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Former champions hit town in the wake of Olympic fever -- and scandal

Friday, March 08, 2002

By Pohla Smith, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The Rink at PPG Plaza isn't nearly large enough to contain the athletic feats of four-time world figure skating champion Kurt Browning, so the kids with whom he skated had to settle for a single axel instead of a triple.

Kurt Browning The rest of the Team

They weren't disappointed, though, for he had plenty of other tricks up his sleeve.

Soon he had them lined up with hands joined, whizzing around the tight circle of the rink. "Crack the Whip!" he shouted, and a couple of the kids went rocketing off in different directions, laughing in delight despite a temperature in the teens and a hard wind that made it feel like, well, nobody really wanted to know.

The kids weren't laughing as hard as Browning, though, and when one of the Special Olympians presented him with her gold skating medal, he just as obviously was moved.

"That's the only one I never won," said Browning, who ran into bad luck in his trips to the Olympics in 1992 and 1994. He finished sixth at the '92 Albertville Winter Games and fifth at Nagano, Japan. Browning thanked the smiling girl for her gift and hugged her.

Browning, 35, was in Pittsburgh Monday to promote the Stars on Ice show at Mellon Arena Sunday and to make the day of these Special Olympians. He scored high on both counts. He pushed some of the kids around the ice like a train engine, taught three of them how to glide on one knee and posed for picture after picture and video after video. He even skated a couple of laps "the old-fashioned way" with this reporter, who was making her third wobbly appearance on ice since somewhere around 1970.

	Stars On Ice FEATURING: Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi, Katarina Witt, Ilia Kulik, Kurt Browning and others. WHEN: Sunday at 6 p.m. WHERE: Mellon Arena, Downtown. TICKETS: $37 to $58; 412 323-1919. WEB SITE: www.starsonice.com

"Hey, you're doing great for it being 30 years," he said. "Left foot, right foot, what else is there?"

His talent for comedy -- he entertained the Special Olympians with some clownish tripping and stumbling -- is just one of the attributes that makes Browning one of the most beloved male skaters in history and a standout in the star-laden Stars on Ice ensemble cast. He has an uncanny gift for impressions -- anyone who has ever seen his "Casablanca" and Philip Marlowe-style routines will attest to that. And his athleticism -- he was the first skater to land a quadruple jump in competition -- remains that of a far younger man. Browning, the son of a cowboy, also was a talented hockey player as a youngster growing up in Carolina, Alberta, Canada. But he made what proved to be a great decision to concentrate on figure skating when he was 15.

A four-time Canadian champion now in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, Browning had time for seriousness during his visit here, too. The controversy involving the Olympic pairs competition in Salt Lake City upset him as much as any viewer, and he has given the long-ingrained problems in judging much thought.

"You want people to trust your sport, and if people are talking more about the judging than they are the skating, then something's wrong," he said.

"You know you get used to things in your own house. You get used to how things work and you get used to judges having opinions and changing other judges' opinions and campaigning for their skaters. You get used to that and you grow up with it and you live with it.

"But out-and-out cheating -- let's clean house. Let's be respectable. You come and pay money to see Katarina Witt, Kristi Yamaguchi because they were great champions. You want people to trust that they're the one who won."

Browning said he has talked to a "high-up" man in the International Skating Union who previewed serious changes to be considered at the next meeting.

They include picking judges closer in time to the competitions, leaving less time for pressuring other judges.

"They might not be putting in numbers any more," Browning added. "They'll be putting in excellent, very good, good, average, below average, mediocre and bad, and they'll just push a button so you can pick the excellent button for the top three skaters. ... Then they'll have to figure out some system that ranks how tough each jump is and what factor that jump is and weight it like diving. Then the computer will have this magic number, how hard that program is and it'll [multiply] that number by what percentage.

"This is what I've heard."

Browning has an idea of his own.

"I've always hated that one judge gives both marks," he said. "It should be one judge gives a technical mark; one judge gives an artistic mark, and then you don't control the outcome so much. So why even have two marks? Why not give just one mark like they do in gymnastics. ...

Browning, who is married to the principal dancer of the National Ballet of Canada, Sonia Rodriguez, also has wondered if going outside skating to find the judges for artistry might be a good direction to go. "A specialist panel," he said. "There's a dancer, there's a singer, there's a musician, there's a skater."

A change in the fact that judges are allowed to attend every practice also might be beneficial, he said. Instead, he suggests "an open practice where you can preview your program for the judges, you can choose to go or not and then those judges sit there and you give it your best shot to influence them or to prepare them for what [the skaters] are going to be doing because it's hard" for a judge to see.

Browning, who lives with his wife of five years in Toronto, noted that the number of ice shows touring here and abroad have multiplied despite occasional scandals or controversies like the one in Salt Lake City. "If the Golf Channel can exist, we can do as much skating as we want to. I'm a fan of golf, but a whole channel of it? I always stop at golf; I always watch for a while. If [the ice show] is good, there'll be room for it. The bad things don't stay, and the good things do, and the people make that decision."

And Stars on Ice has always been a good show -- it's been touring since 1986. But this is the first year without its founder, Scott Hamilton. Potential audiences have to wonder what it's like without him.

"It's quiet in the dressing room," Browning quipped. "He's so funny.

"It's been fine," he added. "It's always been designed as a show that didn't rely on one person to be there. We can have an injury and the show will still go on. That's why his name was never put on it. It never was Scott Hamilton's Stars on Ice."

Attendance is down some this season, Browning said, but he blames the Sept. 11 terrorist attack -- "it was a terrible blow to all sorts of things" -- and the Olympics.

"Before the Olympics there's always a down," he said. "We've seen it every year, and after the Olympics it goes back up."

With Hamilton gone from the show, Browning said he's had to assume a little more responsibility. "I get the microphone a little more often [on ice]," he said. "They give me some choreographic responsibilities as well."

But Browning said he and the rest of the men are just supporting actors to Tara Lipinski, Yamaguchi and Witt.

"The show's all about the girls," he said. To that extent, the men have a number where they stage a sort of panty raid in protest. "It's more of a fishnet raid," he said.

But Browning is wrong if he thinks the show is just about "the girls." Last year one of the most popular numbers featured the men skating on chairs. This year, they skate on tables, a routine choreographed by Olympic ice dance champion Christopher Dean.

"It's very playful and very physical. We're over the tables, under the tables, flinging them around," Browning said. "We're sliding on them, rolling on them while they spin. They're wood and they're heavy. I fall back on it and land on it. I spin it around me ... so that's fun."

For skaters and audience alike. Remember, there are no judges.