Exactly six years ago this week, Scott Hamilton — a man who had become the very face of men’s figure skating in America since winning the gold at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984 — turned his back on the sport that had given him everything.
“I fell out of love with figure skating,” he tells Tonic. “I didn’t want to do it anymore. I did the last show on Stars on Ice and said, ‘I’m not enjoying this anymore.’ I was disappointed more than I was satisfied. It was time to step aside “
A few months later, Hamilton was diagnosed with a benign but life-threatening brain tumor.
“I’ve wondered ever since if that’s what was taking away my love of skating,” he says.
But it was too late. Having already overcome a battle with testicular cancer in 1997, and determined to spend more time at home with his wife, Tracie, and their growing family in Tennessee, the will to get back on the ice simply wasn’t there — until last year. That’s when Hamilton took a good long look in the proverbial mirror.
“Where I was, physically, was beyond my worst nightmare,” Hamilton admits. He was packing 145 pounds on his tiny 5-foot-4 frame. “I realized that my body had changed for the worse, and I needed to get it back. And the only way to fight myself out of this mess was on the ice.”
On Monday, March 8, BIO Channel will present a two-hour special, “Scott Hamilton: Return to the Ice,” chronicling Hamilton’s fight to get back on his skates, and back in shape, in time to perform at his 10th annual cancer fundraising show, “An Evening with Scott Hamilton and Friends,” after a five-year absence.
“I had to change my life completely,” Hamilton tells Tonic of the emotional and physical struggle he went through to accomplish that feat at age 51. “If not, I felt I wouldn’t be around much longer.”
With two young sons he wanted to see grow up, that simply wasn’t an option.
“It was a mid-life crisis,” he says, “in the healthiest way it could be.”
Starting Over
Hamilton isn’t the first athlete to come out of retirement, of course. “I never thought I’d be back on the ice,” he says. But for a man who started skating at age 9, who became a Gold Medal Olympian, four-time World Champion and US Olympic Hall of Fame inductee, getting back on the ice was the only choice he had: ”I’m looking at my life, where it was headed and where it was, and I realized, ‘The only thing that’s going to get me back to where I want to be is skating. Physically and emotionally.”
Five years into retirement, the physical part was much tougher than he expected.
“At 51, there’s only so much I can practice before I run out of gas,” he says. “I had to balance how much I’m doing, and how often, and to what length I’m going to push this thing. I couldn’t afford any chance of injury, because I had a specific goal in mind and a date that I had to be ready.”
There’s also the simple fact that the body forgets what it doesn’t practice — like jumping into a flying camel spin. On the ice after being away for so long, “I went to step into it and it was like, ‘No, it’s not gonna happen.’ You spend days trying to figure out something you’ve done 50,000 times.”
“Learning how to spin and hold positions,” he adds, “I thought I was doing really well, but the choreographer came in saying, ‘Your shoulders are up … your posture’s terrible!”
Overcoming his newfound limitations now also meant overcoming a bruised ego: “I used to think I was a pretty good skater,” he says. “It was a roller coaster.”
Despite the massive challenges he had overcome in his life and career already, he says, this comeback “was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
But he did it. And he has the back-flip (photo below) to prove it!
Off the Ice
Hamilton was no slouch during his time away from skating of course. He continued to serve as a commentator (as he did at this year’s Winter Olympics), became a best-selling author, and continued his work as a passionate philanthropist — raising money for a wide variety of causes.
“I’ve been really lucky to be able to participate in a lot of different things,” he tells Tonic.
Hamilton serves on the board of Special Olympics International — which just this past week pushed its campaign to eliminate the “R” word from everyday vocabulary. “The ‘R’ word is beyond disrespectful,” he says. “It’s hateful for people with disabilities.”
He’s raised money for cancer through his annual skating event, and through other friends’ foundations. And with his own philanthropic fund, he has been able to funnel dollars into a wide variety of causes, including the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, Target House, Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. The fund has even become one of the largest donors to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
“I haven’t been touched by Parkinson’s,” Hamilton says, “but we just feel like their group is onto something. If we can fund the science, we can come up with something pretty quickly to treat, or diagnose, or prevent Parkinson’s Disease.”
The same goes for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation: “I don’t have it, but it’s been a great opportunity. We’re not doing it because we’re swimming in those waters; it’s because we want to participate and we have an opportunity to do something good.”
Working on making the world a better place, he says, “It’s an opportunity — not an obligation. And that opportunity will always exist.”
Do the Best with What You’ve Got
Whether it comes to giving back, or getting back out on the ice, Hamilton has always found a way to make things happen.
“Ultimately you do the best you can with what you’ve got,” he says. “I’ve been really lucky that I’ve had a lot of support over the years. Coming back to the ice like this, my wife took up a lot of the responsibility at home to allow me to do what I needed to do. Without her support and the support of my family, and the inspiration coming from wanting to be around for my kids, I couldn’t have done it.”
And without taking care of his health and well-being, none of the philanthropy or anything else in his life would have lived on. “I’d look at my kids every day and say, ‘I have to do better. I can’t carry this weight, I can’t keep eating like this. I can’t do this to them. It’s just wrong.”
He hopes his lessons will be picked up by others.
“There are a million reasons why you can’t [start getting healthy] today. ‘I’m not in the mood,’ whatever. But looking at my 2-year-old, I thought, ‘Why would I want to step away from this? It’s going to take me an hour [to work out]. Just do it.’”
“What I did was I started with baby steps. Super small baby steps,” he says.
Whether it’s getting back in shape, overcoming an illness, jumping back into the game after taking time off, or working to help the causes you care about, Hamilton’s life and career have proven that just a few baby steps are all it takes to start down a path toward extraordinary accomplishment.
Photos courtesy of Scott Hamilton.