Stars on Ice loses its shining light

When the pink slip is delivered, it rarely arrives in a perfumed envelope. This one came wrapped in onion skin and dipped in acid.

It was also laced with dramatic irony.

"Men don't sell tickets," Ice Capades owner Tom Scallen complained in 1986, as he gave the unceremonious chop to Scott Hamilton.

Just two years after his Olympic gold medal and his fourth straight world title, a string unduplicated since, Hamilton was being told he was yesterday's news.

Hamilton, an entertainer to the core, was devastated. Mr. Popularity, and he couldn't sell tickets?

So Hamilton and his managers, the giant IMG agency, mounted their own travelling show, the polar opposite of Ice Capades and its doomed ilk. Stars on Ice would be a new genre of professional tour, weather-proofed against the quadrennial influx of new Olympic champions, and relying but not solely dependent upon its key player. Scott Hamilton.

Fifteen years later, as the man who could not sell tickets completes the final leg of his emotional farewell tour, Stars on Ice is a thriving, evolving, institution and Ice Capades is a financial white elephant with a fading past and no future.

The turnabout should have come as no surprise. Hamilton's history is one of making manna out of manure, turning messes into messages.

Even now, a fortnight from retiring as a tour skater, Hamilton has overcome an ankle injury that has plagued him since his bout with cancer four years ago. "I never thought I'd skate without pain again," he marvels, and many nights he's landing seven triple jumps. At 42 years of age.

Stricken in childhood by Schwachmann's Syndrome, a growth-development illness, Hamilton was enroled in figure skating because it was felt the exercise would be therapeutic. He responded by maturing into one of the greatest skaters of all time. He called his return a victory for "short, bald guys everywhere."

It is appropriate, then, that in Hamilton's final season with the tour he co-founded, his opening number should be Sinatra's My Way.

"It sets a hook," says the native of Bowling Green, Ohio. "It creates emotion, and every now and then I get caught up in it."

So does the rest of the cast. Canadian legend Kurt Browning, a Hamilton disciple and the heir apparent to the Stars' leadership role, says that the U.S. tour, which recently concluded, "was a love-fest. The very first show was weepy and we were all emotional. And we said, 'Hey we've got to do it 65 more times'. I've shed a few tears so far."

The Canadian tour makes its traditional Hamilton stop next Saturday night and this time, Copps Coliseum will be the TV venue. Because the annual Stars on Ice television special will be taped here, the audience gets the additional benefit of seeing, after the regular show, partial reskates of performances which weren't quite up to snuff. Usually that's not too many, mainly because of the standard Hamilton has set by example.

"He's like a chirpy father who never stops giving advice," Browning said. "He's going to reprimand, but not by putting a finger in your chest. You have to pay attention."

That's because Hamilton has always wanted Stars to be, paradoxically, star-proof. When the prototype was mounted in 1986 for a five-stop tour through mid-size American college towns, the show bore his name in the title. But it was changed to the more generic Stars on Ice for another five-city tour the next season, this time to large NHL-type arenas. Copps Coliseum was the only Canadian stop.

Stars was designed to resist the normal Olympic birth-death cycle. Marquee skaters such as Brian Orser, Browning, and Kristi Yamaguchi joined after Olympic years, but soon learned the lesson that Hamilton had learned from Sarah Kawahara, a Dundas native but a long-time resident of California, and regarded as one of the divas of professional-skating choreographers.

"Sarah said to me, 'It's time for you to turn pro,' and I'd been there for two years already," Hamilton recalls. "But she was right. I was still hanging on to my amateur career.

"So Stars was the putting together of an ensemble of skaters. A plan where skating and skaters would take everything to the next level. You want where you are now to take you to another place."

It was centred around solid, entertaining, individual performances. It was not dependent upon costuming and production numbers (although there were usually three or four great ones in each show). And it was, and still is, brilliantly choreographed by Sandra Bezic.

And along the way, it became a family. Talented skaters, most of whom had been superstars in their amateur careers, living and touring together for five months. Sharing triumphs and tragedy.

"It's like like life, it's not easy," Hamilton says wistfully. "We're a family. You're going to have the greatest moments of your life with your family and the most horrible to balance it out."

By far the worst day for every Stars relative was the morning of November 20, 1995 when Sergei Grinkov collapsed and died on the practice rink at Lake Placid, leaving his wife and partner Ekaterina Gordeeva and their young daughter Daria.

"The lowest point was Sergei, because it came so far out of left field," Hamilton says. "So quick, so distressing and so final. You're talking to someone and five minutes later he's gone, and it's someone I respected so much and someone I loved so much.

"With Rob (McCall, who had died in 1991 of AIDS) we got to spend a lot of time together. The same with Brian Pockar before he died. You could prepare yourself. But that horrible day, I'll never forget it.

"There was also, on a personal level, skating in Madison Square Garden (in 1994), the day I buried my father."

The high point, individually was October 29, 1997, in Los Angeles as Stars opened its U.S. tour to a sold-out audience which stood and cheered, seemingly forever, to welcome Hamilton back to the ice after months of cancer treatments.

"But the most important thing when I look back is who I've gotten to share the ice with," says Hamilton. "Everyone. Torvill and Dean, Katarina Witt, Sergei and Katia, Kristi (Yamaguchi) Ros (Sumners) Brian, Kurt. The best skaters of our time."

And they got to share the ice with him. Hamilton isn't retiring from the sport, just from the grind of touring. He'll do some one-off events, some television work and is committed to writing a skating show for Broadway, but figures that project will take two years to bring to fruition.

"I'm the last of the original cast members and it's cool that I'm leaving," he said. "Now the show isn't tethered to the past."

Which is exactly the way he set it up 15 years ago.

For now, he's still the main man, and saying goodbye to Canada. It's fitting that his touring career will end (May 1, Vancouver) in the same country that his amateur competitive career did (Ottawa Worlds, 1984).

The U.S. tour was the main artery but almost every Stars cast member also took part in the Canadian tour sometime in his or her tenure. Other than the seasons immediately after his cancer, Hamilton headlined the northern exposure.

"I put a lot of pressure on myself in U.S. tours. I don't in Canada," he says of his frequent trips here. "In Canada a lot of the show's identity falls on Kurt and Brian. Heck, a lot of Americans always thought I was Canadian anyway.