At 13, She’s in Big Time : Kwan Has Shot at a Trip to Lillehammer

Too nervous to sleep in the hours before his youngest daughter made her debut last winter among the “senior ladies” in the U.S. figure skating championships, Danny Kwan decided that pacing was preferable to tossing and turning and had almost worn a path in the hotel carpet when he heard mumbling coming from Michelle’s bed.

Stopping to listen, he heard his still-sleeping daughter reminding herself, “It’s nothing. It’s nothing.”

Those were the words he and Michelle’s coach at Lake Arrowhead’s International Ice Castles Training Center, Frank Carroll, had used to convince her that the goal of competing with the seniors was the same as it was with the juniors and novices, to have fun and do her best.

But, now, she was repeating those words over and over again in her dreams, and it hit Danny Kwan like a punch to the stomach that the experience to come was hardly nothing to his daughter.

She asked for it, he reminded himself. Although she had finished ninth in the junior nationals in 1992, she was determined to compete with Olympians such as Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding the next year. And, when the time came for Southern Californians to take their senior tests, Michelle, who is from Torrance, told her father she wanted to go for it.

“Ask Frank,” her father told her.

When she told him a few days later that her coach had said it was OK, a fib, Danny Kwan took her for her senior test, which basically required her to perform a senior women’s long program, and, even though she had just turned 12, she passed, all of which Carroll learned when he returned from a meeting in Toronto.

“I was furious,” said Carroll, who did not believe she was mature enough for the promotion she had earned. “I sat her down and told her I was captain of this ship, and I would decide who were the mutineers.”

But once he reaffirmed his authority, he had to decide how to proceed with a senior lady who was not even a teen-ager. After a skater passes her senior test, she cannot return to juniors except in the subsequent world championships.

“If she wanted to be a senior, she had to learn what it took,” Carroll said. “She had to give up her baby feelings, that, ‘I’m tired,’ or, ‘I’m sick.’ I told her, ‘You have to suffer.’ ”

The night before she began competition in the 1993 national championships, Michelle suffered.

So did her father.

If she had asked to drive an automobile on the San Diego Freeway at 12, would he have left the decision to her coach simply because she wanted to do it so badly, or would he have exerted more parental control and told her that she was not ready for such a potentially hazardous journey?

As he examined his role in his daughter’s choices, his own ambitions for her, Danny Kwan began to cry.

“I stood there and listened to her talk in her sleep,” he said, “and I asked myself, ‘Is this really what I want for her?’ ”

*

As a reporter and photographer arrived at the Lake Arrowhead training center a few days before Christmas, Carroll met them outside the cafeteria.

“I have one request before Michelle arrives,” he said. “Could you please not ask her anything about the Olympics? I’ll answer any questions you have, but there will be less pressure on her if she concentrates on skating well and not on the Olympics.”

Twelve months ago, any discussion of Kwan and the Winter Olympics would have focused on 1998.

But in this week’s national championships at Detroit, which will serve as the Olympic trials, she is considered a contender for one of two berths reserved for U.S. women next month in Norway.

The 24-year-old Kerrigan, bronze medalist in the 1992 Olympics, is conceded one of them, and Harding, 23, is favored for the other. She, however, is inconsistent, and if this is one of her off weeks, the other berth probably will be filled by one of two 16-year-olds, Nicole Bobek or Lisa Ervin.

Or Kwan.

If her remarkable sixth-place finish in last year’s senior national championships in Phoenix, three places higher than her finish the year before as a junior, did not alert the figure skating world to her potential, her championship six months later in the U.S. Olympic Festival did.

Competing before 25,691 in San Antonio’s Alamodome, the largest crowd to watch figure skating anywhere in the world, she seemed so oblivious to her surroundings that she might as well have been performing for the squirrels at Lake Arrowhead, landing three more triple jumps than Kerrigan had in winning the 1993 national championship.

Contending with flu and a sudden growth spurt, which shot her up to 4 feet 11 and 88 pounds, she appeared to be in over her head for the first time in October with a sixth-place finish in Skate America.

Last month, however, Kwan re-established herself by winning the world junior championship in Colorado Springs, Colo. Fourth in that competition was Germany’s Tanja Szewczenko, who earlier in the year had beaten reigning world champion Oksana Baiul and two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt.

The reviews are all positive. Patinage, a French figure skating magazine, calls her “a small American marvel.” Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic champion, says Kwan is “much further advanced than I was at 13.” Carroll pays her the ultimate figure skating compliment, comparing her to U.S. Olympians Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill and Linda Fratianne.

“She has something there beyond talent,” he said. “Fratianne was a little twink, Dorothy was this little graceful thing, Peggy ethereal. Yet, they were three of the strongest individuals I’ve ever met in my life. They all could have been champions at anything they tried. Yes, Michelle has that. Definitely.”

But if Carroll did not believe she was ready for the senior nationals at 12, could she possibly be ready for the Winter Olympics at 13?

“Maybe she just didn’t have the vocal skills to express how much she wanted it last year,” he said. “But it’s worked out fabulously. She has a beautiful body, a wonderful face and personality on the ice. She’s also got the strongest total program of anyone in the nationals. Nobody else is doing seven triple jumps.

“If she can go out there and do them all, and if she can perform like a senior lady and not like someone who just wants to jump her brains out, she’s going to pull it off.”

*

Carroll was eager to begin an afternoon practice, which he knew would be disrupted because of a photo session, but Kwan was in a mood for mischief.

“Where is your sister?” Carroll asked, referring to 15-year-old Karen, also a competitive skater who trains at the International Ice Castles.

“She’s invisible,” Kwan said, skating in a circle around him.

He did not respond.

“We’re blind,” she said, covering her eyes with her hands and continuing to skate.

“Michelle,” Carroll said firmly.

“Oh,” she said, expressing her exasperation with his refusal to play by affecting a mock English accent, “I think she’s in the bahth- room.”

Carroll has coached numerous Olympians, his two most famous being Fratianne and Christopher Bowman. She was an angel; he was the self-proclaimed Hans Brinker from Hell. Kwan is more like Fratianne, but she has a mind of her own.

“If you told Linda to jump off the roof, she jumped off the roof,” Carroll said. “This kid wants a little more input into it. She has respect for me, but I don’t scare her.”

Later, she put her contrary side on display. It was even colder than usual in the rink because of a heating problem and a shivering Kwan began to grumble, making it clear that posing for the photographer was an imposition. But she did not quit until he did.

With the national championships on the horizon, media requests for her time have been frequent, and where there is media exposure, there are agents. Danny Kwan has put them on hold.

“Michelle is not ready for an agent,” he said. “She is nobody, just a young athlete. I want to keep it all in perspective, that’s all.”

But without an agent, responding to media requests has been left to Carroll.

He usually does it with one word: no.

“When ABC called, they said, ‘What do you mean you don’t want to do this? Don’t you realize this is prime time? Don’t you realize what this is worth?’ ” Carroll said. “I told them, ‘Yes, but you’re not going to want to talk to her in the future if she doesn’t do well at nationals.’ So what’s more important, going on television or preparing for the competition?”

Michelle, however, has done enough interviews in the last year that she knows the routine. She sat in on news conferences at Skate America so that she could learn how veterans such as Brian Boitano and Harding give enthusiastic responses to the same tired questions they have heard for years, but, as became obvious during a conversation, she has yet to master the art.

She started skating when she was 5 because she enjoyed watching her older brother play hockey. She was not very good at first, “falling on the ice and holding onto the rail like normal people.” She won her first competition at 7 1/2. She defied her coach last year and took her senior test because she “wanted to go up to see and compete with the big people.” She misses her friends at school, but she writes to them while she takes eighth-grade correspondence courses.

There was a sparkle in her eyes when the discussion turned to the Winter Olympics, a subject she broached.

“The first time I watched the Olympics on television (in 1988), I knew I wanted to be there some day,” she said. “I thought I could just go there, like, ‘OK, tomorrow, I’ll go to the Olympics.’ ”

But, as if realizing she had entered forbidden territory, she quickly added, “I never think about the Olympics. It’s like my dad says, ‘Everything coming your way right now is extra. Just give it your best shot and take what comes to you.’ ”

Her eyes really lit up, however, when she talked about a pet squirrel she once had, a bear that dined each night last summer from the cafeteria garbage bin, and a tent she built on the training-center grounds with plastic trash bags.

“What you get with Michelle is such a normal, natural 13-year-old that the potential stardom hasn’t hit her,” Carroll said. “She wants to be a champion, but that whole other side, she doesn’t have any awareness of it.

“Wouldn’t it be great if she stays like this?”

*

“You have kids?” Danny Kwan asked over dinner at the Golden Pheasant, a Chinese restaurant in Torrance that his wife’s family owns.

“No,” he is told.

“You’re lucky,” he said, perhaps at that moment only half-joking as he considered the evening ahead.

Danny, 44, was about to embark upon his nightly two-hour drive “up the hill” to Lake Arrowhead, where he would stay overnight with his two daughters in a cottage at the training center before returning the next morning to his job as a systems analyst with Pacific Bell. His wife, Estella, 42, remains in Torrance to manage the restaurant.

“They’re still just babies, so somebody has to keep an eye on them,” Danny said of Michelle and Karen. “I tell them, ‘You’re not a sacrifice.’ If they want something, we as their parents will pay the price for it. If they don’t want it, it’s a sacrifice.”

Danny and Estella met and married in Hong Kong, where he had emigrated with his parents from China as a 9-year-old, but although they have been in the United States for 22 years, he still does not quite understand the almost religious fervor with which Americans follow sports and sports heroes. Frankly, it frightens him.

“He comes here every night because he wants to maintain the family unit, the values,” said Carol Probst, who, with her husband, Walter, owns and operates the International Ice Castles, a skating center unique in the United States. Their foundation provides scholarships so that talented, middle-class skaters such as the Kwans can afford to remain in the sport.

But, Danny said, there is more to it than that. He wants to be there each night to remind his daughters that there is more to life than figure skating, a lesson that he had to learn.

“He is probably the most level-headed parent we have,” Probst said.

Until last winter, however, he had a reputation as a skating father, which is to the sport what a stage mother is to acting.

That changed when he heard Michelle’s mutterings in her sleep in Phoenix.

“If you love your daughter, do you want to see her stressed?” he said. “Does it make sense to give a sport a lot of time and a lot of money just to make her crazy?

“No, I had to ask myself what this is all about, and my answer is the one I give her. Figure skating is a sport; it is not life. The lessons she learns now will be important to her in the future. Work hard, do your best, learn how to step up as a winner and how to take a defeat. But that is all they are, lessons for life.

“She wants to go to the Olympics. I can tell you that for sure. She didn’t think she had a shot at it. Now she does. But do the Olympics mean that much? I don’t know. It really bothers me that there’s so much emphasis on it.

“These athletes are under so much heat. I think about Donnie Moore. I think about that pitcher for the Phillies (Mitch Williams). The whole city wanted to kill that guy. It’s scary, really damn scary.

“It’s fine as long as she enjoys it. But when I feel she is stressed, it’s time to quit. I tell her, ‘If you want to quit today, that’s OK with me.’ I really mean it. Her achievements are beyond my expectations. But it’s not OK for her yet. She wants to be a champion.”

But every day Danny Kwan accompanies his young daughter to the rink, he shudders at the double meaning hidden in the sign at the entrance, “Skate At Your Inherent Risk.”