Klowning Around With Kurt Browning

"I'm easy-going to a fault," Kurt Browning confessed. "Where do I want to be in my sport? Well, I didn't know I was going to be here, so I'm happy wherever I am. I just want to keep doing what I'm doing and if I can make a small audience happy every night, then in the big scheme of things something will figure itself out."

Last winter, after a year's hiatus, Browning returned to the U.S. Stars on Ice tour to do two of the things he enjoys most - skate and entertain. From January to April, he crisscrossed the United States, performing in countless cities. To accommodate his personal life, tour organizers left openings in his schedule to allow him to return home to Toronto or Alberta regularly. It's a change from the previous season when, after a round of fall competitions and shows, and participation in Tara Lipinski's first TV special in December 1998, he opted out of the U.S. tour of Stars On Ice.

He spent most of that winter traveling from Toronto to his parents' Alberta ranch. In between visits he experimented unsuccessfully with a number of different choreographic approaches, and in the spring he took his clever clown persona on the Canadian Stars on Ice tour. "It went by really fast," he said.

He and Sonia Rodriguez, his wife of four years, spent the summer in Spain with her family. Rodriguez is a first soloist with the National Ballet of Canada and gets a summer break. Said Browning, " I don't skate in the summer because I dedicate everything [the rest of the year] to skating." He believes the vacation from skating keeps his outlook fresh and will, in the long run, extend his skating career. "That's my key to success. I really and truly want to be out in front of people," said the inveterate entertainer.

Browning and Rodriguez live in downtown Toronto in a 75 year-old renovated house on a tree-lined street. There's a new addition to the family - a Portugese Water Dog who will be a year old this summer. Browning maintains that although scheduling puppy obedience classes and domestic responsibilities around two high profile and demanding careers does challenge the couple, "It's a beautiful life. Skating has offered us so many opportunities."

Privacy in big-city Toronto is no problem. Browning said he rarely attracts more than a curious glance at his favorite pub or when filling up his Mercedes at the pumps. And although he insisted "I'm not a star, I'm an athlete," he is reminded every once in a while of his high profile. He described a 17-story elevator trip: "A 14 year-old girl just took one look at me and screamed at the top of her lungs. So I screamed back at her. Then she screamed back at me and I screamed back at her. It would have made a good comedy skit."

Another day he found himself with tickets to a Raptors' game that he couldn't use. He walked over to the local supermarket and looked around for someone to give them to. The fellow he approached looked at him a little suspiciously and then asked, "Aren't you Kurt Browning?" Browning owned up and the fellow replied, "So they're probably pretty good tickets then?"

Browning experienced a different taste of celebrity in the spring of 1999 when The Caroline Kid: The Kurt Browning Story, a one-man play, produced by Prime Stock Theatre, toured Alberta. Thomas Usher, the artistic director, claimed the only instructions from Browning, who had read the script, were to keep the fun in the production. Browning caught the last performance in Calgary and was delighted with the antics of the star, Tony Eaymie.

"He played me. He played my coach. He played my Mom. He played my Dad. He played everybody. He had some pretty good moves. He did my long program in Budapest and he ran to center stage and hit the exact position that I did at the beginning. For me it was absolutely hilarious because I got every joke."

The man who publicly proposed to Rodriguez before thousands in Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens at a Stars on Ice show is not shy to profess his love. During a recent flight, Browning got chatting with his seatmate and discovered that she worked for a wedding magazine. As he described it, he told the Wedding Bells executive that his wife "really dug being a bride and she's already wondering when we are getting married again. She's like a gorgeous creature. She's a dancer in the National Ballet so she has a sort of celebrity in Toronto, so would you be interested in using her as a model?" His unusual request elicited a hesitant, "We'll get back to you on that." And they did! Browning kept the arrangements a secret and surprised Rodriguez with the photo shoot for Wedding Bells. "It was a little hard to explain," he said. The spread in the fall/winter issue showcased Rodriguez modeling six different designer gowns accompanied by Browning in two of the shots. In another romantic gesture, Browning skated at Ice Wars in November in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to The Promise by Tracy Chapman. He and Rodriguez danced to this song at their wedding. "I did it as a gift to my wife. It probably wasn't the best skating music in the world, but I hadn't done a nice big skate for a while. Everything is either silly or rock and roll. It was just nice to breathe."

Browning has no formula for choosing music or themes, and he uses a number of choreographers, including long-time friend, Sandra Bezic and recently Roberto Campanella, who danced with his wife in the National Ballet. If he needs a little line dancing for Star Skates Goes Country, he creates a one-off routine that he hopes he can use in another country format sometime. If the show has a holiday theme, a novelty Santa routine fills the bill. These superficial programs are a bit risky and are often discarded after the event. "Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't," he said.

For Stars On Ice he trusts Bezic and Michael Seibert, the show's co-directors. "They find my music for me and whatever they think, I just accept it," the accommodating Browning said.

Browning considers Michael Jiranek his coach, although he travels to Edmonton for technical tune-ups infrequently. He pointed out, "I'm a professional skater so maybe I should go to Edmonton to train with Michael, but I don't want to be away from my wife because I'm away from her enough. So I don't. You set your priorities.' He planned to use Jiranek at a competition last fall and then neglected to inform him when he bowed out of the competition. In Browning's words, "I do mistakes like that. That was huge. I have to send him a huge box of wine and just say, 'Nothing personal, I'm just an idiot. You've known me for 15 years, so you know that.'"

Browning operates without an entourage. "It would be nice to have a Team Kurt because I'm not, never have been, and never will be, the most business-minded, organized guy in the world. I think it's to my advantage, actually. That quality helps me on the ice, but it doesn't necessarily help me get to the ice. Team Kurt would probably be smart but I don't enjoy traveling with people around me."

Critics suggest that a Team Kurt could have prevented the timing fiasco at the Canadian Open in Mississauga in December. In this pro-am event, skaters were required to skate a technical program with required elements in no more than 2 minutes 40 seconds and a 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 minute interpretative routine. After the short program, Browning was in second place behind Todd Eldredge with a good chance of winning his fifth Canadian Open title. When his technical marks from 5.1 to 5.6 for the interpretative program came up, Browning thought, "Man, they hated it." He didn't realize until he was backstage that the judges had docked him .2 points for each 10 seconds the program was short - a total deduction of .8 for the missing 35 seconds.

Originally Browning planned to use a new clown number as his interpretive program but a few days before the event, Bezic suggested that without spotlights and the final touches to the program, it might be wiser to use something else. Browning chose Play That Funky Music White Boy, which he and Campanella had recently choreographed. Running out of time, they had cut a shortened version of the piece for Kristi Yamaguchi's holiday special. It was this version that Browning practiced and took with him to the competition. Other competitors who heard the time check at the Friday rehearsal either thought they had heard incorrectly, or else assumed that Browning knew the piece was too short.

Browning said had he known right up to the minute he stepped on the ice, he could have improvised. "I could have played the first 40 seconds and then just had them push the rewind on the CD and start over just so I made it. I knew the rules. I knew it had to be 3 1/2 minutes. I was so concerned with the short program making the rules because I had to adapt another program. I just forgot."

Browning's preoccupation with the short program may have resulted from problems in an earlier fall competition, the Masters Skating Challenge in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in which he competed with only a few days notice. He discovered that IMG New York was advertising his participation although he and his Toronto agent thought he had not committed to the event. In his short program, skated to An American in Paris, Browning said he left out an upright position on one spin and missed another spin entirely. The ISU format which requires specific elements was unforgiving, and Browning's marks were as low as 5.0

Even though Browning maintains that those who know him well would just describe the Canadian Open problem as a typical Kurt day, he was upset about the way in which he lost the title and concerned about the reaction of his parents, who were watching the event on television in Alberta. He was relieved when his Mom just laughed and said not to worry about it.

To those who accused him of being unprofessional, Browning countered. "I think showing up at two or three competitions in a row and skating badly, that's unprofessional, but that's not what happened. I just made a stupid, stupid mistake."

With fewer professional competitions and the strict requirements of the pro-am ISU events, Browning chose to enter only six fall competitions, as opposed to as many as eight or nine in previous years. He chooses competitions on the basis of format and past experience and he particularly likes the team events such as Ice Wars. "Every year you have a different team and you see the interaction between the teammates. Some people don't want anything to do with you. Others get into the team thing. I've always enjoyed the cheering on stage." He's keen to be included in any competitions in Canada and said after competing in the Canadian Open against two other Canadian champs, Brian Orser and Elvis Stojko, "There are not many moments like this, skating close to home, in Canada."

He didn't compete at the 1999 World Professional Figure Skating Championship in Washington, DC in December. He explained, "I didn't get a deal done witih Dick [Button]." Negotiations with the organizers dragged out so long that he accepted a conflicting competition, the Keri Lotion U.S. vs. the World. Besides, Browning said he was not jumping as well as he would like. "Skating is going great but I really didn't want to be at World Pros another year without a triple Axel, so I said no. Whether Dick believed me or not, this was not a personal thing." he added, "That competition has my respect totally. Beating Brian [Boitano] a couple of times out there was almost as important as winning the amateur world championship, as far as I was concerned." When he returns to the World Pro he intends to have a solid triple Axel in his arsenal.

If Browning was disappointed with his standings at the fall competitions, he's not broadcasting it. Besides he knows he is the master of his own destiny. He freely admitted that his lack of a triple Axel in the fall events was his own doing. In December he said, "I just haven't put in the effort. I think I've just made a choice to take a holiday. But, you know I miss it. It's fun. It's really exciting to be spinning that fast in the air and to control that much power." The triple Axel is the one jump that he does not enjoy doing in the spotlights. "You look forward for so long. All the others you just go," he said.

A change of boots and blade position which sent his double Axel, in his words, "to Alaska," friend Josee Chouinard's triple Axel attempts, and Orser's triple Axel success, were perhaps the impetus he needed to work on the jump in tour practice sessions during the winter. On February 25 in a Stars on Ice performance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he landed a triple Axel. Later he promised, "[It] should be in more shows now."

Browning was one of Orser's biggest fans at the Canadian Open. "It would have been so nice to have a clean win, but I was really happy that Brian had a great night. He was the emotional favorite. I was cheering him as a friend and also as a 22-year-old who watched him win Worlds. I felt young. I never thought I would see a vintage Brian Orser, triple Axel, person again. He's been very inspirational for me the last couple of years. I've seen my skating come down a notch or two but I've seen my 38 year-old friend bring it up. When I start to get mad at myself, I realize there are ups and downs. I didn't do the quad for six years and then started landing it again. You can do a lot if you put your mind to it, but sometimes your mind is somewhere else."

Reminiscing about that first-ever quadruple jump at the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary in 1988, Browning said, "They didn't have to give it to me because I did a three turn after it." However, he's okay with the Guinness Record because he claims, before anyone else could duplicate the feat, he had landed a "pristine-perfect" one at the Canadian Championships the next year in Chicoutini, Quebec. And he's pretty proud of the 10th anniversary quad he landed in 1998 while performing in Stars on Ice.

After a family Christmas and New Year's at the farm in Alberta, Browning took to the road with Stars On Ice. Rodriguez's schedule is demanding (Browning refers to the ballet as bootcamp on toe point), but during her week off in January she joined him on tour. Of life on the road, he said, "If you had no family or friends it would be great. You get on the road for months at a time and you really lose track of bills, taxes, birthdays and Christmas shopping. It's a million miles from real life. No one can catch up to you and your telephone number changes every day. Until emails it was a real pain in the butt. It's easy to not have a home. You just have a hotel room. You don't have furniture, you have luggage. The only good thing about it truly, is the show - those two hours every night and the lifestyle that provides. You're away from your parents and your friends and your wife and your beautiful home and you're grumpy and then you have a great show and it's all worth it. You skate great and you have this number that you're really proud of and people love it and it's so much fun."

America On Line (AOL) cleverly capitalized on Browning's endorsement of electronic communication in a television commercial touting the benefits of the Internet. The Browning pooch plays a supporting role.

Browning said his number one survival tactic is, "to skate well in the show every night. That's the easiest way to stay happy on the road. You just see it happen to skaters. When they have two or three bad shows in a row, they become evil." He added, "The second key is to really have fun. To make sure it's not all trains, planes, hotel rooms and rinks." On the road, the camaraderie of the group sustains the skaters. "We have this bond of skating and it makes us pretty close," Browning said. He and Yamaguchi share more than a decade of private jokes right back to their Olympic training days in Edmonton. Hamilton and Steven Cousins are his golf partners and Chouinard and Browning have a special, almost brother-sister, relationship. Of his surrogate family, Browning said, "Hate 'em and love 'em all at the same time."

On reentry into real life, domestic errands and family expectations can bewilder Browning, who for weeks hasn't concerned himself with taking out the garbage, walking the dog, or buying groceries. And the moment the pressure is off, he, like other skaters who rarely get sick on the road, collapses. In the days after the Canadian Open, he said he slept 10 or 11 hours every night. He calculated that he had worked on the ice 33 out of the previous 35 days. Often skaters returning to the tour after Christmas report ill health. "When you have to go, you go and then as soon as you stop, you get sick," he explained.

When he's in Toronto, Browning acts as a consultant to the skating department at the prestigious Granite Club. "It's the first real step towards a real life," Browning said. "It's the only other job I've ever had, other than waitering at Chi Chi's [an Edmonton restaurant] 20 years ago." He helps Granite skaters with bits of choreography and technical problems and assists in the search for coaches and experts who may be useful to all the club's young hopefuls. In the fall he was involved in a media seminar, which introduced the athletes to the pitfalls of press conferences.

Last fall Lea Ann Miller asked him to play around with Takeshi Honda's straight-line footwork for an hour while she attended to some other business. Browning, who is a great fan of Honda, had a lot of fun showing him how the fastest feet in the business transform ordinary moves into dazzling footwork. Browning demonstrated the effect of adding airtime to three turns and changed free-foot positions to brackets, and all those embellishments that make a difference. For Browning, footwork has always been fun but he credits Hamilton with some of his inspiration. "I've always looked up to Scott and I've always liked that I couldn't hear his feet. He always had one move in every number that you didn't know how he did."

"Footwork doesn't have to be impossible, but you do have to work at it. I don't think people know that," he added.

Coaching appeals to Browning and he plans eventually to get his Canadian coaching certification, but like other elite skaters he is puzzled that there are no concessions in the accreditations process for world-level skaters. "I think it's right [to require certification] but I think it's silly that a four-time world champion has to spend three days, eight hours a day to get Level 1," he explained.

Browning can't see himself producing shows, managing arenas or acting as an agent for other skaters. "I wouldn't consider myself a businessman. I'm not ashamed of that. It's just the way it is," he remarked. On the other hand he plans to skate for a long time. Comparing himself to Orser, he said, "I'll be skating at 38 [Orser celebrated his 38th birthday on December 18]. I don't know if I'll be as good as Brian but I'll definitely be skating."

If he does fantasize about a future role in the business of skating, he sees an ongoing program with his name on it that would assist developing skaters. "My wife could do the ballet and the stretching. Doug Ladret could do the pairs and Michael Slipchuck would guest coach. I would love to do something like that, " he said.

In January at the Canadian Championships in Calgary the Canadian Figure Skating Association inducted Browning, fellow World Champions Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler, and Canadian-born skating promoter Tom Collins into the Canadian Figure Skating Hall of Fame. The location was perfect. In this same Saddledome, Browning cut his Olympic teeth at the 1988 games and Calgary is close to family, and long-time friends, many of whom were able to be present for the ceremony. Up to that point, Browning considered his greatest sport's award to be his induction into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1994. For a kid who grew up on Hockey Night in Canada and who painted team emblems on his hockey pucks, standing alongside "Boom Boom" Geoffrion and Maurice "The Rocket" Richard is about as good as it gets. Ironically in an end-of-the-millenium, on-line poll on CBC for Sportsperson of the Century, Browning placed second to hockey's great one, Wayne Gretsky, and ahead of other hockey heroes Bobby Orr and Maurice Richard. Now he rubs skating shouldiers with Canadian figure skating pioneer Montgomery Wilson and Canada's legendary queen of ice, Barbara Ann Scott, whom Browning recently described in a column for the Calgary Herald as a great skating "Gramma" to other skaters and him.

His columns in the Calgary Herald during the Canadian Championships touched on his personal skating experiences and his hopes and dreams for the current competitors. He dared skaters "to go out there and have a bit of fun" and to "find a few moments to remember why you started skating in the first place." He claims that writing comes easily and that he particularly enjoyed writing the introduction in the program for the Legendary Night of Figure Skating. For a time, he regularly contributed personal reports on shows and competitions to one of his fan websites, until he found the global dissemination of information too intrusive. "I found it just got too personal," he commented. Browning directed payment for the columns in the Calgary Herald to his Junior Skating Bursary that supports novice and junior skaters in Canada. This past year both Investors Group in Canada and AOL have come on board to assist with the bursary fund.

Browning admitted that where skating is concerned, he's always been easy-going and a bit of an opportunist - two characteristics that he feels go hand in hand and that have helped him throughout his skating career. Browning claimed even as an amateur he had another life, "I never skated weekends. I enjoyed life. I brought that with me to the rink." Unlike his Edmonton training partner, Yamaguchi, he did not train methodically all year, but rather waited until the crunch came and then got serious. However, if anyone opened the door a crack, he was quick to dart through.

"I make a joke of it but I've always been lazy that way. I see an advantage and I take it," he said. "I don't waste any time." He recalled that in 1989 it seemed logical to take over Orser's Canadian title and then while he was at it, he might just as well win Worlds. He said he thought, "I beat Victor Petrenko at Skate Canada. I beat Chris Bowman at Skate Electric, so I guess that makes me the best skater in the world. OK, I'm going to win Worlds. No heavy-duty math there." He said, "I was just very straightforward about my opportunities and just took them."

Browning, who is both the quintessential entertainer and a skater of great ability, believes that whether professional or amateur, skaters are skaters who entertain, not entertainers who skate. "People see the entrance to a jump that comes out of nowhere, a spin with that perfect line, the pointed toe, the speed, the ease that you change from left to right, the fact that you can be doing footwork and at the same time smiling. Deep down there has to be a quality skater. We're skaters first. Then you learn to entertain."

He makes an exception for Philippe Candelero. "Philippe is an entertainer. And sometimes it's enough. He comes to the rink to make sure people have a good time. You can see the work he puts into his programs. It's paint. It's special costumes. It's big sticks. It"s not the best skating. It's not the nicest crossovers. It's not the best spins or the prettiest jumps..but he's there for the people."

Had he known he would grow up to be a professional skater, Browning would have taken dance lessons as a kid. "The Russians are now kicking our butts because they all learn how to dance. Dancers learn to create an image from the very beginning...whereas we learn to get the jump done, no matter what." As it is, he said he knows good dancers and he's not one, but he pointed out, "I can do enough to make sure you know that I'm dancing. If I'm doing a dancey, funky number, I'll do the best I can. Maybe I'm a 33 year-old balding guy [he will be 34 on June 18], but we're in this together and we're going to have a good time."

In response to requests from Browning fans for a compilation of his best skating numbers, a friend, Don Metz, produced and directed Kurt Browning: By Request. The hour-long program aired on CBC television in February and a video is planned. The idea originated from the family's frustration at fielding questions about where to get copies of Browning's best-known numbers.

"It was actually my mom and dad's idea," Browning explained. Kurt Browning: By Request celebrates his greatest career moments including the first quad, Casablanca and Browning's all-time favorite, Singing in the Rain. Browning commented, "It was difficult to decide which solos and how much of each to include." Friends and fellos skaters, Bezic, Chouinard, and Lipinski, among others, contributed comments on Browning's career to date.

Browning took part in another television project last year. 100 Years of Canadian Sport, a 12-part series, showcased a century of Canada's sporting heroes and ran on TSN from July to December. "Don Metz asked me if I would help host one of them. I hosted the first one and then I did interviews that were also interspersed in other ones," he said. Some of the scenes used Browning with his cousin's horse in front of their Alberta cabin and others were inside by the fireplace.

Browning maintains he's in great shape with the exception of some bone chips in his ankle. This past year, for the first time in five years, he decided to forgo the usual insurance elite professional athletes carry to hedge against missed opportunities due to injury. So there appear to be no physical roadblocks to his continued professional skating career. A flexible schedule within the Stars On Ice tour allows Rodriguez and him to combine careers and family life, while her career with the National Ballet ensures the couple will continue to call Toronto home. There's even talk of perhaps moving the fall rehearsal of Stars on Ice to Toronto from Lake Placid, a move that would accommodate both Browning and Bezic, whose son Dean is now of school age.