Real Life Becomes a Short Program

Peggy Fleming has breast cancer. Scott Hamilton has testicular cancer. Carlo Fassi died of a heart attack. Sergei Grinkov died of a heart attack (at 28). John Curry and Ondrej Nepela died from AIDS. Dorothy Hamill filed for bankruptcy. Oksana Baiul drove drunk. Tonya Harding did 500 hours of community service and was banned from professional figure skating for life.

You don’t need ice to feel a chill.

Good thing Michelle Kwan and Tara Lipinski came along when they did, to turn up the warmth.

Such a lamb each seems, Michelle, 17, who dots the i of her autograph with a (Heart) , and Tara, 15, the imp who could pass for Macaulay Culkin from “Home Alone.”

So unassuming. So unsullied. So, oh, I don’t know, untarnished by life they appear, Kwan standing at a virtual-reality video game, Lipinski curled up on a male skater’s lap. They are two women who want a gold medal. They are two kids who collect Beanie Babies.

Both are so much tougher than they look. They are solid professionals--not hardened ones, like the nakedly ambitious Harding or the smug Nancy Kerrigan, but a couple of composed, level-headed, All-American women-girls. And boy, did skating need them now.

These past few years have been hard on their sport.

Death. Despair.

Even subterfuge, worthy of a Shakespearean plot.

Kwan felt a shudder last spring. She was in Switzerland for the World Championships when two jolts came, 24 hours apart. Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic champion, had his cancer diagnosed. Fassi, the coach of gold medalists Fleming, Hamill, Curry and Robin Cousins and one of Kwan’s main rivals, Nicole Bobek, was then fatally stricken, just as the competition began.

“And here I was,” Kwan says, “getting bent out of shape over a triple lutz.”

When one is young, as Kwan and Lipinski are, life’s horrors are often confined to bad falls and poor scores.

You are going to live forever, not cope with cancer surgery, as Fleming did earlier this month.

You are going to win a gold medal worth an estimated $10 million to $15 million in career earnings, not go broke promoting ice shows, as Hamill did.

You are going to skate for years, not collapse on the ice as Grinkov did, right in front of the partner with whom he won two Olympic gold medals.

You are going to be invulnerable, not succumb to AIDS in the prime of life, as did Curry, the 1976 gold medalist from Great Britain, at 44 years old, and Nepela, the 1972 gold medalist from Czechoslovakia, at 38.

You are going to cruise through life, not veer off a highway in your Mercedes-Benz at 100 mph, as Baiul did, so busy singing along with a Madonna song that she quit watching the road, so intoxicated that cops could smell alcohol on her six hours later.

You are going to respect your opponent, not be shorn of your national championship, as Harding was, and fined $100,000 and put on probation by a judge for helping to cut a rival off at the knees.

Skating has falls. Real life has pitfalls.

If anyone can avoid them, Kwan can.

Her skates are on the ice, but her feet on the ground. She is a sensible young lady, if it is OK to say “young lady” in this day and age. Quite modest. Impeccably mannered. And considerably wiser now, having seen what befell her predecessors.

Michelle has become someone who says, “I don’t want to turn this into a thing of dread, so that I’m happy when it’s over. I want to cherish every moment.”

I know she means it.

I only hope she remembers it, win or lose.

Kwan and Lipinski are the best thing that could have happened to this sport. They let in a little sunshine.

Too bad they have to grow up. Figure skaters have to leave the ice and go out into the world.

It can get pretty cold out there.