Category Archives: figure skating

Real person. Real sport.

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Frank Carroll is retiring at 80. He coached figure skating for 58 years, most widely known as the mentor of five-time world champion Michelle Kwan and five other Olympic medalists, including 2010 Olympic winner Evan Lysacek.

In a half-century of covering sports, I can’t say I crossed paths with too many characters more memorable than Carroll. All those heroes and villains in what my sportswriting brethren typically considered real sports—football, baseball, basketball—all those physically gifted protagonists, psychologically vulnerable troupers, philosophically aware artistes and occasionally fanatical wingnuts, yet one of the really fascinating humans was encountered in…skating. Go figure.

(I must acknowledge that in reporting on five Winter Olympics, I long ago was disabused of any notion that, a) figure skating lacked arresting personalities and b) that it was not a sport. An early lesson came from 1992 U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski, a 31-year-old once-divorced, remarried former waitress who partnered on the ice with Rocky Marval, the 26-year-old owner of a small trucking company. The Waitress and the Truck Driver. “To say this isn’t a sport, just because we wear fancy outfits,” Urbanski lectured, “I’d like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eight-inch blade. And then tell me it’s not a sport.”)

Not that there isn’t a theatrical aspect to the endeavor. And Carroll—who spun humorous, involved tales that he illustrated with hand gestures and dramatic expressions—was an ideal example. For a brief time in his youth, after all, he had been an actor. Sort of.

“There were these bad beach party movies that I was in, in the mid-‘60s,” he said. “I was a body. I’m Irish. I’m like Casper the Ghost with this skin, but I had blond hair then and I was the perfect beach bum/surfer. They would spray me tan!”

He is the only son of a teacher who grew up in Worcester, Mass., with a pond near his home that lured him into skating. Take a breath, and listen….

“I used to go to the movies and see those old Movietone newsreels that had pictures of [1948 Olympic gold medalist] Barbara Ann Scott and Dick Button [the 1952 and ’56 Olympic champ]. Then they built an indoor rink in Worcester, across the street from my house.

“I was 12. I was the second person on the ice when it opened. [The owner] was the first. He gave me a key and said, ‘Frankie, if this rink isn’t being used for hockey or lessons, it’s yours.’ I was a very good skater very early because I’d practice at home on the floor. I’d put a dishrag down on the linoleum floor and skate around on that.”

He enrolled at Holy Cross and, based on his regional skating title, was given a partial athletic scholarship and awarded a varsity letter for skating, “even though they didn’t have a skating team,” he said.

“I’d practice early in the morning before the Holy Cross hockey team got on the ice, and they’d line up along the boards, waiting with their hockey sticks. If I missed one thing in my routine, they’d take their sticks and bang on the boards and boo me.

“But if I skated well, they’d all cheer.

“When I finished school, well, you know, you go on with your life. My father thought skating was frivolous or stupid, but I was 21 years old and I signed for more money in a week with the Ice Follies than my dad ever made in a year in his entire life: $250 a week.”

He wound up going to Hollywood at the invitation of friends and found his way, temporarily, into bit parts of those beach movies. “I didn’t know I wanted to coach at all. I’d go to the beach, go to the gym to work out. But there was this little rink in Van Nuys where I gave skating lessons to beginners, and these kids began to improve and I got in demand. So I eventually gave up the cattle call at the studio.”

Just as elaborately—with asides and not-especially pertinent detail—Carroll told of how his accidental discovery of music for a Kwan skating program resembled finding a winning lottery ticket in the street; of how his coaching theory lacked talk of winning because that was “destructive language; it doesn’t make any sense to be promising and building hopes up in the sky”); yet how, before Kwan’s 1998 Olympic final in Nagano, Japan, he “prayed a lot. I went to the Catholic church here because that’s my church, and then I went to the [Buddhist] temple, just to cover my bases.”

Kwan, though the favorite, was beaten by Tara Lipinski that year, and retired with a silver and bronze in two Games. But Carroll—voted into a handful of skating halls of fame—long ago was safely inside the velvet ropes, and got his Olympic coaching gold with Lysacek eight years ago.

He covered his bases. He left his mark. He made things interesting. In a real sport.

I, skeptical

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Actor Margot Robbie (left); Not an actor (right).

“I, Tonya” is filmed in the original profanity. Not something for delicate ears. Nor is it fare for the gullible. Though the Tonya Harding character’s final words are, “That’s the [unprintable] truth,” it’s best to note the film’s opening alert that it is based on “irony-free” and “wildly contradictory” interviews. A word to the wise of the narrator’s possible inclination toward mendacity.

For those among us ink-stained wretches who covered the seriously bizarre 1994 Harding-Nancy Kerrigan Olympic uproar, “I, Tonya” offers Harding’s thoroughly familiar bunker mentality—but to the point that some scenes are complete fiction.

Even before her skating rival Kerrigan was clubbed on the knee during practice for the ’94 Olympic Trials and the FBI quickly fingered Harding’s associates, we knew of Harding’s defensiveness over a troubled past: That her abusive mother had been married six times, her absent father often was between jobs, her marriage to Jeff Gilloly was brief and occasionally violent. We knew that Harding suffered wracking asthma attacks but continued to smoke (though she repeatedly denied that) and that she was forever convinced of unfair treatment by skating judges.

All of that is in the movie. But so are events that appear to have happened only in Harding’s head. There is no evidence, for instance, that she ever marched up to a judging panel during a competition and cursed out the arbiters of success, or that she confronted one judge in a parking garage and was told that she simply didn’t “present the image we want to portray.”

Nor did the real Harding ever deliver a tearful plea when she was sentenced for her role in the attack on Kerrigan—another of the movie’s sympathetic takes on Harding.

As a dramatic device, it works to depict a moment when Harding’s coach supposedly informed her—after Harding’s disappointing fourth-place finish at the 1992 Olympics—that the International Olympic Committee “announced today” it was moving the next Winter Games up by two years, to ’94. In fact, that IOC decision had been made seven years earlier.

Also, to hammer home Harding’s conviction that the entire world doubted her skating, the celluloid Tonya is faced with a male fan harassing her just prior to a competition. Anyone who has spent time around the sport knows there never is any heckling in the prim world of figure skating.

Even the film’s depiction of incessant reproach by Harding’s mother—so well played by Allison Janney that she has been awarded an Oscar—appears to be taken out of the real-life time line. Though theirs unquestionably was a difficult relationship, Harding’s mother was essentially out of her life years before Harding’s peak skating years.

In truth, Harding was not a victim of judging favoritism. The subjective scoring, arcane as it can be, made her the 1991 national champion and ’91 world silver medalist and qualified her for two Olympic teams despite a steady deterioration in her skating power. Having made her mark as the first American woman to land the monster 3 ½-rotation triple axel in competition, at the ’91 nationals, she struggled mightily with her jumps thereafter, repeatedly falling at the marquee competitions. Harding’s complaints about under-financing also were at odds with the skating federation’s records of significant economic support, as well as accounts by her then-agent Michael Rosenberg.

But it’s a movie, no? Some things are exaggerated. There are reviews out there that have described “I, Tonya” as a mockumentary, a satire. The cinematography is top-notch and the acting terrific and, in the end, the details may not be as important as the overall impression left on the popcorn crowd.

Perhaps we should consider the Chinese model. I’m told that, instead of translations faithful to the original English, the Chinese often create their interpretation of a movie with their own title and that, in this case, have re-branded “I, Tonya” to “Obnoxious Woman.”

And I think of the chaotic Harding press conference in Lillehammer, Norway, days before Harding’s 1994 Olympic skate (when she crashed into eighth place while Kerrigan finished second). Even after her ex-husband had ratted on her and the FBI closed in, Harding still was denying any role in the Kerrigan mugging.

Twenty-two years later, after seeing “I, Tonya,” let me paraphrase the New York Times’ Jere Longman’s question to Harding that day: “You have lied to us so many times, why should we believe you now?”