Homewood graduate takes ice skating show to the pros

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - What's next, after three national championships, three second-place finishes in Grand Prix competition, a bronze medal at the World Championships and a distinguished fifth place in the 2002 Winter Olympics?

How about getting paid?

After his most successful two years in pairs figure skating, Homewood's John Zimmerman IV has decided to end his amateur status and, along with his partner Kyoko Ina, join the cast of "Stars on Ice," a professional skating show.

Other skaters in the "Stars on Ice" lineup include 2002 Olympic pairs champions Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, 2002 Olympic champion and four-time world champion Alexei Yagudin, Olympic champion Tara Lipinski and two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt. The tour begins in December.

"That's a huge change," said Zimmerman, who is in Birmingham for the unveiling of "Ice Dreams," a painting by local artist Steve Skipper celebrating Zimmerman and Ina's competition in the Olympics.

"I've spent 24 years skating and training and preparing for world amateur competition. Now, suddenly, we're taking it easy for awhile. We'll kick it (training) into high gear as it gets closer to December. But even at that, we don't have to worry so much about the technical things and margins of difficulty. We can just find a really cool piece of music and skate.

"We've got a Bon Jovi song we're going to skate to, a really cool program, that's going to be entertaining and, I think, a lot of fun."

While the 1992 graduate of Homewood High School continues to list Birmingham as his home - along with the Birmingham Figure Skating Association as his home club and University of Alabama athletics as his passion - Zimmerman lives and works out of the New York area.

He and Ina train at the IceHouse Ice Rink in Hackensack, N.J, with their Russian coach, Tamara Moskvina, while Zimmerman manages to maintain a cross-Atlantic relationship with Silvia Fontana, the Italian women's national figure skating champion.

"My life is a regular mini-United Nations," Zimmerman said, laughing.

His rise from the Deep South to the highest levels of international competition in the very un-Southern sport of ice skating has been well chronicled: the constant travel, the sacrifices made to train in Atlanta while attending high school. And it hasn't happened without a few regrets.

"I work out here (in New Jersey) at a local high school, and watch the guys practicing football and things like that, and I missed that," Zimmerman said. "I always thought I'd have liked to play football, maybe be a kicker because my strength is in my legs.

"In the ninth grade, I was playing baseball as well as figure skating, even going to a number of baseball camps, when it came down to a decision: `Do I want to really be involved in high school, or not?' Because I could do that if I followed baseball, but not if I stayed with figure skating. And down deep, I identified more with skating, so I chose that."

Without question, these past two years have been the best for Zimmerman. He and Ina won a third consecutive U.S. national pairs title, finished second in three Grand Prix competitions, placed fifth at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and earned a Bronze medal at the 2002 World Championships, the first world medal awarded to a U.S. pair since 1998.

"Proving to people I could do it was the coolest thing," Zimmerman said. "That was exciting."

Now Zimmerman moves into a new challenge - trying to get a college degree while continuing to skate professionally.

"I'm working through Newberry College in South Carolina, to get my degree online," Zimmerman said. "They've never had anyone do it before, but they're willing to see how it works. So, once again, I'm going into new areas. I'll be the first to do it at Newberry.

"I'm hoping to get a degree in sports management, maybe. Then, my girlfriend's family owns a construction company in Italy that they're thinking of moving over here. Maybe, eventually, I could get involved in that."

Once again, Zimmerman is charting a very different course for himself, one that seems to careen back and forth, avoiding all sense of normalcy.