'Just like innings in baseball'

I'm in my last full day of a somewhat relaxing and very comfortable Florida vacation (more on that later, maybe).

Curiously, my American vacations seem to sync up with the Olympics unusually often - it happened in 2002, 2008, 2010, and possibly other years as well. This means that for a good portion of the event, I'm left with only American commentators, frequently accused (by Canadians) of homerism and ignoring events Americans aren't favoured in.

I haven't really noticed either of those. Of course American coverage will tend to favour Americans in the same way Canadian coverage favours Canadians, but NBC has shown both Canadian gold medal ceremonies and plenty of other non-American events in their limited programming time (five hours a day plus an overnight show).

More amazing is the NBC affiliates - CNBC, MSNBC and USA - which are working together pretty much every men's hockey game, most women's hockey games, and every curling draw.

Yes, there's been some hilarious criticisms leveled at NBC for giving hockey short shrift (mainly for missing the first couple minutes of a game in favour of the final end of curling, following the sports broadcasting golden rule of 'finish what you start'), but overall I've been impressed by the American coverage of my favourite Winter Olympic sports.

With one exception, that is.

Namely, Andrew Catalon (right).

Catalon is the amiable-sounding sportscaster who NBC tapped to call curling. Now, admittedly it couldn't have been easy to find a curling announcer - in Salt Lake City and Turin, NBC used Don Chevrier, the legendary Canadian broadcaster who had called everything from baseball to synchronized swimming to spelling bees. But Chevrier passed away in 2007.

Curling is not a major sport in the US (obviously), so there wasn't exactly an established curling broadcaster NBC could call upon within American borders - maybe there's somebody on a community channel in Minnesota, but his familiarity with the game would be trumped by the broadcast abilities that relegated him to community television in Minnesota.

Most of the major Canadian curling broadcasters were already in use in Vancouver, because they belong to the networks covering the Olympics up here - Vic Rauter and Brian Mudryk working on curling, Rod Black on figure skating, Rob Faulds on luge-related sports.

In fact, the only Canadian out there with national curling broadcast experience who isn't either part of the CTV/Rogers consortium or dead is the CBC's Bruce Rainnie, who took over their curling duties when Don Wittman passed away, a few weeks after Chevrier.

Rainnie either wasn't approached, or wasn't interested in giving up his day job (as host of CBC's supper-hour news show in PEI). This is an extremely roundabout way of saying that Catalon - who called team handball in Beijing, another sport he no doubt learned on the fly - was probably the best NBC could come up with.

And it's not like he was flying solo - he was partnered with Don Duguid, a longtime curling commentator and two-time world champion, and Elfi Schlegel, a former Canadian gymnastics champion. Both of them were part of NBC's crew in the past.

Besides, having a non-fan in the booth makes sense given he's speaking to a nation of non-fans - his questions might seem obvious to you or me (especially if you are Marc Bernard or Andrew Flemming, two curling uber-fans who occasionally comment here), but they could well be what most of his audience is also wondering.

Truth be told, Catalon isn't doing that badly, especially for a sport he's unfamiliar with. Another plus is that Duguid is far too Canadian to ever correct his partner. Consider this exchange, where Catalon temporarily forgot that the crowd noise would be for the Canadian game on the next sheet:

Catalon: A good shot from the Americans!
Duguid: But what's bad about it is that it leaves the stone wide open!

In the next end, Catalon tried to bring his knowledge of strategy and scoring to the forefront, knowing exactly what would come next:

Catalon: And now he'll just draw for two.
Duguid: Or do the double takeout for four!

The American skip did indeed try the double takeout. It failed, sending the game into extra ends where yet another skip error handed Denmark a victory.

Compare that to the Canadian broadcast, where Vic Rauter is able to deduce what is going on, what needs to be done, and what is being done poorly (in fairness to Catalon, Vic has been around the game for decades now) - freeing up his analysts to go into a greater level of detail.

But the biggest sin committed by Catalon, the one that will forever stop me from proclaiming him 'good' at even a layman's broadcast of curling, is his oft-repeated assertion that ends are "just like innings in baseball". I heard it from him twice before three rocks had been thrown in his first broadcast, and he still sprinkles it in from time to time.

The problem? Ends in curling are not like innings in baseball in almost any sense. Yes, a curling match happens to be divided into ten ends, similar to how a baseball game is divided into nine innings, and yes, a curling scoresheet looks an awful lot like a baseball line score - but that is where the similarities end.

In an inning of baseball, Team A sends up all its batters (until three make outs), and then Team B does the same. In curling, each team alternates shots.

In baseball, it is common for both teams to score in an inning, as the inning is divided into 'top' and 'bottom' portions. In curling, it is impossible for both teams to score in the same end - and there is no 'top' end and 'bottom' end, it's just one end.

There's no great comparison for curling ends - tennis sets, bowling frames, golf holes, an odd combination of those three maybe - but baseball definitely isn't the best.

This wouldn't bother me if he said it once or twice. But Catalon repeats it and repeats it, to the point where, yes, I think he truly believes an end is like an inning.

And it's spreading - last night, the local NBC affiliate (Fort Myers), showed curling highlights. Well, one shot, but I digress. The hosts bantered for a moment about curling (the female news anchor claimed eight members of the American team were, like her, from Minnesota) - and then the sports anchor claimed that he'd been reading up on curling, and showed off his knowledge by suggesting that ends are "just like innings in baseball".

Good thing I go home tomorrow and don't have to drive myself crazy with this anymore.

--Ryan