The stretch of time that lies between the final college football bowl and the first pitch of baseball’s opening day is long and forbidding. But it does provide an opportunity for fans to enjoy the only spectator sport that makes winter bearable.
Figure skating.
I know, I know, there are people whose idea of cold-weather entertainment is watching grossly elongated men lope up and down a wood-covered rectangle, trying to squeeze a ball through a metal hula hoop. Or maybe some snaggletoothed refugees from the Canadian tundra whacking sticks at a chunk of black plastic, in between trying to beat each other unconscious. Not me. Deciding whether to watch Tara Lipinski or Christian Laettner seems like choosing between a day at the beach and a week in traction.
The uninitiated think figure skating is about as much of a sport as square dancing. They regard it as a prissy amalgam of things that have no place in athletics–schmaltzy prerecorded music, arbitrary scoring, self-conscious artistry and sequined costumes.
Ha. Go to an NBA game, and you will hear far more music than at a skating competition, and it will hurt your ears to boot. If you think incomprehensible judging is unique to figure skating, ask the Atlanta Braves about umpire Eric Gregg’s strike zone–or find a football fan who can explain, in 250 words or less, what constitutes pass interference. Plenty of title fights have been decided by boxing judges who might have been the inspiration for “Mr. Magoo.”
The people who think balletic gestures have no place in sport are the same ones who swoon over Jerry Rice’s graceful leaping catches. And I have yet to see Michelle Kwan or even Nicole Bobek appear in public in anything as laughable as the Denver Broncos’ uniforms, to say nothing of that hideous fringed loincloth that welterweight Hector Camacho wears in the ring.
What does skating have to offer true sports aficionados? Well, to start with, it features acrobatics that would leave Michael Jordan sucking wind. A female figure skater can do jumps requiring her to make three complete revolutions in the air before landing on a single slender blade of metal. What’s more, she may do half a dozen of them in the space of 4 1/2 minutes–all with a smile on her face and no hint of physical exertion. And we shouldn’t forget the men, who are just as athletic and even prettier.
Figure skating has been blessedly immune to the less enchanting developments afflicting other sports–if you leave out Tonya Harding, which figure skating has been more than happy to do. You will see no trash-talking on the ice, no strutting and gesturing after a good performance, no bench-emptying brawls, no psycho coaches, no labor disputes, no drug scandals, no endless expansion, no Bud Selig. Tonya, meanwhile, has moved on to other pastimes, including a stint as a manager in a sport better suited to her character–professional wrestling.
More important, figure skating competitions have been able to retain the sort of drama that you somehow just don’t find in a mid-season face-off between the Canucks and the Sabres. There are only a few big contests each year, and they mean something. In basketball and hockey, innumerable teams play for months merely to winnow out the few that don’t get to go to the playoffs. At the U.S. national skating championships, it all gets settled in a week.
Speaking of brevity, the skaters’ long programs, which last all of four minutes, are a lot easier to sit through than your typical Monday Night Football telecast, which in length and tedium has come to resemble a meeting of the central committee of the North Korean Communist Party. Even so, Monday Night Football still takes less time than the last two minutes of a basketball game. And once a skater starts her routine–newcomers won’t believe this–there’s no timeout midway for a commercial!
I’m not the only one to recognize the attractions of the sport. Figure skating outdraws everything but the NFL and the NBA on TV, and CBS has responded to popular demand by scheduling it on 10 of the 17 evenings of the upcoming Winter Olympics. In the last Olympics, some 45 million people in this country watched the women’s competition–and probably a third of those were big hairy guys who could have been tuned to some more macho fare on ESPN.
Something is obviously overcoming their bias against this supposedly bogus sport. For me, it’s the pleasure of watching lissome young athletes perform astonishingly difficult feats in an atmosphere of tension and electricity. And you know what else? I like sequins.
