From sacks to stones: Former Vikings star rides the bench for Fairbanks curlers at national championships

Fairbanks curlers Greg Persinger and Colin Hufman weren’t able to repeat as national champions last weekend in Michigan, but at least when they fell, the mighty fell with them.

Mighty as in 6-foot-6 Jared Allen, a former All-Pro defensive end who tormented quarterbacks during a 12-year NFL career.

Allen is 36 and doesn’t look less big or scary than when he was a 255-pound lineman racking up 136 career sacks.

In the years since he retired from football in 2016, he has taken up curling. He made his World Curling Tour debut in a December bonspiel in Eveleth, Minnesota, where Persinger and Hufman won the tournament championship along with skip Rich Ruohenen of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and Phil Tilker of Seattle.

The Ruohenen rink was playing without a fifth in Eveleth, and Allen was looking for a way to play more high-caliber curling. A match was made, and when the defending champs showed up at the national championships in Kalamazoo, they boasted the most famous alternate at the championships.

“We thought it would be fun and honestly, these week-long events get repetitive and sometimes a change, any change, can be the spark a team needs to win,” Hufman said by text. “So we got his contact info and asked if he’d be interested. He was in, and here we are."

Allen spent most of the tournament on the bench. “Hopefully I can be like the practice squad guy who gets the ring at the end,” he said in a story on vikings.com last week.

He didn’t play in Saturday’s finals, where Olympic champion John Shuster led his team to an 8-4 victory over the Ruohonen team. But he did see action in round-robin play at the national championships.

When Allen missed his first shot while filling in at lead near the end of a 9-2 round-robin win, Hufman, who grew up in Fairbanks and lives in Minneapolis now, made the most of a post-game interview.

“It was all his fault,” Hufman said in the vikings.com story. “I told him, ‘Pull off a little bit,’ and he added way too much on his first one.

“… It was pretty embarrassing. We’re going to have a players-only meeting after this and discuss his future with the team.”

These days Allen lives in Nashville, where he put together the All-Pro Curling Team, which includes that former NFL players Marc Bulger, Keith Bulluck and Michael Roos. Their goal is to qualify for the Olympics, although they have a long way to go — their attempt to qualify for last week’s national championship came up short, according to a Reuters story.

Allen is hugely popular in Minnesota, where he played six seasons for the Vikings. He played for a couple of other teams in the final two years of his career, but after he announced his retirement in 2016, Minnesota signed him to a one-day contract so he could retire as a Viking.

Allen curls because he likes the challenge, he told WOOD-TV of Kalamazoo.

“I think as you get older, you have to always challenge yourself,” he said. “You never stop reading, right? People say that reading keeps your brain young. I know businessmen that are constantly saying, ‘You’ve made a bunch of money; why are you still working?’ It’s about the activity, you know, of challenging yourself with something new.”