There was a time, and it was not at all a short period, when figure skating was one of the most popular television sports in the country, and that Dick Button was the most famous and powerful person sport.
Button, who died Thursday at the age of 95, personified figure skating for millions of Americans from the 1960s at the end of the 20th century, and in part of the 21st.
The first American Olympic gold medalist in sport in 1948, then again in 1952, button took the nation by the hand and escorted us all in the often arcanic and always dramatic world of jumps and towers, slippes and slides falls, kissing and crying.
Star button ones with a sentence on the antenna. A triple jump was not good unless he said that it was. When he shed a tear in the Sports ABC broadcasting stand for an injured Randy Gardner and his partner, Tai Babilonia, while they withdrew from the competition of pairs during the Lake Placid 1980 Winter Games, the fans cried with him.
Viewers have trusted him, and rightly so, because you can make a fairly strong case that no other sport has produced someone like Dick Button. As a pioneer superstar, innovative, business person and electric broker, he had to skate about what Arnold Palmer was to golf, bring sport to the masses – and earn a lot of money in the process – like access and the Fascination of the Americans and the fascination with television exploding across the country.
But there is more. Button also became Howard Cosell from Spreing Skating, a Smoking TV personality and educated at Harvard who was the extremely confident consciousness of sport.
“He was like a teacher,” said his long -standing broadcast partner, the Olympic gold medalist Peggy Fleming, in a telephone interview. “He taught the public how to watch skating. He was also sometimes like a teacher sitting next to me as a commentator. If I said something he thought was grammatically incorrect, he literally wrote a note because we were on the waves to tell me. »»
Even if viewers did not know anything about Button’s story as an athlete and entrepreneur, he became both famous and essential for them because when they turned on figure skating, he was ready to explain everything to them .
And, oh my God, they lit the figure skating. Today, skating, like many sports, seizes the whole ribbon of the television public that it can attract. But 31 years ago, following the extremely sensational Tonya-Nancy saga, when there were only three or four channels and Dick Button and Peggy Fleming were at their peak, well, get a charge of This statistic:
In March 1996, the long male program at the World Figure Skating Championships, presented live on ABC with Button in the stand, received a score of 10.1.
Going face to face with skating was the live cover of the NCAA male basketball tournament on CBS. This gained only a note of 8.8.
I knew the buttones of the cock before meeting him. My first memory of his call from a great Olympic moment took place in February 1976, during the winter games in Innsbruck, Austria, which I watched with my family with us in the suburbs of Toledo.
Dorothy Hamill had just finished his long program while Button’s voice has skyrocketed. The flowers “cried” on the ice, he exclaimed.
“She did it!” I’m sure!
At that time of my life, I had never heard more words with a sports advertiser.
Almost 20 years later, when I finally met him, I was scolded almost immediately. While I was starting to report my book “Inside Edge” in 1994, I planned an interview with him and of course, I asked questions about his role as the most famous commentator in sport.
He stopped me.
“I’m a narrator,” he said. “I don’t comment on skating. I tell it.
I have it, I say. It was the beginning of a wonderful working relationship. We often talked about skating events; I asked for his opinion on various skaters, and sometimes he asked for mine.
I became his colleague when I joined the ABC / ESPN figure skating ad team for a few years in 2005. One memorable morning, Button, Fleming and I was stuck in a SUV with a few other members of the Broadcasting team on a road survey in the middle of an ice storm in Portland, Oregon, on the way to the arena.
Button, then 75, decided that he was going to do something. What, we had no idea. He opened the door of his car.
“No, Dick,” we all said.
It came out of the SUV on the road covered with ice. He took a step or two, fortunately holding the door of the car. He stopped and questioned the situation, then made another step or two, without clinging to the door of the car.
Was he trying to walk to the arena?
At that time, I was comforted by thought that he was a man with two degrees from Harvard who also knew a lot about the ice.
The Great Dick button is returned to the car.
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