Skater Isn’t Just Spinning His Wheels

It’s a lonely life, being world-class in a sport most people have never heard of.

Eighteen-year-old Bo Brucker should know.

He has spent half his life on wheels--spinning, jumping and landing double axels.

Most of his teachers and classmates at Buena High School--from which he graduated in June--had no idea he skated, let alone that he trotted the globe striving for gold in the obscure sport of artistic roller-skating.

“Barely anyone at school knew I skated,” Brucker said between classes on a recent afternoon at the Skate Palace in Oxnard. “But I’m proud of what I do. I never felt a need to brag.”

The shy young man from Ventura, who tinkers with cars in his spare time, explains the sport to quizzical outsiders by analogy: It’s like figure skating on roller skates.

The movement, the jumps, even the music are--to the average person--just like figure skating on ice.

Brucker, however, does his stunts on wheels--old-fashioned roller skates, costing hundreds of dollars for competition-quality models.

Brucker started skating when he was 8, after he saw a roller-skating exhibition at a fund-raiser that his mother worked on.

“Bo was doing gymnastics, but he was really uncoordinated,” his mother recalled. After the fund-raiser, she asked if he wanted to keep up with gymnastics and he stunned her by saying he wanted to roller-skate instead.

That Christmas she got extravagant, and--over her husband’s protests--purchased young Bo a pair of $50 skates.

“The next morning, it was totally worth it,” she said. “Now that won’t even buy his bearings.”

A year later, he traveled to North Carolina and won in his age group at national championships.

Since then, skating has been his life.

He skates several hours a day, five to six days a week--training like an Olympic athlete. In August, Brucker placed second at nationals in Fresno, qualifying him to compete in the world championship junior class division in Bogota, Colombia, next month.

He has delayed enrolling at Ventura College this fall to train for that event.

“I try to keep my private life and my skating life separate. At home I’m a lot quieter. I like to sit in my room or work on cars. But when I’m skating, I’m always talking to people. I’m high profile.”

He flashes a wide, mischievous smile.

“I become Bo the artistic roller skater.”

But Brucker makes it sound like a hard, lonely road.

He said he battles perceptions by some of his peers that he is gay. He added that it is a challenge to work so hard in a sport that many insiders say is in decline.

He can remember going to nationals, when the stands were packed on the final night. Now they are only three-quarters full. He said his coaches remember when the stands were packed every night--in the days before roller hockey.

Making matters worse, the boys who started with him have all quit. Now he is alone at the top.

“Now it’s just me and Brandon,” he said, pointing to a small boy with green hair sitting at a video game. “He’s my little protege. I taught him how to jump and spin.

“I’d like to see more guys in the sport,” he said.

And though he said it doesn’t matter if people know what he does, it seems to.

Only once, a teacher at Buena High took an interest. When Brucker talked about it, his face glowed.

He was taking around a slip to miss school for a week to attend the Olympic training camp in Colorado. He took it to his history teacher.

“He said, ‘Roller-skating, you mean artistic roller-skating?’ ” Brucker said excitedly. “And he starts talking about sure grip and schneiders and toe stops. I could go up to anyone on campus and start going off about that and they would have no idea what I was talking about. I thought, ‘Wow, someone who really knows what I do.’ ”

But when he stands up from the table, and rolls out onto the baby-blue floor of the Skate Palace in his sleek black outfit, Brucker’s misgivings dissolve into smooth grace and fluid confidence.

He zooms backward like an ice skater, his hair blowing, and launches into the air, spins and lands with a clunk.

“I love jumping,” he said, skating to the wall. “What I’m known for is my jumping. I can jump high and turn fast.”

Brucker’s coach, Tom Davis, who grew up skating at the Skate Palace and competed internationally, has seen a lot of skaters in his time.

The first national roller-skating competition was held in 1936. In the last 20 years, only three roller-skating venues have sent three or more people on to the world championship, he said. Skate Palace in Oxnard is one of them. Along with Brucker, local champions include Dezera Salas, who won the world championship in 1994, Kelley Hendrix, who won the same title in 1995, and Leonard Steinberg, who competed in the world championship in Tokyo and now coaches.

Davis said Brucker is a good jumper and a good spinner, but that his strength is mental.

“He’s good under pressure,” Davis said. “When he’s in a skate contest, he’s in a trance. He doesn’t out-think himself. He doesn’t look at the competition. You can’t teach that.”

However proud they are of Brucker and other champions, those in this wheeled world of roller-skating still feel slighted. They speculate that ice skating gets more attention because contestants on ice have lighter skates that allow them to move faster and jump higher. For roller skaters, even the most graceful spin ends with a clunk.

Coaches also say that because roller-skating is not an Olympic sport, there are fewer opportunities.

“Most people don’t know anything about it,” Brucker’s mother said. “They think he must be one of those in-liners who tears up the steps at the post office.”