He Had His Moment and Can Skate for the Rest of His Life

Brian Boitano wakes up well before sunrise every morning, without benefit of alarm clock or hotel wakeup call, and always there is a vague disorientation.

Part of it is simply trying to keep track of where he is on the map of America as he fast-forwards through 32 cities in 42 days, headlining an exhibition skating tour. Is this Indianapolis or Akron?

But more than whizzing geography is the sense that something is lost, something very important that he can never get back. The driving force in his life, ultimate excellence in competitive skating, is gone. It’s as if his reason for being were an object someone has sneaked off with.

What he feels is the intense void that nearly all top-level athletes drop into upon retirement. But not many meet the end as abruptly as Boitano, who won the Olympic gold medal in figure skating in Calgary three months ago, then retired soon thereafter.

Having achieved the greatest athletic fantasy, a perfect performance at the ultimate moment of truth, Boitano was suddenly out of a job.

“It hits you in the morning,” Boitano says. “Instead of getting on your Spandex pants and going skating, you get on a suit and go tape a TV show. The adjustment is just amazing. It’s something that’s going to be hard in my life.

“The mount of energy and the amount of difficulty, the challenge of amateur skating is so fulfilling, there’s nothing that can be as challenging as the moment when you go on ice and say, ‘I’ve gotta do it.’ It’s the most risk-taking thing you’ll ever do.

“You’re 24 and there’s nothing that powerful in your future, maybe never. It’s almost like losing your right arm. It’s a matter of telling yourself, ‘Now deal with it. Deal with life.’ Things go on, but you’re different.

“It’s really sad, but at the same time, you’ve done everything you wanted to do in skating, it’s time to go on. You think, ‘What do I do now? Die?’ I guess by being busy, it’s going to be better, but I’m really going to miss amateur skating.”

Jerry West has said that what he missed most when he retired from pro basketball was not the playing or the interaction with his teammates, but the discipline. Be at the airport at 8 a.m. sharp, shoot-around at noon, report for the game at 6.

“That’s it,” Boitano said. “That’s the thing you miss. You feel so proud of yourself for getting up at 4:30 and working out for five hours. The discipline is so fulfilling.”

Say this about Boitano: The kid knows how to suffer in style. If you can no longer be driven by your own Olympic ambitions, you might as well be driven by a liveried chauffeur.

He is working on a deal for his own ice show, he is sifting through movie scripts and TV show offers, he is avalanched by fan mail and he is the grateful recipient of awe and adulation whenever he shows his face on the street.

“It’s like they’ve met God or something,” Boitano says, still incredulous that his few minutes on ice touched so many lives, aroused so much admiration and patriotism.

In describing the outpouring of affection, Brian uses his highest expression of positive amazement: “It’s really neat.”

He can’t buy a meal. His name gets him the best table in any restaurant in America, and he never sees a check. Instead, the manager invariably trots out the house’s finest bottle of champagne.

The mail floods in, the count reaching triple figures every day, a dozen weeks after his night of glory.

“I’ll call my mom and she’ll read me some of the letters. There are marriage proposals (he already has a girlfriend), a lot of songs written for me, lots of mail from kids and mothers, a lot of drawings. One woman sent me her first oil painting, which she painted from a magazine cover. It’s really gratifying to think that what I did inspired someone to do that.”

Boitano will skate at the Forum Sunday in the traveling exhibition of figure skating champions--along with Brian Orser, Debi Thomas, Katarina Witt. He still has the memory, in his head and on his VCR, of his gold-medal performance.

When he first viewed the tape, watching alone as always, he couldn’t believe what he felt. For the first time, he watched himself skate and didn’t nit-pick his performance, didn’t curse aloud and agonize over minute mistakes. Like millions of us, he simply enjoyed the show. He says he felt proud, and humble.

“It will always, always humble me, watching that video,” Boitano said. “You do movies, TV, you forget exactly where you come from, what you were like at that moment. It humbles you so much, remembering what that moment was like. You can never, ever get a big head.”

Runaway ego is no problem. And never again winning a gold medal? Brian can cope with that, too. What he struggles to replace is the joy of the dirty work that got him there.