This Kwan Content to Wait in the Wings

Michelle Kwan is a world-class figure skater. Her father is a world-class pacer. When she skates, he looks like a man who needs a cigarette.

No, he says, never again. Danny Kwan has quit smoking.

Michelle would like to take credit, but she can’t. Four years ago, when they were in Nagano for the Winter Olympics, she fined him $20 for each cigarette he smoked.

“I figure I owe her about $60,000,” he said then.

The tab was approaching $600,000 by last year. But then came some real motivation for Danny. A friend of his had lung cancer. He had a short time to live.

“When people came to visit him, I could see pity in their eyes,” Danny says. He hasn’t smoked a cigarette since.

“I don’t want anybody pitying me,” he says.

Danny Kwan, 52, is a proud man. When you hear his story--where he came from, how hard he and his family have worked to get where they are, the sacrifices they have made--you understand.

But Danny doesn’t talk about his story anymore. Or much of anything publicly. I saw him on the street one night last week. We chatted amiably, but at the point when he thought I might be interviewing him, he politely excused himself.

He has never wanted to become the focus of his daughter’s story. He wants the attention even less now that some in the media are questioning his role in the firing of Michelle’s longtime coach, Frank Carroll, trying to portray Danny as the Richard Williams of figure skating. Danny doesn’t believe he should have to defend himself. So he doesn’t. He’s too proud.

I don’t know who fired Carroll, but, as someone who first met Michelle when she was 12, I can almost guarantee it wasn’t done unless she wanted it done.

As Carroll, whose best female skater before Michelle was Linda Fratianne, said when Michelle was only 13, “If you told Linda to jump off the roof, she jumped off the roof. This kid wants a little more input into it. She has respect for me, but I don’t scare her.”

Michelle probably still respected Carroll when they parted last year. But she’s 21 now. She has been to college. She has her own condo in Manhattan Beach. She has a boyfriend, an NHL player for the Florida Panthers. She and Carroll, like sometimes happens in a marriage, had grown apart.

Her father and Carroll grew apart a long time before that. I doubt Danny tried to talk Michelle out of leaving Carroll. But if anyone outside the Kwan family says it was Danny’s call, I would guess he or she doesn’t know Danny very well. Or Michelle.

More insulting to the Kwans are those who criticize them for living off Michelle.

Let me tell you Danny Kwan’s story.

His father, who had been sold into slavery when he was 4 to a farmer in Canton, China, went to Hong Kong in 1949 to look for work. He left behind a wife who was seven months pregnant. Before he could return, China’s borders were shut. It would be seven years before he was allowed to rejoin his wife--and introduce himself to his son, Danny.

Danny, whose family had little money, dropped out of school after the seventh grade and went to work for the telephone company to learn a trade.

He was still working for the telephone company many years later, as a systems analyst in Southern California, when it began to appear as if his two daughters had a future in figure skating. The older one, Karen, would finish fifth in the national championships before leaving the sport for college. The other would become one of the sport’s great champions.

Danny literally drove them to success. He would wake up before dawn, drive them from their home in Torrance to Lake Arrowhead for lessons, drive down the hill to work in Gardena, drive back up the hill to pick up his daughters, then drive back to Torrance, where he would work nights with wife Estella in the family restaurant.

If the Kwans are living off Michelle, who’s to say they haven’t earned it?

Michelle, who earned $4 million last year, is the only one who has the right to say that. She hasn’t complained.

Danny is the first to admit that he used to push Michelle too hard, that the Olympic dream was more his than hers, but he says that changed one night during her first senior national championships. She tossed and turned all night, repeating her father’s instructions from that day’s practice in her sleep, and he realized that she was under enormous stress, too much for a 12-year-old, for anyone really.

He went outside the motel room, smoked a cigarette and cried.

“If you love your daughter, do you want to see her stressed?” he asked later. “Does it make any sense to give a sport a lot of time and a lot of money just to make her crazy? These athletes are under so much heat. I think about Donnie Moore....

“The next day, I told her that she was probably going to be in skating for another 10 years, which meant about 100 competitions.... I asked her if she was sure she wanted to go on. If she did, it had to be because that’s what she wanted for herself, not for me. It was her choice, not mine.”

Michelle went on. Tonight, she has a chance to win an Olympic gold medal. Because she doesn’t have a coach, standing next to her in the wings as she prepares to go onto the ice for her freestyle program will be her father. I can’t think of anything more appropriate.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.