Shock Absorber

Frank Carroll was taught by a champion and, in turn, became a teacher of champions. But he anticipated the crowning moment of his coaching career would arrive at the Salt Lake City Winter Games, when Michelle Kwan would ascend to the top of the medal podium after the Olympic women’s figure skating competition.

He would not accompany her on that triumphant climb, of course. But he would know something of him was with her as she bowed her head to allow the ribbon and its heavy golden ornament to be slipped around her neck.

That happy dream was shattered in late October, when Kwan told him she wanted to end their 10-year collaboration, during which she matured from a skinny jumping bean into a stunning five-time U.S. champion and four-time world champion. She wanted her independence, she said. She wanted to control her life and her skating.

Carroll was dumbstruck. He had come so close to being the coach of the Olympic gold medalist when Linda Fratianne went to the 1980 Lake Placid Games as the world champion but was beaten by Anett Poetzsch of East Germany, a verdict he disdains as politically tainted. And even though Tara Lipinski upset Kwan to win gold at the 1998 Nagano Games, Kwan was gutsy enough to win the last two world titles and establish herself as the favorite at Salt Lake City.

How could the Olympic gods deny him again? How could he not have seen this coming?

“If you spend 10 years with somebody you feel pretty close to them, and I felt she really trusted anything I said. It was kind of a shock to find otherwise,” he said. “I love Michelle. I care about her. She’s a great human being. I have nothing bad to say about her.

“If there had been an argument or disagreement about her skating, it would be easy to put your finger on it. We didn’t.”

A busy schedule got him past his initial shock. He has coached U.S. men’s champion Tim Goebel the past 18 months and recently took on 2001 U.S. bronze medalist Angela Nikodinov, whose coach, Elena Tcherkasskaia, died of cancer in November.

But Kwan was his shining star, and he will be torn when he watches her compete this week at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Staples Center and, presumably, next month at Salt Lake City. If the timing of her decision seems unfair to him, he tries to look beyond that.

“For me, it’s really a win-win situation,” he said. “I’m not talking about Michelle in a derogatory fashion, I’m just talking about myself and my own life and career.

“If Michelle Kwan wins the gold medal, and after all the world championships I’ve won with her and the years we’ve spent together, who do you think, in the skating world, they’re going to attribute that [to]? If Michelle Kwan doesn’t win the gold medal and doesn’t skate well at the Olympics, what are people going to say is the cause or why?

“What am I losing out of this? As far as my own reputation is concerned, I really don’t feel like it’s a losing situation.”

He pauses.

“Sure, I’d feel left out,” he said, “as far as the way I am as a human being.”

Yet, he wouldn’t be hurt if she hired another coach. “I think it would be better for her,” he said. “I think it would be very unwise for her to go to the Olympics without a coach. A real coach.”

Kwan’s father, Danny, has occupied the coach’s spot at her practices and competitions since she dismissed Carroll, yet they say Danny is not coaching her. Asked if Danny Kwan had influenced his daughter’s decision, Carroll spoke carefully.

“He’s always been there, let’s put it that way, and that’s no surprise,” Carroll said. “After 10 years, I knew her dad pretty well. I knew the way things were was the way things were going to be. I never tried to get between her parents and her because I felt that would be a losing situation for myself.”

Carroll is among the sport’s most respected coaches. Regal and purposeful, he’s as exacting with Goebel as he is with the novice skaters he coaches at HealthSouth Training Center in El Segundo.

Goebel credits Carroll with improving his technique and artistry.

“He’s very disciplined and sort of stoic. He doesn’t yell and scream if I have a bad day,” Goebel said. “He’s always on time and comes to work every day with a set plan.”

Even his most vexatious student, Christopher Bowman, acknowledges a debt to Carroll. Bowman, known as “Hans Brinker from Hell,” was a brilliant skater who won two U.S. titles and two medals at the world championships but let substance abuse erode his talent. As a teenager, he hated Carroll’s devotion to tradition. As a coach, he respects it.

“Everything he taught me is something I honor every day I step on the ice with my students,” Bowman said. “I’ll say, ‘What would Frank do in this situation? What would he say?”’

Fratianne, whom Carroll described as “the perfect student,” still seeks his counsel.

“My mom and he were very close, and she passed away seven years ago. Now I kind of joke and call him my surrogate mother,” the Northridge native said. “I can’t say enough good things about him.

“I’m the head coach at the rink in Sun Valley. If I ever have a question about how anything at the rink should be done, I’m always calling him for advice, things I’d probably call my mother on. He’s always available.”

Carroll gives his age as “somewhere between 40 and death,” but he is about 63. He grew up in Worcester, Mass., and skated there before studying with skating legend Maribel Vinson Owen, whose nine U.S. women’s titles in the 1920s and ‘30s remains a record.

After a middling competitive career he skated with the Ice Follies but left the vagabond life in July 1964, when a friend helped him get a coaching job in Van Nuys. Other friends with Hollywood connections got him work in the Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach blanket movies popular at the time.

But don’t look for him in the credits. Another Frank Carroll was registered with the actors’ union, so he had to take a stage name--which he won’t reveal.

“That was so stupid,” he said of his movie career. “I won’t tell anyone my name because I’m afraid the kids will see me.”

Skating was his real passion, and as his students began to excel, he moved from the tiny Van Nuys rink to Pickwick in Burbank. His first student to earn a berth on the world team was Robert Bradshaw, who was an Olympic alternate in 1972, second at the U.S. competition in 1973 and finished 12th at the 1973 world championships.

Fratianne’s parents had called him several times to ask if he would teach their daughter, but he was too busy teaching to respond. Finally, they went to great lengths to get his attention.

“One day in Van Nuys a little girl came up and started skating big circles around me and jumping and jumping, and she was cute as a button and had such spring in her legs. Remarkable spring,” he said. “I said, ‘My goodness, this little girl could be world champion.’

“As I got off the ice, I sort of thought, ‘I wonder if it’s those Fratianne people?’ I got off the ice and her father was there and he said, ‘Is my kid good enough for you?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, who’s your kid?’ But I knew.”

Fratianne, the 1977 and 1979 world champion, brought new athleticism to the sport with that jumping ability. “They all had to do triples after Linda,” Carroll said. “When Dorothy Hamill won [in 1976], she could do a double axel. But after Linda won bronze in the free skating and was fifth overall in her first year at worlds [1976], it was all changed.”

Fratianne was expected to prevail at Lake Placid, but Poetzsch, a less graceful free skater, built a lead in the compulsory figures and held on to win the gold.

“Back then the politics in skating was such that the sport could be manipulated,” Carroll said.

Fratianne’s parents knew of those political games, but they rejected a chance to fire Carroll a year before the Olympics and hire Carlo Fassi, who was better connected politically.

“The bottom line, loud and clear, is Frank was my security blanket,” Fratianne said. “Frank was out there, putting his judgment on the line for me, and that was all I knew and all I wanted to know.... I have no regrets at all. This is about 10 years of commitment and loyalty we had with each other.”

Carroll coached 1985 U.S. champion Tiffany Chin for a while, but Bowman was his joy--and his despair. A child actor with an engaging personality, Bowman charmed everyone. That included Carroll, until drugs made Bowman uncontrollable.

Bowman says Carroll, unmarried and childless, couldn’t relate to him because his problems “took more parenting skill than coaching skill.” Not that his parents could rein him in, either, but he felt Carroll’s natural reserve kept them apart.

“You didn’t have that, ‘Yeah I love him like a father,’ though in a lot of ways I spent more time with him than with my own father,” Bowman said. “But it wasn’t like Cus D’Amato and Mike Tyson, the trainer who adopted him and took him in....

“He was the teacher. He was the master. He was not the baby sitter. Not the diaper-changer. He was only there for one thing. It’s not that he didn’t care, he just cares about skating.”

Carroll ran out of patience with Bowman by 1990, but didn’t have long to wait for his next champion.

On the advice of Fratianne’s mother, Virginia, Carroll met Kwan’s father, Danny, at the 1992 Pacific Coast Sectional competition in 1992. Seeing Michelle was Carroll’s third thunderbolt, the third time, after Fratianne and Bowman, he looked at a young skater and thought “world champion.”

His vision came true, and they were so successful a team that even after Kwan won silver to Lipinski’s gold at Nagano, their bond seemed unbreakable.

He knew her well, and so wasn’t worried when she opened this season with so-so performances at the Goodwill Games and the Masters of Figure Skating in San Diego. He thought all she needed was a change in her schedule, perhaps a return to the exercise regimen that had worked for her last year. Or even a review of old videotapes of herself.

“Nothing, I think, that would be rattling,” he said.

But then she rattled the skating world by saying she would skate by herself for a while, and then indefinitely.

“A lot of people are shaking their heads,” Fratianne said. “Frank Carroll is an unbelievable coach and he absolutely knows what it takes to be an Olympic champion.”

Carroll and Kwan rarely see each other. She usually trains at Lake Arrowhead and he is at El Segundo, teaching Goebel, Nikodinov, Lloyd and others. It’s to them he now passes on the legacy of Maribel Vinson Owen.”I’m sort of the last of a generation,” he said, “and that’s kind of scary in a way because it’s something I never intended to have happen.”

He didn’t intend to lose Kwan, either, but his spirit remains unbroken.

“I’m teaching a little girl who doesn’t know her left foot from her right foot and doesn’t know one edge from another. But she’s cute. I make her keep a notebook and write everything down. I write in it and she writes in it.”

And maybe she will be the champion who doesn’t break his heart.

Viewers’ Guide

U.S. Figure Skating Championships TV schedule:

Day; Event; TV/Time

Wednesday; Men’s short program (tape-delayed one day); ESPN2, 8:30-9:30 p.m.

Thursday; Men’s free skate (delayed on West Coast); women’s free skate preview; Ch. 7, 8-11 p.m.

Friday; Original dance (delayed one day); ESPN2, 4-5 p.m.

Pairs and women’s short programs (delayed one day); ESPN, 6-8 p.m.

Saturday; Pairs and women’s free skates (delayed on West Coast); ABC Family Channel, 8-11 p.m.

Jan. 13; Pairs and women’s free skates (repeat from Saturday’s skate); Ch. 7, 2-5 p.m.

Jan. 20; Free dance (tape-delayed eight days); Ch. 7, 3-4 p.m.