The short program, which was skated on Friday night, is the only thing that remains of the old world of school figures, of which there were sixty-nine in all—eights, threes, double threes, loops, brackets, done on all edges, skating forward and skating backward. Skaters called them “doing patch,” because each skater made the figures on his or her own patch of clean ice. (The reason there were so many 4 A.M. days in a skater’s life was that the skater had to get the cleanest ice.) School used to be all there was to figure skating until Sonja Henie brought dance to the sport, in the thirties. The remaining required elements in the short program are spins, footwork, and jumps, including a double axel and one triple-jump combination. Both the short and the long programs get two marks—a “technical” mark and a mark for “presentation,” or artistic impression.
The girls came out in their new skating outfits—each girl has one for the short program, one for the long—which they will wear throughout the season. Michelle’s was a backless burnt-orange-and-cream number with flutters around the skirt; Tara’s was sequined around the shoulders, and was done in a style that Jere Longman, of the Times, described as conveying the message “I’m going to my First Communion and I intend to yodel.” Both Michelle and Tara were heavily made up, and their hair was in elegantly coiffed buns on the top of their heads.
Michelle looked awful in the warmup. She fell on her triple-lutz/double-toe, and then, incredibly, she missed a routine double axel. Frank Carroll, her coach, was standing in the skaters’ box, called the Kiss and Cry, on the edge of the rink. Wearing a dark-blue pinstriped suit, with a camel overcoat draped over one arm, he watched as his best hope for an Olympic gold in a long and distinguished career—it had reached silver with Linda Fratianne, in 1980—started falling apart. After missing the axel, Michelle just stood there, her hands on her hips, looking down. Then she left the ice.
“She’s cracking,” one of the reporters said.
But both girls skated error-free short programs. Artistically, Michelle looked better. Technically, Tara’s program was more difficult than Michelle’s: it had a triple flip in it, whereas Michelle’s had only the triple lutz. Even so, eight of the nine judges marked Michelle ahead of Tara on technical merit. At the press conference afterward, Tara seemed a little annoyed. “My jumps actually felt stronger than they did at Worlds,” she said, “but I guess the judges didn’t think so.” Mike Burg later elaborated on Tara’s remarks, explaining that in his view the judges, who were very old-fashioned, were simply biased against Tara. Having tolerated athleticism for the sake of TV ratings, and unleashed these young triple-jumping demons, he said the judges were now trying to put a lid on it by marking the better athletes down. In other words, the judges were voting for Skatingland.
The ladies’ “free skate,” or long program, is by far the most popular activity in women’s sports—the only sports event in which the women’s version is more popular than the men’s. (In 1994, the ladies’ long program at Lillehammer ranked fourth on TV’s all-time most-watched list.) These four minutes are as pure a dose of live performance as the media offer. For the athletes, they are also among the most pitiless and harrowing four minutes in sports. Although the long program is an endurance event—within a minute and a half the exercise becomes anaerobic—the skater has to continue to look as if she were enjoying herself. The smile at the end of the routine is of the utmost importance: Skaters practice many hours in front of the mirror to get it right. Sweat, which is celebrated by the new magazines for women’s sports, is still not acceptable in figure skating. (Among the lingering images of the tawdry Tonya affair are the chalky white clumps of deodorant you saw whenever she lifted her arms.) “If you show you’re sweating, you’re not in shape,” Peggy Fleming told me. “You’re showing that you’re weak.” She added, “The process is designed to find any sign of weakness and apply pressure until it breaks.”
In the morning on the day of the ladies’ long program, I ran into Frank Carroll in the Renaissance Burger King. We talked about Michelle’s short. Carroll observed that it was a relief that the program seemed to have been well received by the judges. “I just wish Michelle had a little more confidence,” he said before biting into his Croissan’wich. “She is the best, after all.”
That night, at the Joe Louis Arena, the crowd was dressier. Even the Zamboni driver had made an effort to spruce himself up. Peggy Fleming was wearing a startlingly low-cut black dress, her cleavage partly obscured by a chiffon modesty panel, which is very skating. Dick was in his usual blue blazer and conservative slacks. The flower girls—little girls who skate onto the ice and collect flowers and stuffed animals that fans have thrown to their idols—wore tartan skirts, white kneesocks, and blouses with Polish folk sleeves.
As the awful, blinding pressure began to build, partisans of both the Tara and the Michelle camps could be found prowling the great old halls outside the Joe Louis Arena. “At least, it’s not me out there,” Lori Nichol, Michelle’s choreographer, said. The concessions weren’t doing much business: People seemed too nervous to eat. Only the eight-year-old-girl fans, practicing axels on the way to the ladies’ room, seemed unfazed by the pressure.
Michelle’s father, Danny, went by, and disappeared into the recesses of the hall. When Michelle skates, he settles somewhere in the rafters to watch. He doesn’t want the camera to find him. Like Venus Williams’s dad and Tiger Woods’s dad, Danny is Michelle’s sports superego. He retired early from his job at Pacific Bell, and this summer he sold a family-owned Chinese restaurant in Torrance, the Golden Pheasant. He now lives in Lake Arrowhead with Michelle, and keeps a close eye on her, giving her few chances to slip up.
“Have you ever made a huge mistake?” I once asked Michelle when we were having lunch with her mom and dad in Lake Arrowhead. “Done something really foolish?”
“I don’t know,” Michelle said, thinking. “I’m not really good at lying, so…” She looked across the table at her father and said, laughing, “Why do you have that smirk on your face?”
Danny said, “I’m thinking. I can’t think of anything.”
“How about boys?” I asked Michelle. “You have a boyfriend?”
Danny made a face, then smiled.
“Dad always laughs,” Michelle said. “No, I don’t. It’s Lake Arrowhead.”
“No suitable boys?”
Michelle giggled. “Not in skating.”
Estella said, “She’s still very young.”
“Asian parents…” Michelle grumbled.
“I don’t think it’s Asian,” Danny said, and leaned forward. “Let me try to go back to—”
“Lecture No. 1,859,” Michelle put in.
“I never say you can’t have a boyfriend. I don’t. As I try to explain to her, you put three things together in life. What’s No. 1 in priority for you? Your No. 1 priority is skating. And then you also have school. Then comes the fun part—like dating, or something else. So you put the three things together—She always complains I analyze too much, but I say put these three things together, you make the decision. Dating, can it wait? Yes, it can wait. Can education wait? Yes and no. Can skating wait? No, it can’t wait. You have to do it now.”
Michelle sighed. “I always look at my parents like they’re so wise. But if they’re so wise, how come they’re not millionaires?”
“Because I’m a loser,” Danny said. “I lose too much.”
Michelle came out of the tunnel and stood by the rink, waiting to skate. She tugged on her dress, practiced some moves with her arms, and made little shaking movements with her legs, trying to stay loose. When it was time for her to take the ice, she relaxed her shoulders and stepped with her left skate first, an old habit. She assumed her pose in the center of the ice, looking down, and took a deep breath. The music began—“Lyra Angelica,” by William Alwyn. First came the triple-lutz/double-toe-loop, right into the triple-toe-loop/double-toe-loop, which landed perfectly, right in front of the Thrifty Car Rental sign. Then the triple flip, t
hen a double axel. Three triples down. The music changed, and Michelle took a charming little giddyap stride of happiness. Away, doubt and confusion. Hello, Mickey, President Clinton, David Letterman. A triple loop, then a triple salchow, and then the final jump, the triple lutz—perfect. Hello, America! She glided into her spiral sequence—the loveliest part of her program, in which she spreads her arms, leans out, and joyously offers up this beautiful thing she has just done for the audience to savor. She finished with a triple toe loop and a butterfly jump. And then the smile, which is the deal clincher. Michelle has the best smile in the business. It has a limpid quality, like the Little Mermaid’s smile.
The crowd stood and applauded for several minutes. Cellophane-wrapped bouquets rained down on the ice; the flower girls delivered them to Michelle in Kiss and Cry. The marks were very good: all 5.8s for technical merit, and all 5.9s for presentation. A cameraman found Danny, and the Jumbotron over the scoreboard showed him slapping someone a high five.
“Representing the United States, Tara Lipinski…”
As Tara skated to the center of the ice, eight-year-old girls’ voices calling out “Go, Tara!” echoed in the otherwise silent arena. Tara’s music began, the soundtrack for the movie The Rainbow. She smoothly landed a double axel, then did a perfect triple flip. Now came her triple lutz. She kicked her right leg high, jumped, and—bang!—she hit the ice hard. A quick, shocked intake of crowd breath. Tara fell! Tara hadn’t fallen since Germany in 1996. But there she was, sitting on her glutes, another fallen princess. She got up off the ice and skated the rest of the program cleanly, finishing second to Michelle.
Afterward, both girls faced the skating press, sitting side by side on a raised dais. Michelle spoke first. “I can say that I came out of my coma,” she said. “I feel different this year. The joy is back.” She smiled her thrilled-little-girl smile.
Tara sat there with her lips parted, a slightly haughty look on her face. When Michelle finished, she spoke curtly. “The mistake I made was not a big deal,” she said, crossing her arms. “It was just a mistake.” She paused, and looked over the heads of the press, perhaps catching a glimpse of her rapidly vanishing childhood, with its unself-conscious, ballerina-on-a-music-box rotations. You could hear in her voice a slight false note of confidence as she said, “I think I am still in a good spot.”
1998
“Er—haven’t you forgotten something?”
THE CHOSEN ONE
DAVID OWEN
On a hot Sunday afternoon last May, Tiger Woods conducted a golf exhibition in Oklahoma City. During the hour before he appeared, while a large crowd baked in the bleachers, a member of his entourage held a trivia contest, with T-shirts for prizes. One of the questions: In what year was Tiger Woods born? The first guess, by a very young fan, was 1925. That’s off by half a century, but the error is understandable. Woods has accomplished so much as a golfer that it’s easy to forget that he’s only twenty-four. In a sport in which good players seldom peak before their thirties, and often remain competitive at the highest levels well into their forties, Woods is off to a mind-boggling start. Most recently, he won the British Open with a record-breaking score of nineteen under par. After that blowout, Ernie Els, a terrific young South African player and the winner of two United States Opens, said with a resigned smile, “We’ll have to go to the drawing board again, and maybe make the holes bigger for us and a little smaller for him.”
When Woods eventually appeared for his Oklahoma exhibition, his entrance was appropriately dramatic. A small convoy of golf carts bore down on the bleachers from the far end of the driving range, while martial-sounding rock music blasted from the public-address system. The exhibition was the final event in a two-day program sponsored by the Tiger Woods Foundation, a charitable organization whose goal is to inspire children—especially underprivileged children—and “to make golf look more like America,” as Woods himself says. Forty-two cities had applied to be visited by Woods and his team in 2000, and Oklahoma City was the first of just four cities to be chosen. Among the reasons for its selection was the existence of this particular facility: a low-fee public golf course, with free lessons for children on weekends, situated in an unprepossessing neighborhood not far from Oklahoma City’s unprepossessing downtown.
Before stepping up to the practice tee, Woods answered questions from the audience, whose members differed from golf’s principal constituency in that many of them were neither middle-aged nor white. One of the first questions came from a junior-high-school-aged fan, who asked, “How do you maintain your personal life and your golf career at the same time?”
Woods, who was leaning on his pitching wedge, said, “That’s a great question. When I’m off the golf course, I like to get away from everything, and I like to keep everything private, because I feel that I have a right to that.” There was heavy applause from the crowd. “There are exceptions to that, where the press likes to make up a few stories here and there. But that’s just the way it goes.”
Many very famous people become very famous because, for some compelling and probably unwholesome reason, they crave the approval of the rest of us. That’s why they put up with the media, among other things. Even the ones who vigorously defend their privacy seem to do so in a way that attracts an awful lot of publicity, suggesting that their aversion to celebrity is more complicated than they let on. With Woods, though, you get the feeling that his fame mostly gets in the way. We intrude on his golf when he’s playing golf, and we intrude on his private life when he’s not. He can be a dazzlingly emotional and telegenic performer, and he surely finds it thrilling to walk down fairways lined with thousands of deliriously happy admirers shouting his name, but he conveys the impression that he would play every bit as hard if the cameras and the microphones and the galleries simply disappeared.
That’s an awe-inspiring character trait, but it’s also a chilling one. Part of the fun of being a sports fan is harboring the delusion that great athletic achievements are in some sense collaborations between athletes and their rooting sections. Woods’s accomplishments are so outsized that it’s hard to conceive of them as belonging to anyone but himself. As Tom Watson said of him after the British Open, “He is something supernatural.”
Before Woods turned thirteen, he had researched and memorized the main competitive accomplishments of Jack Nicklaus because he already intended to exceed them. Between the mid-1970s and a month or two ago, sportswriters viewed Nicklaus’s remarkable career (which was crowned by eighteen victories in golf’s four major championships) as the permanent benchmark of greatness in golf; the new consensus is that Woods is capable of breaking all of Nicklaus’s records, unless he loses interest in the game or injures himself or decides to run for president instead. Nicklaus himself has always been one of Woods’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders. In 1996, he said that Woods could ultimately win the Masters more times than he and Arnold Palmer had combined—more than ten times, in other words. That statement seemed like crazy hyperbole at the time; it doesn’t any longer.
Here in Oklahoma, though, Woods wasn’t focusing on the record book. Earlier in the day, he had worked one on one with twenty-five young local golfers, most of whom were members of ethnic minorities. He watched them swing, offered advice, teed up balls for them, and made them laugh. The kids all looked nervous while they awaited their turns, but most were smiling by the time he moved on. One of those golfers was Treas Nelson, a high school junior from Lawton, Oklahoma, who had just won the Class 5A Girls’ State Championship; she is the first black golfer in Oklahoma to win a statewide high school title. After she finished her session with Woods, I violated a ban on over-the-rope media fraternization and asked her what Tiger had told her.
“He said I have the pizza-man syndrome,” she told me. “I get my right hand too much like this.” She lifted her right arm with the elbow bent, as though she were holding a pizza on a tray at shoulder height. “He said he has the same problem.” She was beaming. Like almost all the kids
who received individual instruction, she was wearing Nike shorts and a Nike shirt—goodies provided by Woods’s biggest commercial sponsor. She had supplemented this uniform with a pair of Nike earrings. “I don’t know if he noticed that,” she said. But she hoped he had.
“I can relate to these kids,” Woods said a little later that day. “I’m not too far from their age. If these kids saw Jack Nicklaus, I don’t think they would have an appreciation for what he’s done in the game or what he has to offer, just because of the fact that it’s hard for a person of Nicklaus’s age to relate to a kid. But I’m not too far removed from my teens. I can say ‘Dude,’ and that’s cool—that’s fine.”
It’s only because of Woods that most of these kids even know who Jack Nicklaus is. Woods spends almost as much time studying golf’s history as he does making it, and he goes out of his way to share his knowledge of that history with the youngsters who idolize him. In answer to a question from the audience at his exhibition, he said, “When I was young, I looked up to a lot of different players for a lot of different reasons. Obviously, Jack Nicklaus was the greatest of all time. Ben Hogan was the greatest driver there ever was. Seve Ballesteros probably had the best short game. Ben Crenshaw putted the best. So what I did was analyze every different player’s game and try to pick the best out of each and every player and try to look up to that. I wasn’t going to look up to just one person.” For young golfers twenty years from now, however, looking up to the best player in each of the areas Woods mentioned may be no more complicated than looking up to Woods himself. He leads the tour in most of the several dozen statistical categories that tour officials keep track of, including career earnings. (His tournament winnings during the first seven months of 2000 alone exceeded Nicklaus’s lifetime earnings.)
The Only Game in Town Page 26
