Coach With a Midas Touch : Nicks Has Five Skaters Hoping for Medals at Albertville, and There Is No Doubt of His Rank With Them and Their Famed Predecessors

Insulated from the cold by thick-soled boots and a parka that seems to swallow him, John Nicks is a stolid figure in a tableau of bright and darting colors at the Ice Capades Chalet skating rink in Costa Mesa.

As Nicks watches from a corner, U.S. men’s figure skating champion Christopher Bowman flashes across the ice and soars into a jump.

A few feet away, Jenni Meno and Scott Wendland, who were second in the pairs event at last month’s U.S. championship meet, spin in unison and then skate to Nicks for a critique, imitating him as he extends his leg to demonstrate a more graceful pose.

Natasha Kuchiki and Todd Sand, the third-ranked American pair, glide through a sequence of difficult moves, winning an approving nod from Nicks as they finish.

Never does Nicks raise his voice or gesture theatrically. He’s not flashy, but he is successful. He coached JoJo Starbuck and Ken Shelley to U.S. pairs titles from 1970-72 and Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner to five consecutive pairs titles and the 1979 world championship.

Nicks has five skaters who will compete for Olympic medals later this month in Albertville, France.

To Nicks, a Briton who has lived in Southern California for three decades, such a bonanza at 62 is amusing and rewarding.

“A lot of people have complimented me on my coaching, which is very nice,” he said. “But I have a lot of losers, too.”

His skaters--and the parents who entrust their children to him--say no one coached by Nicks is a loser.

“We wouldn’t be where we are today without him,” said Sand, who combined with Kuchiki to win a bronze medal at the 1991 World Championships. “He’s a master. He commands both of our utmost respect. He’s been great.”

Said Bowman, who has been working with Nicks since November: “He’s very serious and direct and to the point. There’s no ‘flimsy-flamsy’ way of training with John Nicks. . . . In the back of my mind, I knew John Nicks was the person who would have the experience and roadwork laid out to do the work I needed to do in a short period of time. It’s paid off tenfold in the end. Things couldn’t be better.”

Nearly 40 skaters, ranging in age from 7 to 28, twirl and glide under Nicks’ instruction in Costa Mesa, his base the last 10 years. The honors won by his students attest to his expertise, and the reverence shown, even by skaters with distant Olympic dreams, testify to his concern for them all.

“He watches out for his kids,” said Elinore Birk of Newport Beach, whose 15-year-old daughter, Shannon, is a junior pairs skater. “All his kids are special to him.

“He doesn’t put up with any nonsense on the ice, but he knows how to let them have fun, and they get the work done. I don’t think there’s anybody here who doesn’t respect the man.”

Bowman’s mother, Joyce, considers Nicks’ firmness a stabilizing influence on her son.

“He’s very supportive of Chris, and he’s tried to take some of the pressures off him,” Joyce Bowman said. “They get along really well. Mr. Nicks won’t put up with any monkey business, and Chris knows that.”

Nicks speaks in conversational tones, never bullying skaters or stifling their creativity.

“He wants to take my personality--which is the strongest point of my skating--and he wants to add to it,” Bowman said.

“I get a lot of pleasure when young skaters are successful,” said Nicks, who won the 1953 world pairs title with his sister, Jennifer, after having finished eighth in the 1948 Olympics and fourth in the 1952 Games. “One of my weaknesses is what to say to them when they’re not successful, when they mess up, and that does happen. Some coaches scream, some coaches kiss them. Some say, ‘Let’s leave it to tomorrow.’

“When they’ve failed, it’s very difficult, because I care for them.”

The nightmare Kuchiki and Sand experienced during last month’s national meet was obvious. Their hope of winning a second successive title was crushed in the long program, when Sand fell as they attempted side-by-side double axels and later misstepped on the same jump, and Kuchiki two-footed the landing of a double flip. They finished third, behind Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marval and their rinkmates, Meno and Wendland.

It was left to Nicks to dissect their mistakes without destroying their confidence, a task he performed with frankness tempered by compassion.

“It was a failure. It was night and day, Wednesday and Thursday, the two programs they skated,” Nicks said. “They skated incredibly well and won the original program. They couldn’t have skated better. That program would have put them in the top three in the Olympics. The next night, coming out and skating very poorly as they did, was such a surprise, certainly to me. They’d been training well and the practices at Orlando had been fine.

“There were three or four obvious failures in the routine, and we talked about it. You can’t say it was bad ice or bad luck or anything of the sort. It was just a bad performance. But once you understand that, understand that you can do so much better and you have done better, then you start to come out of it. I tried to be of some support because they felt embarrassed to have performed as they did.

“I was particularly pleased with Natasha. In the past she had not handled adversity well. She cried often. This time she kept her composure. She learned something, if not about skating, then about life.”

Nicks’ life has taken some unexpected but happy turns since his youth in England. After he and his sister won the world pairs title, they skated with an ice show for two years. He worked in Africa before suffering a broken foot and returning home to England, where he went to work in his father’s retail sports outlet.

“I missed skating a lot,” he said.

When his sister, who had married and moved to Vancouver, suggested he might find coaching jobs in North America, he packed up his wife and two children and moved to Canada. After a plane crash near Brussels killed the American skaters and coaches headed for the 1961 World Championships, U.S. Figure Skating Assn. officials asked Nicks if he wanted to fill a job left open by the death of a coach from the Iceland rink in Paramount. Nicks was interested enough to take the job and stay for 10 years.

He scored his first coaching success in Paramount, transforming Starbuck and Shelley from precocious youths into accomplished athletes who won bronze medals at the 1971 and ’72 World Championships and finished fourth in the 1972 Olympics.

“Since then, some of the skaters I’ve been associated with did not learn their basic skating from me,” Nicks said. “JoJo and Ken I’d taken at 7 or 8, and I was responsible for the end product, their world championships performance. It was great for me. They were a good couple and they worked well together.”

His success with Starbuck and Shelley was the first link in a chain of championships. Because Starbuck and Shelley had captured their imagination, Babilonia and Gardner wanted to work with their idols’ coach; because of Babilonia and Gardner’s success, Kuchiki’s mother, a former amateur competitor and show skater, concluded that Nicks was the right coach for her daughter when Natasha’s progress with her first partner stalled.

Tiffany Chin, the 1985 U.S. women’s champion, trained with Nicks for four years, as did Robert Wagenhoffer, a nationally ranked American singles competitor.

Nicks began coaching Babilonia and Gardner when they were adolescents. Exceptionally athletic and closer in size than most pairs--East Germany and the Soviet Union customarily paired tall men with tiny girls who could be thrown into the air--Babilonia and Gardner brought a new dimension to pairs skating. Working with Nicks in Santa Monica, they broke the Soviet stranglehold on pairs supremacy by winning the 1979 world championship in Vienna.

Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev of the Soviet Union, who had won the previous six pairs titles, did not compete in Vienna because Rodnina had recently had a baby. However, she was ready to reclaim her title in the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid, setting up a dramatic contest with Babilonia and Gardner. That meeting never took place, canceled when a pulled groin muscle and Gardner unable to skate.

“They were the existing titleholders and were favorites for the title,” Nicks said of his pair. “Rodnina and Zaitsev were a wonderful couple for many years, but they were getting on, in figure skating terms, and Tai and Randy were at their peak.”

Nicks hopes Kuchiki and Sand will reach a competitive peak at Albertville. After only six months together, they finished second in the 1990 U.S. championship meet and qualified for the World Championships. After persuading the International Skating Union to waive its rule that skaters must be at least 14--Kuchiki was then 13--they finished 11th in their first world competition. Their leap to third place last year was astonishing.

“I’ve never seen a pair come together so successfully so quickly,” Nicks said.

Their greatest successes are yet to come, he says. He believes them capable of winning a medal in Albertville, with Meno and Wendland more likely to be on the victory stand in 1994.

“I would hope the improvement I see this year will continue next year, or however long (Kuchiki and Sand) keep going . . . especially on her side,” Nicks said. “She was a little girl and not mature or sophisticated when they got together. She’s not as good as she’s going to be in her musical interpretation.”

Coaching students of various ages, as with Kuchiki and Sand, keeps Nicks from getting bored.

“I really enjoy the challenge,” he said. “It makes me, I think, be a different person through the day. You cannot teach somebody who’s 10 years old the same way as somebody who is 25. There’s different motivation.

“That comes into play particularly with Sand and Kuchiki. She’s 15 now and he’s 28. Having to work with them at the same time and use the phraseology both understand is not easy sometimes. You watch her and you see an 18-year-old young lady out there, and physically and athletically she looks 18. But when you talk to her, you remember she’s 15.”

Bowman presented Nicks with one of the greatest challenges of the coach’s career.

Considered temperamental and stubborn, he left his longtime coach, Frank Carroll, in 1990 and moved to Toronto to work with Toller Cranston. That arrangement unraveled last year, when Cranston’s professional skating career limited the time he spent with Bowman. After asking his agent, Michael Rosenberg, to approach Nicks, Bowman moved to Costa Mesa to train at the Ice Capades Chalet.

Happy in his new surroundings, Bowman skated well, if a bit cautiously, in winning the U.S. men’s title last month. Nicks had no quarrel with Bowman’s showing--or with Bowman’s behavior since they began collaborating.

“I must tell you whenever I’ve worked with Christopher here, he’s never been disrespectful,” Nicks said. “There’s been no problem at all. When he’s out of a routine, that’s when he seems to have problems with self-discipline. . . .

“I’ve enjoyed working with him and particularly enjoyed his performance at nationals. He came to me and wasn’t in good shape. Our objective was just to get him onto the team. He was criticized by the media, particularly by (TV commentator) Dick Button, which I felt was unfair. He performed two routines and he never put a foot wrong, was never off balance. He was the best one out there. He won it.”

Even if his skaters come home laden with medals, Nicks has no intention of retiring.

After all, he has more possible world and Olympic champions to groom: The brother-sister team of Nicole and Gregory Sciarrotta of Huntington Beach won the national junior pairs title last month, and 12-year-old Michelle Cho of Costa Mesa won the novice girls’ division.

“I go year after year,” he said, “trying to do the best I can.”