THE OLYMPICS WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : On Ice or Off, He Loves Being Hard to Figure : Skating: Believe him or not, Bowman keeps everyone guessing . . . and expecting more.

Question to Christopher Bowman, news conference, U.S. figure skating championships, Orlando, Fla., Jan. 9, 1992: “Why should we take you seriously anymore?”

Bowman: “Is this a trick question?”

When a message was flashed by computer to the Hollywood-born, Valley-boy blade runner, Christopher Bowman, to wish him luck Thursday when he skates in the Winter Olympics and to volunteer a 1992 campaign slogan, “Van Nuys Guys Don’t Finish Last,” he also was asked if there were any last words for the folks back home.

All we can repeat of his reply is that it was very funny, slightly nutty and totally outrageous--which is pretty much Christopher’s biography--and that he signed it: “Bowman the Showman.”

So, go on. Take him seriously. No, go on. Take him seriously . . . not. Christopher is a walking contradiction. No, Christopher is a skating contradiction. Equal parts famous and infamous. Someone who worked so hard to become so distinguished, who keeps hearing how distinguished he might have become had he simply worked harder. Part savoir faire, part l’aissez faire. That’s Bowman, figure skating’s most difficult-to-figure figure.

The French press has taken to calling him “Le Kid d’Hollywood,” and all you really have to know about le kid is that he made his TV debut in a comedy called “The Good Guys,” made his cinema debut in a horror film called “The Lost Boys” and, in both, he was typecast.

The critics speak:

Frank Carroll, his coach from age 5 1/2 into adulthood, after the 1990 World Championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia: “Why do I have the only maniac in figure skating?”

Toller Cranston, who coached him next: “Christopher is the most undisciplined skater in the history of the world.”

Ellen Burka, who coached him next: “It’s sad to say for someone of his age, but he needs someone to supervise him 24 hours a day.” And, yet: “Christopher is the greatest performer on Earth.”

John Nicks, who coaches him now: “The thing is, Christopher is an actor. One day you get Act I, Scene IV. Next day you get Act III, Scene II. The Christopher you see in rehearsal isn’t necessarily the Christopher you see when he gets in front of the camera.”

Does Bowman deny it?

On the contrary, he appreciates it. He eats it up with a spoon. He delights when you suggest that his professional tour someday be called “Sybil on Ice.” He manifests multiple personalities. His showman nickname is literally his signature. His “Hans Brinker from Hell” identity is not his curse; it’s his personal creation. On his arm, he wears a tattoo of a devil in diapers, bearing the inscription: “Nobody’s Perfect.”

He’s both showman and showoff.

He’s also a likable kid who likes to be liked.

And money’s no object.

“I didn’t get into this for the frankincense, myrrh and gold,” Bowman says. What he will say next, no one knows.

Question: “Got anything special planned for the Olympics?”

Bowman: “Maybe I’ll pull an Oral Roberts.”

Q: “What’s that?”

Bowman: “Say if they don’t give me the gold, I’ll kill myself.”

He is glib and verbose and can peel off enough non sequiturs in any given sentence that when he finishes you feel compelled to award perfect scores: 6.0, 6.0, 6.0. But nobody’s perfect. He is giddy and goofy one minute, then so genuinely emotional and intensely sensitive that when he finishes you feel compelled to say: “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

He has undeniable charisma, which magnetizes people. He also labors to affect charisma, which repels people. The fact that Bowman clearly is so sufficiently gifted to win an Olympic gold medal is the very thing that simultaneously annoys and amuses some who already have won gold medals.

Take Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion, who jokes that although most figure skaters are unique, “Christopher is definitely more unique,” and says that if the work-allergic Bowman ever bothered to apply himself diligently for 10 or 11 months, nobody could touch him.

On the other hand, Hamilton, having noted the handsome Bowman’s growing groupie population and devil-may-care manner, can’t help acknowledging: “Anyone who does an ‘Up Close and Personal’ on the beach at Malibu with four girls in bikinis is my kind of guy.”

Bowman is not, however, Dick Button’s kind of guy. They have a mutual ammunition society. After Christopher won his second national championship at Orlando with a deliberately conservative program so as not to risk his placement on the Olympic team, Button, the 1948 and ’52 gold medalist turned TV commentator, described Bowman’s program as “boring, ordinary, simple, sedate, conservative and dull.”

Bowman’s return fire?

“At least I have my hair.”

That he does. Lots of it. Bowman has been known to dye his dark hair darker. Then again, for a joke on a coach who preferred Christopher to be more serious and less colorful, he dyed it blond. It came out orange. Now it’s jet black again. And so are his costumes. They used to be spangled and cute. At the 1990 Goodwill Games, Bowman wore a bow tie and suspenders. He tore off the tie and threw it. He plucked off the rhinestones and threw them. It was time for a new image.

He can tell you why.

He says: “I consider myself a person first and a skater-athlete second, and some people put skating first and I find that terribly sad. . . . That’s why you see a lot of them go belly-up in the bathroom before they perform. . . . I wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t want to go off in a strait-jacket followed by the guys with the butterfly nets.”

And he says: “Work is exactly what it is, a four-letter word. This isn’t like boxing where you’ve got to be in shape or whammo, you’re dead. It’s not like heart surgery, where one mistake is fatal.”

And he says: “But I’d just like to add that skating is something that defines my own psyche, what kind of person I am, what am I doing in this sport, what I get out of this sport, and that’s very precious to me. Skating is an emotional experience and I’m a very emotional guy. I skate with every drop of my blood and my whole soul. That’s the Bowman medicine. Without skating, I have no idea what I would be, where I would be, who I would be. Some guys overlook that, try to hide that facade, try to say, ‘I’m superhuman, I’m stronger than anything.’ Well, I’m not. I have insecurities like anyone else. The first cut is always the deepest. But, it’s like a boxer friend of mine from Van Nuys told me, you’ve got to roll with the punches.”

I forget the question.

Question: “Twenty years from now, how would you sum up Christopher Bowman’s career in skating?”

Bowman: “He loved it . . . he did it . . . why? . . . and, if it isn’t Mexico and it isn’t new, why do they call it New Mexico?”

Christopher was born March 30, 1967, in Hollywood, the only child of Nelson Bowman, a repairman for a petroleum firm, and Joyce, who was employed in the entertainment industry by a producer. At six months, he was playing a baby in a TV show. He eventually did more than 200 commercials and a “Little House on the Prairie.” He also was dazzled by a rink inside a Van Nuys mall and went for lessons at the Pickwick Ice Rink in Burbank for Frank Carroll, who thought the 5 1/2-year-old resembled “a wind-up doll.”

Was he otherwise athletic?

Uh, no.

“I actually hold the world record,” Bowman jokes to this day, “as the only person ever to strike out in T-ball.”

Christopher considered Carroll his third parent. Said as much, many times. Exaggerated affectionately that he spent more time with his coach than with his father. He developed under Carroll, who had previously tutored Linda Fratianne and Tiffany Chin, first at Pickwick and later at the International Ice Castles in Lake Arrowhead. Their aim was the ’88 Olympics, and their setback, two years beforehand, when Bowman’s bicycle bumped into a car, leaving him with a stress fracture and punctured vein in his left calf, did not prevent him from placing seventh at the Calgary Olympics.

A year later, Bowman became world champion. He was better than ever. He also was wilder than ever. Rooming with skater Paul Wylie, he would return at dawn after an all-nighter, leap on the bed and scream: “Good morning, Vietnam!”

And girls, yeah, there were those. Carroll said Bowman had one “in every port, even in the Iron Curtain.”

Before the ’88 Olympics, Bowman regretted that he was “trying to be Mr. Congeniality, Mr. Howdy Doody . . . look at me, with a light bulb on my head, dancing around.” Lampshade, maybe he meant. And yet, while at Notre Dame for an exhibition, Christopher brought down the house with an on-ice impersonation of football Coach Lou Holtz, for which the CNN cable network featured him as “Play of the Day.”

He isn’t merely ready for the Ice Capades. He’s ready for the Ice Charades.

But Bowman’s act wore thin on coach after coach. He split with Carroll after 17 years with a nationally televised quarrel at the 1990 worlds, after which Christopher called his parents to tell them he wanted to quit skating. He didn’t. He moved to Toronto, where Cranston advised him to get serious. Serious music. Serious clothing.

Said Cranston: “The cheeseburger had to be changed into filet mignon.”

Hot dog, maybe he meant.

Cranston tried. So did Burka. But if Bowman was trying, he also was trying. Cranston said that although he greeted Bowman with open arms, what he needed were the arms of an octopus. He and Burka couldn’t get him to practice. They couldn’t watch him around the clock.

“She was day-care, I was night-care,” Cranston said.

Burka went so far as to call Christopher’s mother and urge her to move to Toronto, saying her son needed 24-hour supervision.

The importance of what happened next is in question to this day. Bowman got mugged. On a Toronto street last October, a punch broke a bone in his face, necessitating plastic surgery. But because Christopher elected not to file a police report, rumors began, rumors so persistent that even the president of the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. questioned Bowman about drug use, questions no longer tolerated by Bowman’s current coach, Nicks, who shouts down anyone attempting to ask them.

Left on his own, Bowman, who can handle himself with the best of them, said: “I find it flattering that people have nothing better to talk about. . . . Am I that big a star, that big a celebrity?”

Not really. Even with the titles he has won, there remains much conjecture that Bowman could have--should have--done more, that he was undone by what the French newspaper L’Equipe called “a self-destructive personality,” that whatever decline he endured was directly related to, as Burka put it, Christopher having several personalities.

“One of them is very likable. Another is very irresponsible,” she said in January. “Lately, his behavior has been erratic and out of control.”

And yet, she added: “The miracle is that while the others become unnerved under the pressure, Christopher becomes 10 times better. I’ve never seen that in another skater.”

Which is why Bowman must be considered a prospect, although he is probably not the favorite, to win the Olympic gold. Nicks is a no-nonsense stickler for training. He says actor Bowman understands his role. And that role is . . .

“Whipping boy?” Bowman asks.

“If you like,” Nicks says.

So why can Nicks motivate him when Cranston couldn’t?

“He packs a bigger wallop than Toller does,” Bowman says.

Who will win the gold medal here? Who will do the ice shows, dance with Dorothy Hamill, duet with Snoopy, dodge the secret admirers in the audience? Bowman doesn’t know. Doesn’t know how he will do. Doesn’t even know what he will do, because to the amazement of everyone in this sport, Christopher even has been known to improvise on show night. He intends to do triple jumps, triple axels, you name it.

Question: “Got any surprises for the Olympics?”

Bowman: “A quint.”

Q.: “What’s that?”

Bowman: “Five revolutions, from the ceiling.”

Hit or flop, show-stopper or show’s-over, he is ready.

“You want to be, like, the super stud, the super jock, the super ultra-millionaire, the super god of the world,” Bowman said. “But sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way.”

And that’s all he has to say for now, except for that message in the computer. Sorry, we simply can’t reprint it here. But here’s a hint. It’s not nice. And it’s about Dick Button.