By Joe Sixpack
Posted on Feb. 20, 2009 on Joe Sixpack

YOU KNOW WHAT'S wrong with winter? The dearth of decent beer-drinking sports.

Golf, softball, bicycling, rowing - these are all perfectly fine summertime activities that easily accommodate beer consumption. All can be performed quite adequately with a beer no farther away than the distance between your last chip shot and the golf cart.

But when the grass freezes, what do you do?

You can't play ice hockey with a beer in your hand, you can't drink while downhill skiing, and figure skating with a buzz is a recipe for instant barf.

Friends, allow me to introduce you to . . . curling.

Here is a sport that combines the physical exertion of bowling with the high-paced excitement of chess. It's a game in which one player slides a 42-pound stone down a sheet of ice while seven other players stand around and wait for it to arrive at its target 20 minutes later.

The sport moves with all the speed of a SEPTA bus climbing Green Lane in Manayunk.

Now, I concede that classifying curling as a "sport" is a bit of a stretch. It's a sport in the same sense that sweeping your front steps is a sport.

But, no matter. It's in the Olympics, so a sport it is.

And, more to the point of this column, if you ever catch a glimpse of the sidelines at Philadelphia Curling Club, in Paoli - the region's only curling facility - you'll find several neatly stacked cases of Yuengling and Labatt's Blue, chilled and ready to go.

Aside from a pair of 150-foot-long ice sheets, the facility's main feature is a cozy clubhouse with a well-stocked bar.

"Curling," said Sandi Macan, one of the club's enthusiastic members who invited me to watch an evening of stone-chucking, "is a sport that was made for beer-drinking."

And, vice versa.

Curling meets the three-basic criteria of any decent beer-drinking sport:

1. Anyone can do it, even those of us with ample beer guts.

2. It's a game of strategy, leading to countless hours of post-game analysis over beers.

3. You can do it while holding a can of beer.

I won't bore you with the rules. You're sliding a rock on ice - what else do you need to know?

Honestly, the most important guy on the team - called the "skip" - simply stands there and orders his broom-wielding teammates to "sweep." Then he takes a gulp and yells, "Stop sweeping!"

Yeah, I know, sounds just like your boss, right?

The game requires balance, hand-eye coordination and the ability to "read" the ice, club member Wayne Anderson told me after a match last week. Then he drew a swig from a can of Black and Tan and conceded, "It's a game that you can play just totally socially. You just try your best and have a good time."

That's not to say there aren't some very good players. Word is a couple of the club's women members will compete at the Olympic trials this year.

Erik Sheets, a junior at Villanova, is headed to the college championships in Chicago next month.

"I got hooked while watching it at 3 in the morning during the Olympics a few years ago," he explained. "I actually enrolled at Villanova because it's just down the road from the club."

The club, founded in 1957, now has about 230 members who share costs of running the facility. They host dinners and tournaments, called bonspiels, to raise funds.

This weekend, members will compete in their annual Jeff Harris Curl-a-Thon, named for a young member who was rendered a permanent quadriplegic after a swimming accident two years ago. The event, open to the public, raises money for Harris' continuing medical care.

Anderson, who coached Harris when he was a teenager, said the fund-raiser is a good example of the camaraderie of curling.

After all, he noted, curling is a sport where tradition holds that the winning team - not the losers - buys the first round.

For information about the Curl-a-Thon and the Philadelphia Curling Club, visit www.philadelphiacurlingclub.org.

"Joe Sixpack" by Don Russell appears weekly in Big Fat Friday. For more on the beer scene in Philly and beyond, visit www.joesixpack.net. Send e-mail to joesixpack@phillynews.com.