Dick Button, craft champion and commentator, dies at 95

Dick Button, whose passionate and often tangy comments on figure skating competitions have become a must for television for six decades and made him the unofficial sport spokesperson, died Thursday in North Salem, NY, he was 95 years old.

His death was confirmed by his son, Edward.

Winner of the Emmy, Button taught generations of television audiences the nuances of loops, lutzes and triple toe and how the judges evaluate the performance of a skater. But many fans did not know that he was himself a double Olympic gold medalist, progressing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early 1950s with its dazzling jumps and towers , including the first triple jump in competition.

Button started working as a television analyst in 1960 with CBS, covering the Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, California, at a time when figure skating and other winter events had not yet seized the Imagination of the American public. CBS only allocated 15 minutes every evening to highlight the Olympic events he televised during the day.

The main journalists of the network for the Olympic Games, Walter Cronkite, Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer, were “very at sea where winter sports are affected,” Jack Gould, television columnist for New York Times. But he added this button and his colleague commentator of figure skating, Andrea Lawrence, gave the coverage “an elevator decided” when “authorized to press a few useful words”.

Button soon contributed much more, because the Winter Olympic coverage flourished when ABC obtained the rights of the Innsbruck games in 1964.

Working as an analyst in a variety of skating competitions – and for the three main networks – Button has waved brilliant performance with enthusiasm, but he did not retain dissatisfaction.