There was a time, and it wasn’t a short period of time at all, when figure skating was one of the most popular televised sports in the nation, and Dick Button was the most famous and most powerful person in the sport.
Button, who died Thursday at age 95, personified figure skating for millions of Americans from the 1960s to the end of the 20th century, and into a portion of the 21st as well.
The first American Olympic gold medalist in the sport back in 1948, then again in 1952, Button took the nation by the hand and escorted all of us into the often arcane and always dramatic world of jumps and spins, slips and falls, kissing and crying.
Button anointed stars with an on-air sentence. A triple jump wasn’t good unless he said it was. When he shed a tear in the ABC Sports broadcast booth for an injured Randy Gardner and his partner, Tai Babilonia, as they withdrew from the pairs competition at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, fans wept with him.
Viewers put their faith in him, and rightly so, because you can make a pretty strong case that no other sport has produced anyone quite like Dick Button. As a pioneering superstar, an innovator, a businessperson and a powerbroker, he was to figure skating what Arnold Palmer was to golf, bringing the sport to the masses — and making a lot of money in the process — as Americans’ access to and fascination with television was exploding across the land.
But there’s more. Button also became figure skating’s Howard Cosell, a tuxedoed, Harvard-educated television personality who was the extremely self-confident conscience of the sport.
“He was like a professor,” his longtime broadcasting partner, Olympic gold medalist Peggy Fleming, said in a telephone interview. “He taught audiences how to watch skating. He also sometimes was like a professor sitting next to me as a commentator. If I said something that he thought was grammatically incorrect, he would literally write a note as we were on the air to tell me about it.”
Even if viewers knew nothing of Button’s history as an athlete and entrepreneur, he became both famous and essential to them because when they turned on figure skating, there he was, ready to explain it all to them.
And, oh my, did they turn on figure skating. Today, skating, like many sports, grasps for whatever sliver of the TV audience it can attract. But 31 years ago, in the wake of the wildly sensational Tonya-Nancy saga, when there were only three or four channels and Dick Button and Peggy Fleming were in their heyday, well, get a load of this statistic:
In March 1996, the men’s long program at the world figure skating championships, shown live on ABC with Button in the booth, received a 10.1 rating.
Going head-to-head with the skating was live coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on CBS. That earned just an 8.8 rating.
I knew Dick Button years before I met him. My first recollection of his call of a big Olympic moment was in February 1976, during the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, which I was watching with my family at our home in the Toledo suburbs.
Dorothy Hamill had just finished her long program as Button’s voice soared. Flowers were “raining” onto the ice, he exclaimed.
“She has done it! I am sure!”
To that point in my life, I had never heard more delightfully certain words spoken by a sports announcer.
Nearly 20 years later when I finally did meet him, I was scolded almost immediately. As I started reporting my book “Inside Edge” in 1994, I scheduled an interview with him and of course asked about his role as the most famous commentator in the sport.
He stopped me.
“I am a narrator,” he said. “I don’t commentate on skating. I narrate it.”
Got it, I said. It was the beginning of a wonderful working relationship. We talked often at skating events; I asked for his opinion on various skaters, and occasionally, he asked for mine.
I became his colleague when I joined the ABC/ESPN figure skating announcing team for a couple of years in 2005. One memorable morning, Button, Fleming and I got stuck in an SUV with a few other members of the broadcast team on a highway overpass in the middle of an ice storm in Portland, Ore., on our way to the arena.
Button, then 75, decided he was going to do something about it. What, we had no idea. He opened his car door.
“No, Dick,” we all said.
He stepped out of the SUV onto the ice-covered road. He took a step or two, thankfully holding onto the car door. He stopped and surveyed the situation, then took another step or two, not holding onto the car door.
Was he going to try to walk to the arena?
In that moment, I was comforted by the thought that this was a man with two degrees from Harvard who also happened to know an awful lot about ice.
The great Dick Button got back into the car.
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