Frozen in Time. Nikki Nichols
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been toiled over hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.
As the growling Zamboni emerged through the wide swinging doors, most of the young men and women hurriedly tried to throw one more jump into the practice, believing that just one more time would help the moves snap into place—that one more successfully executed double loop or flying camel would spark the confidence they needed.
Some of the skaters left the ice grudgingly. Others were ready for a cold drink and a comfortable chair, but coaches, many of whom doubled as coach and parent, urged their prodigies to keep going even in the face of fatigue. As one practice session ended, the Colorado College hockey team, bright and blazing in their white, black, and gold uniforms, thundered onto the ice, nearly knocking several skaters off their blades and into a battered heap. Disaster was averted, but this interruption meant additional work would have to wait.
The usual gathering of newspaper reporters mingled with the competitors, coaches, and parents as well as with a new group of participants at the event—production and camera crews from CBS. For the first time in the history of the sport, the United States Figure Skating Championships would be shown on television. In living rooms across America, hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of viewers would take a front-row seat to watch every spin, landing, and fall. The event would be broadcast a few weeks later.
CBS television had aired the 1960 Winter Olympic Games from Squaw Valley, California, a year earlier to rave reviews. The most celebrated moment in those games occurred when a group of American college boys defeated the heavily favored hockey team from communist Russia. For those who lived through it, this team showed just as much grit as the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team that beat the Soviets in the Lake Placid Winter Games semifinal. Though the U.S. hockey program had won the two previous Olympic silver medals, in the 1960 Games, these scrappy American amateurs were considered overwhelming underdogs to the Soviets, Czechs, and Canadians. Just as in 1980, the U.S. faced the Soviets in the semifinals. The U.S. beat them, the first time the Americans had ever beaten the Soviets in hockey. They went on to beat the Czechs for the gold. In the height of the simmering Cold War, these victories ignited a fire of enthusiasm in America.
Figure skating, in addition to hockey, captured many eyes and hearts in the 1960 Olympics. Carol Heiss, the movie-star-pretty American figure skater, took to the ice with a fierce athleticism, landing a double Axel and forever securing her legacy as a brilliant champion. She had already won a silver medal at the 1956 Olympic Games, and now Heiss had won the gold medal to complete her stellar collection. Newspapers of the day labeled her “Cinderella of the blades.” Her triumph was part of only thirteen hours of Olympic competition shown on television—a stark contrast to today’s wall-to-wall network and cable coverage.
Following the ratings success of the Winter Games, the television network decided to broadcast portions of the 1960 Summer Olympics. The Rome Games produced some of the most enduring champions in their respective fields—Wilma Rudolph in track and field, and the indomitable Cassius Clay in boxing.
Carol Heiss, Cassius Clay, Wilma Rudolph, and the USA hockey team created a spark that leapt right through television sets to captivate viewers. Suddenly, these athletes were the toast of America, even if tense race relations tempered this new social status for some of the black athletes. Television executives longed to capitalize on this new fascination with sport and its beautiful, fiery players. Their athletic gifts and human imperfections fascinated equally, and all facets of both the sport and the athlete seemed to make for dramatic television viewing.
The presence of television cameras at the Broadmoor Ice Palace added a new sizzle of excitement for the skaters, who must have sensed, at some level, that their sport, like many others, was entering a new phase of visibility. Television, as they knew, was influencing all areas of modern life. In the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy famously wore makeup during the first-ever televised debate between presidential candidates. Richard Nixon did not powder his face, and Americans ended up choosing Kennedy as their president. No one can say with certainty that Kennedy won the election because of the new medium, but Kennedy himself credited TV with making a definite difference in the election returns. He said, “We wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget.” And so Camelot began.
FCC Chairman Newton Minnow did not share the new president’s enthusiasm for the new medium, referring to it in a famous 1961 speech as “a vast wasteland.” Regardless, in 1961, ninety percent of Americans owned television sets, and millions of sets of eyes were about to be treated to the first broadcast of a U.S. National Skating Championship.
CBS devoted Sunday afternoons to the new sports craze, in a show fittingly titled CBS Sports Spectacular. The anthology-style show began just thirteen weeks after the 1960 Summer Olympics and featured everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. The vast array of sports seen on this Sunday afternoon broadcast ranged from skating, to fishing, to drag racing, to one episode featuring a man who strapped dynamite to his chest, then blew himself up. (Thankfully, the man survived the stunt.)
Thanks to CBS Sports Spectacular, skaters were about to have access to far larger audiences and far greater fame than ever before. In the past, the top skaters were well known within a small community of serious fans and perhaps at least familiar to a wider audience of people who followed sports. Now the best performers, for the first time ever, would be household names throughout the country. The awareness of this new level of visibility and renown no doubt may have made some skaters more nervous than usual, while for others the event would have seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime.
Whatever you called it—“The U.S. Championships,” or just plain “Nationals” as many skaters did—this event was by far the most important to date on the 1961 competition calendar, cameras or not. The competition wasn’t just about winning medals or trophies, either. Winning a gold, silver, or bronze medal in the ladies, men, pairs, or dance events meant a stronger chance of actually being seen in the televised portion of the championships. With only one hour to cover the four major disciplines, the broadcast editors could only concern themselves with the standout performances. Most important of all, however, was the opportunity a top-three finish presented. Finishing on the podium earned each of the victors a spot on the team that would represent the United States at two important competitions: the North American Figure Skating Championships and the World Figure Skating Championships.
The North American Championships no longer exist today, replaced by the more frequent “Grand Prix” events, but in 1961 the “North Americans” were considered a vital precursor to the World Championships. The North Americans that year would be held in Philadelphia. The team then would head for the World Figure Skating Championships to be held in Prague, Czechoslovakia. A trip behind the forbidding Iron Curtain would put the skaters in a very select group at a time when such travel was much more difficult and more expensive than it is today. Inclusion in that group, as every skater knew while warming up on that day in Colorado Springs, required earning a medal at the Nationals, where their years of training and sacrifice would come down to just a few minutes on the ice.
The pressure of making history rested on the shoulders of the vibrant Laurence Owen, eager to live up to the championship expectations written about so frequently in the press and born of her membership in an elite skating family, a family that had been dubbed the “first family of skating” by newspaper reporters who covered her parents and grandparents in their respective heydays. Her grandmother, a well-known skater in her prime, once told reporters that “skating was obviously in our blood.” Laurence also inherited the skating gene from her father, Guy Owen, who had been a Canadian men’s junior champion and North American champion in an event called “fours,” which featured four skaters performing tricks in tandem—somewhat of a miniature precursor to what we now call “synchronized skating.”
Laurence, like her sister, Maribel Jr., who went by “Mara,” was actually a fourth-generation skater on her mother’s side of the family. Her great grandfather, Sumner Willard Vinson, was considered one of the foremost experts in figure skating in the areas of Roxbury and Dorchester, Massachusetts. He put his son, Thomas Vinson, on skates at age four. As a young man, he had a fateful meeting with a spunky young society belle and Radcliffe graduate, Gertrude Cliff. Boston newspaper writer Sally Ellis wrote about their first encounter on a skating