Life’s just too short to watch Olympic curling.

I made the mistake late Friday night of watching an hour of worldclass curling competition at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and it’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back. All I could think was: Honestly, this is a sport?

A survey this week in the New York Daily News showed that only 34 percent of those viewing the Olympic games thought curling was even a sport. Two out of three readers said that curling, like ice dancing, did not belong in the Olympics.

Curling has been a popular pastime for years, especially in Scotland and Canada where there are rocks to slide, ice to slide them on, and apparently lots of time to kill. The game is much like bocce ball in Italy and shuffleboard – popular, enjoyable neighborhood activities for young and old – only on ice.

If you’ve never seen curling, it involves team members sliding big round rocks gently across an icy surface at a target. The idea is to put your team’s rocks in the bulls-eye and bump your opponents’ rocks out. Those who are involved with curling say it embodies the facets of any sport: skill, endurance, balance, teamwork, strategy, sportsmanship.

Well, that’s no doubt true. But to me, curling seems to involves a lot of talking, a little sliding across the ice, and guys sweeping the ice with a little scrub brush on a stick. Then more standing around strategizing, talking, pointing, and more talking.

In the hour that I watched, I never saw anybody break a sweat.

The U.S. men’s team, dressed in short-sleeved polo shirts and dark slacks, reminded me of a bunch of nerdy software developers playing hackeysack on their lunch break. They don’t remind me of any world-class athlete engaged in any Olympic-caliber sport. Not at all. They looked a little silly, and the more intense they looked, the goofier it became. I get the feeling that the guys playing – do they call them curlers? – are the ones who didn’t get picked for hockey or other real sports.

I watched enough to understand a little about how curling is scored and some of the strategy involved in the game, and I can see how it might be an appealing pastime in places with a lot of ice, boredom, and beer. But a sport?

The Olympic winter games has plenty of real sports. Nobody can argue that hockey and downhill skiing and even snowboarding are real sports, because they all involve skill, sweat, blood, and danger. I admire any athlete who’s willing and able to, say, ski down a ramp and sail hundreds of feet through the air, or rocket down a ice-covered run on a tiny sled, risking serious injury or death in pursuit of the gold. Those are sports.

If they wanted to get more respect for curling, they ought to combine it with more dangerous aspects of real sports. For instance, instead of sliding the 40-pound stone across the ice, they should pick it up and hurl the thing like a shot-put while the other team tries to block it with their bodies – full-contact curling.

They also could throw in a few of those ice dancers for moving targets. Now that’s a sport I’d watch.