How a football guy can become a figure skating guy
I can hear it now: “Too much skating” in the Being There column.
I don’t disagree, but since Skate Canada announced this week I would be joining their hall of fame along with five others — a quintet that actually deserves to be in Canadian skating’s Hall of Fame — I’ve been asked a zillion times what originally drew me to a sport that seems out of step with the football, baseball and hockey, which dominates the rest of my sporting landscape.
Plus, and this counts most, the sports editor said to write about it; and sometimes I like to let him think he’s my boss.
So here’s the Coles Notes version. It dates back to the greatest job in the history for 17year-old Canadian boys, and I came to it through football and hockey.
My high school football coach also had a summer job at what was, in the mid-1960s, the world’s biggest hockey school, located at Tam O’Shanter Golf and Curling Club in northeast Toronto. He ran and staffed the off-ice program, which included all the counsellors for the more than 350 players (all boys), and the teaching of non-hockey sports, including swimming and conditioning.
In 1966, between grades 12 and 13 (note to younger readers, grade 13 actually existed … and not as a victory lap) I was a councillor at “The Tam.” And the next two summers I worked teaching fitness and swimming, to the hockey kids when they weren’t on the ice.
Astute readers will note by the date, that after my first summer, the Maple Leafs were about to win their last Stanley Cup, and several of them worked at the hockey school: Frank Mahovlich, Eddie Shack, Kent Douglas, Wayne Carleton, among them. Pete Mahovlich worked there, too, and so did future Leaf coach Tom Watt. And once a week a half-dozen other Leafs and ex-Leafs would drop around to see their teammates.
Saturday nights, many of us would play hockey on one of the big rinks, especially in August as the out-of-shape players (it was different then) began panicking and tried to get some skating in before training camp. Lots of times I found the two Mahovlich brothers bearing down on me during those late-night shinny games.
The school itself was overseen by Bruce Hyland, the famous figure skating coach who had invented power skating a couple of years earlier.
There was a golf course we could use in our offtime, a bowling alley in the basement, and a massive swimming pool open to the public, many of whom were 17-year-old girls. And we could skate on the empty rinks every night, which we often did.
I didn’t know until my second day there that there was something else going on. That’s when I saw a cute girl my age in a miniskirt in the lobby. She went outside, past the pool and to the rink farthest from the office, to a rink we never used until the end of the day. I followed her in, then immediately forgot about her, because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. About 50 figure skaters, most of them girls, jumping all over the ice and skating backwards faster and more than I had ever seen hockey players do. And they were falling from great heights, with no protection, onto their hips, or elbows, and sometimes heads. Undaunted, they got up and tried the same jumps again. I was mesmerized at this 50-ring circus: these people were tougher than hockey players and waaaaaay better skaters. I didn’t know it at the time, but something about skating lodged very deep inside me that day. I soon arranged my break times to coincide with the skaters’ breaks, and became close to Debi Wilkes, later a TV commentator, but then a competitive skater and pairs world silver medallist. The skater who had originally led me to the rink, Debi’s best friend at the time, became my best friend, and about 30 years later my girlfriend. They, and other top skaters like national champion Jay Humphrey and Rick Stephens, taught me a lot about skating; the politics; Canada’s trouble with compulsory figures; and what jumps were hardest. I began watching the sport on TV when it came to the Canadians and Worlds, because many of the Tam skaters were in those competitions. I didn’t pay that much attention, but was aware of what it meant to do a triple Lutz or try a triple Axel. So, when I moved to Orillia to work at the Packet & Times 13 years later, I was shocked to find a 17year-old Brian Orser training there, almost incognito. He had just landed the world’s second triple Axel (and would go on to do the next half-dozen or so), and the first by a junior. And The Packet hadn’t written about him, partly because the staff didn’t understand the significance of that groundbreaking jump. Because of those hockey-school years in the ’60s, I did understand. Within a month, I was interviewing Orser and within a year or two was following him to Skate Canada, Nationals, Worlds and, eventually, the 1984 and ’88 Olympics. No one else was covering the sport regularly in the late ’70s and early ’80s, so I got lots of freelance work, which helped me further educate myself about the sport. It kind of snowballed from there, especially when figure skating became more of a mainstream sport after Orser won the ’87 Worlds, followed by multiple wins by Kurt Browning and Elvis Stojko. Skating has sent me around the northern hemisphere, and taken me to a number of Olympics, while at the same time causing me great outrage with its judging irregularities, culminating in Salt Lake. But I wouldn’t have traded it for the world, and I’ll continue to write about it. And all because I was a football player working at a hockey school. Veteran Spectator columnist Steve Milton has pretty much seen it all in his 40 years covering sports around the world, and in Being There he will relive special moments of those stories, from the inside out, every Friday. If there’s a memorable sports moment you want Steve to write about, let him know at smilton@thespec.com. Chances are he was there.