Frank Carroll died Sunday at 85. He coached figure skating for 58 years, most widely known as the mentor of five-time world champion Michelle Kwan and five other Olympic medalists, including 2010 Olympic winner Evan Lysacek.
In a half-century of covering sports, I can’t say I crossed paths with too many characters more memorable than Carroll. All those heroes and villains in what my sportswriting brethren typically considered real sports—football, baseball, basketball—all those physically gifted protagonists, psychologically vulnerable troupers, philosophically aware artistes and occasionally fanatical wingnuts, yet one of the really fascinating humans was encountered in…skating. Go figure.
(I must acknowledge that in reporting on five Winter Olympics, I long ago was disabused of any notion that, a) figure skating lacked arresting personalities and b) that it was not a sport. An early lesson came from 1992 U.S. pairs skater Calla Urbanski, a 31-year-old once-divorced, remarried former waitress who partnered on the ice with Rocky Marval, the 26-year-old owner of a small trucking company. The Waitress and the Truck Driver. “To say this isn’t a sport, just because we wear fancy outfits,” Urbanski lectured, “I’d like to challenge the guys who say that to get their butts into the air and turn three times and land on an eight-inch blade. And then tell me it’s not a sport.”)
Not that there isn’t a theatrical aspect to the endeavor. And Carroll—who spun humorous, involved tales that he illustrated with hand gestures and dramatic expressions—was an ideal example. For a brief time in his youth, after all, he had been an actor. Sort of.
“There were these bad beach party movies that I was in, in the mid-‘60s,” he said. “I was a body. I’m Irish. I’m like Casper the Ghost with this skin, but I had blond hair then and I was the perfect beach bum/surfer. They would spray me tan!”
He is the only son of a teacher who grew up in Worcester, Mass., with a pond near his home that lured him into skating. Take a breath, and listen….
“I used to go to the movies and see those old Movietone newsreels that had pictures of [1948 Olympic gold medalist] Barbara Ann Scott and Dick Button [the 1952 and ’56 Olympic champ]. Then they built an indoor rink in Worcester, across the street from my house.
“I was 12. I was the second person on the ice when it opened. [The owner] was the first. He gave me a key and said, ‘Frankie, if this rink isn’t being used for hockey or lessons, it’s yours.’ I was a very good skater very early because I’d practice at home on the floor. I’d put a dishrag down on the linoleum floor and skate around on that.”
He enrolled at Holy Cross and, based on his regional skating title, was given a partial athletic scholarship and awarded a varsity letter for skating, “even though they didn’t have a skating team,” he said.
“I’d practice early in the morning before the Holy Cross hockey team got on the ice, and they’d line up along the boards, waiting with their hockey sticks. If I missed one thing in my routine, they’d take their sticks and bang on the boards and boo me.
“But if I skated well, they’d all cheer.
“When I finished school, well, you know, you go on with your life. My father thought skating was frivolous or stupid, but I was 21 years old and I signed for more money in a week with the Ice Follies than my dad ever made in a year in his entire life: $250 a week.”
He wound up going to Hollywood at the invitation of friends and found his way, temporarily, into bit parts of those beach movies. “I didn’t know I wanted to coach at all. I’d go to the beach, go to the gym to work out. But there was this little rink in Van Nuys where I gave skating lessons to beginners, and these kids began to improve and I got in demand. So I eventually gave up the cattle call at the studio.”
Just as elaborately—with asides and not-especially pertinent detail—Carroll told of how his accidental discovery of music for a Kwan skating program resembled finding a winning lottery ticket in the street; of how his coaching theory lacked talk of winning because that was “destructive language; it doesn’t make any sense to be promising and building hopes up in the sky”); yet how, before Kwan’s 1998 Olympic final in Nagano, Japan, he “prayed a lot. I went to the Catholic church here because that’s my church, and then I went to the [Buddhist] temple, just to cover my bases.”
Kwan, though the favorite, was beaten by Tara Lipinski that year, and retired with a silver and bronze in two Games. But Carroll—voted into a handful of skating halls of fame—long ago was safely inside the velvet ropes, and got his Olympic coaching gold with Lysacek 14 years ago.
He covered his bases. He left his mark. He made things interesting. In a real sport
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Jay Weiner used to say that, instead of given figure skaters a score such as 6.2 of 3.4, maybe just comments by the judges, like "try hockey" when a skater flubs up. Whenever a skater landed on his or her wallet, I recall fellow scribes muttering "Down goes Frazier!" (Maybe that was you.)
Thanks for reading.
Many thanks. Carroll did all the work on this.
Sports such as figure skating, which is choreographed--with no defense--continue to confound me a bit. My friend Jay, who covered a bunch of Olympics and many other things, once said that it would be interesting to put, say, the top seven skaters on the ice at the same time and she how they handled the traffic and chaos. Anyway, what I liked about it, as with virtually everything I got to cover, was crossing paths with some many interesting characters.