The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
All-pro to Olympian?
Jared Allen, once a feared defensive lineman, wanted to try another sport after retirement. He chose curling.
Five or six years ago, Jared Allen was just a retired defensive lineman whose 136 sacks were in the past and whose future contained no requirement to play competitive sports. But retirement brings time, and time brings idle thoughts, and so Allen found himself sitting around with a longtime buddy from his high school days. Wouldn’t you know, but a wager was birthed. Buddy: I’ll bet you can’t make the Olympics.
Allen: I’ll bet I can.
They were off.
Here he is, sticking with it. Allen spoke Tuesday by phone from Denver, where he was competing at the U.S. curling championships. He is not doing it as a sideshow. He is on a team whose skip — the curling term for captain — is Jason Smith, a Minnesotan who played with Shuster at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Smith’s rink — the same as “team” — opened the nationals by upsetting Team Shuster on Sunday and finished play Tuesday at 3-1 in the round-robin portion of the competition. Win the whole thing, and Smith’s team would advance to the world championships in April in Ottawa.
More than just an Olympic sport
For most Americans, curling enters their consciousness only during the Olympics — if it enters at all. It receives scant attention, so if one of the 70 athletes competing in Denver this week happens to be a 6-foot-6 candidate for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, why not help him teach people why his new sport should be appreciated and celebrated?
“You fall a lot,” Allen said. “But I’m an athlete, so I could learn the technical side . ... It was a lot harder than I thought. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just throwing rocks down the ice like shuffleboard.”
The strategy is like shuffleboard, so why is it harder?
“You’re on ice, first off,” Allen said. “So you’re running with rocks that are thrown at various speeds down the ice. You’re trying to sweep them to either hold
a line or curl a line or for distance. You’re trying to take a 40-pound stone and get that within a foot or an inch of where you want to place it on a 144-foot sheet of ice.
“It’s like the short game of golf. The ice conditions come into it. You’re trying to judge ice speeds, communication with your sweepers . ... It’s a constant chess match, and you have to control your heart rate, your adrenaline — you might pound one, sweep end to end and then come back and throw a draw. You have to make sure you don’t throw it through the house.”
The curling lingo flows in conversation as though he’s talking about a spin move to beat an offensive tackle or a dive to shoot the “A” gap. This is not a lark for Allen,
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“I watched Eddie the Eagle,” Allen said, referencing the out-of-place British ski jumper who reached the Olympics in 1988. “And I was like, ‘Well, all I’ve got to do is choose a sport that we’re not historically great at.’”
The choice: curling. He first picked up a stone sometime in the winter of 2017-18. That February, American John Shuster skipped a team to a gold medal at the Pyeongchang Olympics.
“So that was kind of, ‘Welp, we’re pretty good at that,’” Allen said. “But I was already down that rabbit hole, so I had to stick with it.”
40, who says he’s committed through the Olympic cycle that ends with the Milan-cortina Games in 2026, “as long as my wife and kids are OK with it, and they’ve kind of bought in now. They understand it.”
Started as a joke, now it’s real
Even if his pursuit began as a joking bet with a buddy, the commitment is now real. Allen trains with Smith’s team at home in Nashville, but travel to competitions takes him from his family for days at a time. The national championships run a full week. He is still growing accustomed to curling’s rhythms. On Tuesday morning, Team Smith lost a match
it thought it could win, a match that flipped with one bad end — which is akin to an inning in baseball. The task: Rather than collecting yourself over the course of a week, rest and rejuvenate to compete again in the afternoon.
“In football, every game is so important,” Allen said. “In curling, you play a lot of games, and you have to learn to be a little more gracious.” He paused.
“I am not quite there yet,” he went on. “I hate losing, period. That’s where the emotions are a little different because it can come down to one rock, one stone, where in football you feel like you’re a little more in control . ... I just always try to remember I can’t hit anybody and I have
to be nice, which is hard for me at times.”
Hall of Fame not a priority
For most of America, this is, of course, Super Bowl week, and Super Bowl week always includes the announcement of the year’s Hall of Fame class. Allen was one of 15 finalists but was not named to the Class of 2023. In a 12-year career primarily with Kansas City and Minnesota, he racked up the 12th-most sacks in history — including a monstrous 22-sack season with the Vikings in 2011 — and was a four-time All-pro.
Allen could have been distracted by the announcement, but he has other tasks at hand.
“Obviously, the Hall of Fame is an incredible honor if and when I get in,” Allen said. “But I’ve got no control over that. I want to focus on the things I have control over . ...
“It’s what I teach my kids, right? (If ) you make a commitment to something, you’ve got to see it through. I have committed to this and to my team. And I’ll be honest: If we win a curling national championship? Ooh, you might see a shirtless slide down the ice.”
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