curler born with an ice rink in his back garden.
“When I was a kid there was a whole crowd of us about the same age,” he says. “And we all used to play on the ice all the time, all winter. Soon as the hotel clients were off the rink, we’d be on it.”
Those priorities persist even as McMillan was about to head for Utah. The day we met, he had to wait to practise until the rink was cleared of dozens of schoolchildren who were, as he watched over with a proprietorial smile, running up and down brandishing brooms and hurling kettles (which turned out to be smooth granite blocks topped off with plastic handles, items known as stones).
Fortunately for the skip, his day job is general manager of the Northwest Castle hotel, which means he can pop down for half an hour’s practice on the rink his father built whenever there is a lull in his paperwork.
So what is it with the brushing? Is this, then, a sport restricted to housework fetishists? “The theory is, the friction of the brushing melts the ice so the stone moves quicker,” says Hammy. So, he adds, as well as hastening your own stone, it is possible to brush in front of your opponent’s to make it overshoot the target.
“But you can only start doing that once the stone has crossed the hog line.” Curling, it transpires, is a game replete with jargon. Hammy talks about “drawing the stones into the house”, which makes him sound like a DJ.
But there is no doubting his enthusiasm for the sport.