In the once buzzing sawmill town of Gladstone, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, lumberjacks last week played at their favorite sport, birling. It was the first national birling championship in three years.
Birling is far harder than rolling off a log. It is the art of staying on while others tumble. In birling, two sure-footed log-rollers, standing on a peeled log floating in the water, try to spin it so as to roll each other off. With eyes glued to the other fellow's calked shoes, they "cuff it" (roll the log), "snub it" (stop dead and reverse the rolling). First they roll a...
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