FIGURE SKATING / WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS : Freewheeling Bowman on Thin Ice With His Longtime Coach

He was like the football quarterback in a losing effort who decides to ignore the playbook and tells his receivers just to go long. About 2 1/2 minutes into his 4 1/2-minute freestyle program Thursday night at figure skating’s World Championships, former U.S. champion Christopher Bowman decided he was generating no rapport with the crowd or the judges, so he improvised.

For figure skaters, who spend hundreds of hours during the year polishing the programs they will use in competition, ad-libbing is not done.

But the judges at the Halifax Metro Centre seemed to appreciate it. Their marks enabled Bowman to improve from fifth to third place behind Canada’s Kurt Browning and the Soviet Union’s Viktor Petrenko, although it was unclear afterward whether the judges were scoring him for technical merit, artistic impression or chutzpah.

One person, however, who did not appreciate the performance was Bowman’s coach, Frank Carroll.

After the awards ceremony Thursday night, Carroll, still in shock, asked reporters, “Why do I have the only maniac in figure skating?”

Carroll has coached Bowman, who is from Van Nuys, for 17 years. Most of that time was spent at the Pickwick Ice Rink in Burbank until last year, when they moved to the International Ice Castles at Lake Arrowhead. There have been many occasions when the straight and narrow Carroll, 50, has threatened to cut loose the impetuous Bowman, 22, who describes himself as “Hans Brinker from hell.”

And on Friday, Carroll seemed closer than ever to giving up.

“I think we have to sit down and really hash things out, to see where we’re going, whether we’re going to continue,” he said. “I can’t see training somebody who’s untrainable, coaching somebody who’s uncoachable. I don’t see the point of going on like it is now.”

Bowman agreed that it might be time for them to part before their stormy on-ice relationship interferes with their close friendship.

“I sympathize with him very much,” he said. “But I don’t think I have the power to accommodate him. I’ve told myself I would and I’ve told him I would, but it never works out that way.

“Frank has always been Frank and always will be Frank. Christopher is changing all the time.”

Their problems in the past have been caused by Bowman’s lackadaisical training habits. Carroll said Bowman was out of shape before last month’s National Championships, contributing to a back injury that forced him to withdraw and lose a chance to defend the title he won in 1989.

Asked after Thursday night’s performance about his plans for this year, Bowman said, “I’m going to take 11 months off and then prepare for the worlds.”

It was intended as a flip comment, but it is that kind of attitude that tests Carroll’s patience.

Carroll, however, was too exasperated about Bowman’s freewheeling freestyle program to think beyond the immediate future.

Because he stepped out of a triple axel, the most difficult of triple jumps, early in the program, Bowman added another triple axel in the middle, where his triple toe loop was supposed to be. That strategy was foiled when he turned the triple axel into a single axel. And he still had to find a place for the triple toe loop. So he inserted it at the end of the program.

Carroll credited Bowman for his quick thinking but thought he bailed out too soon. Even if Bowman could not have won the bronze medal with the original program, Carroll said, he should have stayed with it.

“Why would you violate one of the primary rules, which is that you shouldn’t change a program in the middle of the World Championships when you’ve trained hour after hour, year after year?”

Bowman had an answer. He said he believed Browning and Petrenko, who skated before him, performed programs technically superior to his, and he wanted to “put the pedal to the metal.”

“I thought people wouldn’t really notice,” he said.

They noticed.

Afterward, prominent Canadian choreographer Sandra Bezic-Ricci said: “It was insane.”

Bowman said he skates for himself, not the critics.

“This is a competition,” he said. “The coach can stand on his head and spit nickels, but if Kurt Browning or Viktor Petrenko do something, I have to fight fire with fire. I’m there, I have to do it. I did what I felt I needed to do.”

Meantime, Bowman found himself in the middle of another controversy Friday that might or might not have been of his making. This one occurred in the women’s competition, in which U.S. champion Jill Trenary was leading before the original program.

But she failed to perform a planned triple jump and fell to third place behind the Soviet Union’s Natalia Lebedeva and the United States’ Holly Cook.

Midori Ito of Japan, who was in 10th place after her disastrous compulsory figures, won the original program and improved to fourth overall. But she cannot defend her championship unless she wins today’s freestyle competition while Lebedeva, Trenary and Cook all finish below second place.

Trenary admitted that she slept for only three hours Thursday night because of a party next door in Bowman’s room at the hotel.

“It wasn’t Christopher,” said Trenary, who did not blame the disappointing performance on her fatigue. “It was his friends. I don’t want to blame Christopher. He felt bad, and he apologized.”

But there were questions about Trenary’s failure to complain to U.S. Figure Skating Assn. officials, who could have moved her to another room, and the officials’ failure to anticipate the problem, considering Bowman’s party-animal reputation and the fact he had completed his competition.

Bowman was moved to another hotel early Friday morning.