Ice the Medals, This Is Pure Fun

Tearing up over an iceberg, I fully support. Look what happened to the poor Titanic, after all. One encounter and kablooey!

Yet anyone in a tizzy over the outcome of ice dancing--the key word here, sports fans, is “dancing”--needs desperately to get a life. Find a hobby. Clean your garage. Work on your car. Shine your shoes. Learn card tricks. Something!

Doing otherwise is like entering deep mourning when your kid, the future Indy star, doesn’t win the Soapbox Derby. Or when your favorite show doesn’t win its sixth consecutive Emmy. The word “nudnik” comes to mind.

Don’t get me wrong. I love ice dancing. Simply adore it! It’s right up there with dirty dancing. Acknowledging this may not be a macho-correct point of view, but I’ll take the ice dancing and other figure skating of the Nagano Winter Olympics any day over ice hockey, speed skating and definitely over some stiff sliding 80 miles an hour (the luge, is it?) on his butt.

The artistry and athleticism epitomized by figure skaters of all stripes are something scintillating to behold, and--although they don’t have to contend on the ice with body checks or hands in their faces--arguably unmatched in all of sports (yes, including even the NBA and Michael Jordan). And the music ain’t bad, either.

What I don’t care about--whether it’s ice dancing or figure skating--is who wins what medal, any more than I’m interested in rating Astaire and Kelly or measuring Baryshnikov’s soaring against some up-and-comer.

Naturally the skaters and their coaches care who wins. As do the most ardent flag wavers from each competing nation. (So much for the universality given lip service during the opening and closing ceremonies of every Olympics.)

To me, though, the great fun is not in rooting for the Americans or the Canadians or one set of Russians over another. A pair of Yanks winning the gold medal wouldn’t validate me as an American any more than someone else winning devalues my citizenship. It doesn’t matter. Five-point-six, five-point-shmix, who cares? The kick is in the watching. That’s what entertainment is all about. And this is entertainment, no matter how much some seek to frame it in a context of nationalistic bias or regional conspiracy.

I mention this only because I came home rather late Monday night (after spending hours searching in the rain for a hobby) and, in between commercials that were coming faster than the luge, somehow had a ball watching ice dancing for about 90 minutes on CBS. Whether the skaters were from Pluto or Mudville was totally irrelevant.

To my untrained eye, Russia’s gold medal winners Grishuk and Platov were awesome and smashing to look at, Russia’s silver winners Krylova and Ovsyannikov were melodramatic mavens you could build an evening around, America’s Punsalan and Swallow were dazzling and simply to die for, and Canada’s Bourne and Kraatz were a wow, especially as I’m a huge fan of the “Riverdance” score they performed to. What spectacle, what charisma, what romanticism, what sizzle, what, uh, females.

I loved it.

That was so even after hearing the network’s commentators bad-mouth the judges and suggest--no, make that charge--that the ice dancing marks were politically motivated and preset. In other words, they were stacked, the fix was in--an allegation repeated in The Times the next morning with the same thin, tenuous reporting we’re getting these days in the surreal Olympiad of Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr. Who wrote this script, Oliver Stone?

True or not about a conspiracy, I’m not wearing a black armband.

Losing a beautiful, mature pine tree in the last storm really bothered me. Hearing Tuesday’s emotional responses of 16-year-old victim Adrianne Jones’ family to the murder conviction of Diane Zamora in Fort Worth really moved me. Learning of a Yorkshire terrier being savagely killed, set afire and mutilated by teenagers in Kansas City recently devastated me.

In the great pantheon of concepts we should be concerned about, though, perceived slights in the ranking of ice dancers are absent from the radar screen. They rate with Sunday’s no-call when Nick Van Exel got clobbered while throwing up a last-gasp shot in the Lakers two-point loss to the Houston Rockets. All right, he got fouled. So put it behind you. This, too, shall pass. Life goes on. Pick your cliche.

When it comes to the Olympics, there’s no bigger cliche than ethnocentrism--that is, extrapolating national virtue from the accumulation of medals, as in the United States beating Canada for the gold in women’s ice hockey this week. Proclaimed Mark McEwen of CBS’ “This Morning” from Nagano, Japan, on Tuesday: “Hey, America, not a bad way to start your Tuesday morning, huh?”

As if all of America were cheering or even paying attention. Actually, I was more concerned Tuesday morning about getting this column in on deadline while watching President Clinton address the nation on television about the possibility of a new Persian Gulf crisis. Get a life, Mark. Get a grip.