Floating on Air

Copyright 2001 The Columbus Dispatch

At 42, figure skater Scott Hamilton is ready to shave some ice from his life.

He wants more time to do things such as visit his brother, Steve, an engineer who lives in Upper Arlington. He wants to attend his 25th high- school reunion in Bowling Green this summer. So the original star of Stars on Ice soon will stop touring with the show.

"It's time for me to have a little balance and pursue other things before my body doesn't want to do this anymore," he said in a telephone interview.

Given what his body has overcome in 42 years, we could forgive it if it decided it didn't want to skate at all. Yet Hamilton stressed that he's not hanging up the blades, just turning them in a less-grueling direction.

Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic men's figure skating gold medalist, helped found Stars on Ice in 1986. His performance tonight in Columbus will be his last in Ohio with the show, which also features skating luminaries such as Tara Lipinski, Kurt Browning, Kristi Yamaguchi, Ilia Kulik and Yuka Sato.

The show, which visits 65 cities this season, eats up seven months a year in preparation, travel and performance, Hamilton said.

"That seven-month commitment pretty much keeps you from having any kind of life. At my age, I feel like it's time" to stop.

It's another turning point for Hamilton, whose life has had many.

Hamilton was born in Toledo in 1958 and adopted as an infant by Dorothy and Ernie Hamilton. Both were professors at Bowling Green State University.

At 3, Scott Hamilton became ill with a malady that prevented his body from absorbing nutrients. His growth was stunted. Doctors, fearing he would die, tried everything, including feeding him through a tube.

At 3 feet, 11 inches, Hamilton was a sickly, 48-pound fourth-grader when he made his first trip to an ice rink and discovered an activity at which he could excel. His health began to improve, although he chuckles now at overly dramatic media accounts that suggest his first experience on ice miraculously healed him.

Soon, he was taking lessons, then entering competitions.

He reached the pinnacle of amateur success by winning the Olympic gold medal at Sarajevo. Then he helped found Stars on Ice, originally called Scott Hamilton's America Tour.

The conventional wisdom back then was that women figure skaters could headline a professional ice show but not men because the public was less interested in them. In fact, Stars on Ice did struggle early. In his autobiography, Hamilton describes the show playing small college towns, half- filling arenas and losing money in the first year.

But he believed in it.

"If you go into the pro side of the sport with the idea of entertaining, it's amazing what you can accomplish and how you can touch people in ways they haven't been touched before," he said.

By 1997, Stars on Ice was a hit, playing major arenas in big cities. That same year, Hamilton fulfilled a dream by performing in his own TV special.

Then, life dealt him another twist. He developed pain in his abdomen and was told he had a mass growing inside him. He left the tour to make an emergency trip to the Cleveland Clinic for diagnosis.

"The irony didn't escape me," he wrote in Landing It. "I was back in Ohio, ailing and checking into a hospital, a routine I became very familiar with as a child."

He was diagnosed with testicular cancer and underwent successful surgery and chemotherapy. By the next season, he was back with Stars on Ice.

Hamilton said he is healthy now, although he acknowledges that his body doesn't recover as quickly as it used to from rigors of skating. So it's on to new things.

First, he wants to reconnect with friends and family. All his relatives are gone from Bowling Green but he still has friends there. He also wants to spend time with younger brother Steve, an engineer with Mettler Toledo's Columbus offices. Steve said he sees Scott only about twice a year.

But while Scott Hamilton will leave behind 65-city tours, he will continue to skate. He is in the early stages of developing an ice-skating show that he hopes will play on Broadway.