Gotta skate: His Quad is retired, but Kurt Browning still has a few years left

Four-time world figure skating champion Kurt Browning is in Toronto today with Stars on Ice, still doing what he loves best: Performing.

Kurt Browning was sitting in the Grand Hall lounge of Union Station in St. Louis, dithering over what to write about the letter 'Q' in a children's alphabet book he's penning on figure skating -- entitled A is for Axel -- that's out next year.

"Quality?" puzzled the four-time world champion. "Quick? Quesadilla?"

"You're kidding, right?" said Stars On Ice troupe member Steve Cousins, shaking his head at Browning's dilemma.

"No, why?"

"Do you think maybe ... Quad?"

Oh, yeah. That. The four-rotation jump Browning was first to land in competition at the 1988 world championships in Budapest. The jump he trained and patented and fell in and out of love with, and finally all but abandoned after a six-year affair in which the threat of a Quad was often as much as he needed to make opponents take unwise risks.

It is by no means a sure thing, but you could make a strong argument that giving up the daily pounding of training the Quad more than a decade ago is the reason Browning, whom many believe is the most versatile, most innovative skater in the sport's history, is still with us, still working the biggest shows, still dazzling audiences with his skills and his art, at age 38.

You could make the opposite argument about the other four-time world champ in the cast of the HSBC Stars On Ice cross-Canada tour, which plays Toronto's Ricoh Coliseum tonight to begin a gruelling stretch of nine shows in 12 nights.

Reigning Olympic champion Alexei Yagudin has already had surgery and is doomed to have more of it on a degenerating hip joint. He's out of big-time competitive skating now, wisely avoids doing Quads these days, and simply can't do loops or Axels. He is barely 25 years old, still a gifted entertainer with great charisma and a wonderful sense of humour ... but if he's skating at 38, it likely will be on an artificial hip.

Or, like 1996 world bronze medalist Rudy Galindo, two of them.

Earlier this season, Browning beat Yagudin in the Canadian pro championships in Winnipeg, doing a triple-triple combination -- "My arm got sore from patting myself on the back," he said -- and filling out his skate with the usual complement of intricate footwork and charm and infectious fun that, for many years now, have been more the Browning trademark than the big jumps.

Only sometimes, the showman runs out of gas.

"I skated like a sack of potatoes in Montreal the other night," he said this week, at his Rosedale home in Toronto which he shares with his wife, National Ballet principal dancer Sonia Rodriguez, and their two-year-old son Gabriel.

"I stumbled once during footwork and had to go down on my hands, and then a little later I was just doing crossovers, and stumbled again," groaned the pride of Caroline, Alta. "The audience must have been going, 'Aw, he's drunk.' But that's what happens when you start closing in on 40 years old. There's good nights and bad nights now.

"I was working on a number I wrote called Gabriel's Toy Box, where I'm supposed to be fixing a leaky pipe in the basement, and keep getting distracted by my son's toys. And at one point I was skipping rope, and to do that you have to be up on your toe-picks, and I burnt my thighs out before the show. So I just did not put together a show for the audience. It rarely happens, but it did happen. I didn't organize myself properly, and there I go.

"It's still really so much fun when I skate well. And it still sucks to skate badly, even if it's just one show out of 50."

There is an end in sight, Browning knows, but his inspiration continues to be 1984 Olympic champ (and Stars On Ice founder) Scott Hamilton, who would still be skating vigorously at 46 if he weren't battling cancer for the second time. It was Hamilton's idea that female skaters weren't the only marketable entertainers in the sport, and Browning has taken Hamilton's art form and turned it into ... well, a higher art form.

"He, I think, is probably the most creative skater ... of this entire century. I mean, the things that he does are just maddeningly difficult, exciting, original, creative. He has more talent in his little finger, I think, than a lot of the other skaters combined," said Dick Button, the longtime ABC skating commentator who won five world and two Olympic titles from 1948-52.

"Kurt is simply the best I've ever seen," said Hamilton, who beat testicular cancer in 1997 only to be stricken with a brain tumour last year that turned out to be benign, but will never entirely go away.

"The older I get, the better I was, as they say," Browning said. "I look back sometimes on what I did, and I think I really, really loved what I was doing. When I did shows, there was never anything but joy in what I was doing. And I think because of that, I was fearless in the things I would try. Chasing my hand around the ice like it was a snake -- I mean, was I stupid? But it was fun. And it worked."

Browning's not entirely comfortable with being the dean of pro figure skating in Canada and, even, the United States, but reckons it's the price of being "the last one left standing. If I'm the dean, I'm a much quieter dean than Scott was. But Brian Orser's still skating and still skating well (at 43), and the rule between us is, I don't get to retire until he does. I said, 'Well, you better hurry up, then, because my knees are barkin'."

If that's true, and the end really is near, Browning will leave behind a body of work that's up there with the most memorable pieces of skating ever performed. His Casablanca-themed free program in 1993-94, choreographed by Sandra Bezic and skated in a white sports jacket, with a pause for an imaginary drag on a cigarette in the middle, was pure genius. It may well have been unbeatable, if he had landed a simple double Axel in his short program at the 1994 Olympics.

Show audiences still remember the dance routine he skated to the Commodores' Brick House on tour from 1996-98, and his 1993 TV special Singin' In the Rain, with steps Bezic adapted from Gene Kelly's water-splashing movie scene, contains some of the most brilliant skating ever committed to video.

"I watched it a little while ago, on tour, for some research," Browning said. "You know I was wearing my sister's skates? I had given Dena a pair of my old skates about four years before that, and she was working for me at the time we taped that special, she was my right-hand girl, arranging all my interviews, all that. And I was just strapping on my skates, and I thought: these things are going to get wrecked, in all that water out there all day -- and then I looked at my sister's skates and said, 'Well, I'll see how far I can go in these.' And I swear to God, I could do no wrong with those skates on. Every time I put my foot down it was exactly where I wanted it to be. I wore them all day, for every jump."

Even though figure skating's market has crashed the past few years, Browning has made millions -- tens of millions -- with his talent, a thing his father Dewey still can't quite grasp. An old mountain outfitter and cowboy most of his life, operating from his ranch near the foothills of the Alberta Rockies, Dewey is 83 now, and living in California.

"My dad says, 'I don't get it, all that money when all you do is go out and skate around. It's not like you went out and killed anything, and skinned it,'" Browning laughed. He has worked with skaters as old as Canada's former world champion Don Jackson, who was 64 last year when they performed together on a Christmas tour, and as young as 1998 Olympic champion Tara Lipinski, when she was 16. He has skated to live music by the Barenaked Ladies, Jann Arden, Michael Buble, and later this year, his fifth Gotta Skate! special will feature Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.

In 1998, on the 10th anniversary of the day he landed the Quad in Budapest, some fans sent him a bottle of champagne to a TV show he was taping in Nashville. He had forgotten the date.

Later, he went to the rink to practise, dusted off the jump and landed it on his fourth try.

That night, in the show, he landed it cleanly. He did it again later that season in Toronto, for old times' sake, but it's been tucked away safely for a long time now.

"I did try it about three years ago, and it was three days before I could walk straight," he chuckled.