Summer's End (4 page)

So Amy started lifting weights.

She hated it. How she hated it. Skating was about speed and beauty and emotion, about lifting an arm and extending a leg and knowing, feeling, the beauty of the line. Lifting weights was drudgery, a job, and she hated it.

There were no short cuts; there was little satisfaction. She couldn't let her muscles become bulky, so she didn't have the challenge of seeing how much she could lift. She instead faced endless repetitions. It didn't matter which tapes she listened to or who else was in the room to talk to; lifting weights was always hateful, and she had never hated anything about practice before.

But she did it.

Her jumps were never as strong as some of the other girls'—they never would be—but they grew better, and she worked on her landings until they became feather-soft. If the jumps themselves were slow and low, that grew to seem right because she was like a feather, floating easily, effortlessly.

It turned out that the more her father talked to her coaches and the other staff at the training center, the less he thought of them. He asked her which two junior skaters she enjoyed watching the most. “I don't care about who is winning, not at this level. Simply tell me who you can't take your eyes off of.”

She thought for a while. It was hard. At competitions you just thought about who was going to win. “There are
these two guys—Henry Carroll and Tommy Sargent—I do love to watch them. Henry blazes across the ice, he has such power, and Tommy, he's little and he always seems so funny. He makes me laugh even when he's skating.”

Her father seemed to like the sound of that. “Then let's look into who they train with.”

“But, Dad, they never win.”

“And I think that's in their favor. It's the little robots that are winning the Juniors.”

Henry and Tommy were in Colorado, not at the big facility in Colorado Springs, but at a smaller rink in Denver, where they trained with a man named Oliver Young. Family finances had forced Oliver out of amateur competition before he had made a name for himself; he had skated in ice shows for several years and was now starting to coach. He was interested primarily in boy skaters; Amy would be the only girl at the Junior Olympic level.

“Will that bother you?” her father asked her.

“No.” She had never gotten very close to the other girls in Delaware, even the ones she lived with; their rink was too competitive for friendships.

She moved to Colorado in the fall. Oliver agreed with her father. His philosophy was yes, you had to get all the basics, and yes, you had to lift weights, but in the end you had to learn to skate like yourself, and the next winter, the year Amy was fifteen, with a program full of dazzling footwork she won the Junior tournament. From seventeenth place to first in one year.

The girls in her old skating club tingled with frustration. They had thought Amy had left Delaware because she wasn't good enough. So why had she won? They were better skaters, they kept saying to themselves over and
over, and it was true. But they were not better performers, and there was nothing that they could do about it. Amy's musicality—that she seemed to hear more in a piece of music than anyone else—and her capacity to project herself, to make people feel what she was feeling, both of those were simply God-given talents, which Oliver Young recognized and fostered.

She went on lifting weights. Day after day, and she never liked it any better, never found it any more satisfying. Her family still made her come to Minnesota for a few weeks every summer, and she took empty sacks with her, filling them with sand for the numbing routine.

She came in ninth her first year in the Senior Tournament. Officials at the United States Figure Skating Association noticed her and arranged for her to enter a small international competition in Vienna. Such invitations were usually limited to the top seven or eight skaters, and the mothers of girls who had finished ahead of Amy at the Nationals were incensed. Why was Miss Amy Legend suddenly the USFSA's little pet? Their daughters deserved the organization's support, not Amy.

But those girls were the little robots, and at this level technique was no longer enough.

Amy's confidence increased. The next year she came in sixth, then third. Now the ice shows, the agents, and the management companies were sending her flowers, and the USFSA was determined to give her more international experience. She sparkled on the ice, skating with glowing warmth, and the year she was nineteen, she became National Champion. It was an Olympic year, and the USFSA named her to the Olympic team.

Nineteen was a good age. Ladies' figure skating had not yet gone the way of gymnastics, a sport dominated by
tiny school girls whose rigorous training schedules had delayed their physical development. They were superb athletes, but they had little celebrity value. Only other schoolgirls were interested in them.

But the general public could identify with a young woman almost in her twenties. People loved reading about Amy during the weeks before the Olympics. She was so pretty, she dressed so delightfully. She was a little shy, looking up and out at the world from beneath her bangs as the Princess of Wales had once done. The media made much of her music professor father and how the music majors at Lipton College in Lipton, Iowa, performed and recorded all her music for her. They took pictures of her mother's grand ancestral homes in England and Ireland even though in some cases her mother had never laid eyes on the place.

Yet there were those who wanted to find fault. People who paid no attention to figure skating at any other time were suddenly experts, announcing that footwork could never win the Olympics. “She may be the most watchable skater of the circuit,” proclaimed the network's skating pundit, “but her jumps aren't up to international standards.”

“I think the American public is going to be in for a big disappointment,” announced a male former pairs champion. “Amy Legend is not going to win the Olympics. She can't.”

He was wrong.

 

The top women skaters usually don't go to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Theirs is one of the last competitions, so any skater who comes to the opening has an extra week of sitting around in a cramped dorm, eating institutional food and waiting for inadequate ice time.

But Amy had been watching the opening ceremonies since she turned seven. There was no way she was going to miss this one, no matter what it did to her training schedule.

“Let her go,” her new advisers at the sports management agency told her coaches. “She'll get some great camera time.”

Both Amy's parents had been involved in the selection of her management team. “No one on earth,” her father had said, “can see through smooth talk faster than your mother. She'll have no patience for any of these people. If we find someone she can tolerate for twenty minutes, you'll have a person you can trust with your life.”

These new advisers were telling her that medals weren't enough. “The American public has to love you,” they said.

“And exactly how do I go about getting them to do that?” she laughed.

“By being yourself.”

Be yourself
. She was the only girl hearing that. The other top amateur girls were being “packaged”—that was the word they kept hearing, “packaging.” Andrea was to be feisty; JillAnn was to be sweet. It put too much pressure on them, knowing that they were supposed to be sweet or feisty all the time.

No one ever spoke to Amy about a “package,” and at first she assumed it was because she was hopeless, such a gooey blob of nothingness that she couldn't be scooped up into a container.

But her training partner, Tommy, tiny, wise, and witty, knew better. No one was talking to him about packaging either. “We're the real thing, Amy, you and me. Even Henry”—technically Henry was a better skater than either of them, but then he was a better skater than anyone on earth—“doesn't have it. We do.”

Henry and Tommy had signed with the same agency. Henry was favored to win the men's gold while Tommy knew that he would be lucky to come in third. “You'll come into your own as a professional,” the agents and managers kept telling him. “Don't worry.”

All three of them went to the opening of the Olympics, and Amy had a wonderful time during that first week when they weren't competing. She had never played any team sport, and she suddenly found that she liked being on a team. She went to as many skating events as she could. Looking wide-eyed and pretty in her red, white, and blue team sweats, she cheered for all the other American skaters. She got a mad crush on one of the American hockey players, but fortunately for his concentration she never had the nerve to tell him about it.

She was third after the short program. She and Oliver had hoped to be in second place at that point, but with jumps like hers it was no surprise that she was not.

Then in that day between the short and long programs the Olympics stopped being fun. Tommy and Henry were skating in the men's final that evening, but all Amy could think of was her own fate—how large the gap was between her and the other two girls and how solid their jumps were. And then a worse thought took over—how very few tenths of a point separated her from the fourth-place finisher. The skating community might not expect her to get a medal, but the American public did. They believed in fairy stories. She was pretty, therefore she would win the gold.

It doesn't work that way. There's no magic, no guarantees. It's just me and my skates
.

Henry won. Now all the people who were saying that Amy couldn't win were talking of 1976, when Dorothy
Hamill and John Curry, two skaters trained by the same coach, had won the women's and men's golds. Amy and Henry could repeat that. Oliver would become the Carlo Fassi of his generation.

It was too much.

So she fell. On the easiest of the triples, the plain old toe loop. A little overrotation. Tilting in the air. Fighting for the landing. Not being able to hold it, and she was on the ice. Her chance for the gold was gone.

So it was over. All those years of lifting weights—they had been a waste. Now it was all pointless.

She scrambled to her feet and caught up with the music. She wasn't going to think about the weights. Just as she had been watching the opening ceremonies for twelve years, so she had been watching people compete for twelve years, and long ago she had made a pledge to herself.
If I fall on a big night, I will not mind. I may have to stop competing, but then I can start performing. The judges may hate me, but I can make the audience love me. I will skate for them
.

She opened her arms in a swirling, embracing, almost triumphant motion, gathering in the audience.
I'm here for you now. It's too late for those people sitting at rink-side with their little computerized scoring machines. They've given up on me. But you haven't. You will love me…love me…love me
.

And they did.

The young Chinese woman in second place gasped in weary relief when she saw Amy fall. She turned her back to the monitors, knowing that she didn't have to worry about Amy anymore. She was to skate next, and so she was at the boards, taking her skate guards off when Amy's scores flashed up. She had not seen Amy's performance,
and she was staggered by the numbers. Amy had fallen; how could she be getting these scores?

So that skater, rattled and tense, fell too. Only she went on trying to compete. She could compete, but she could not perform. Amy was now in second place.

The German skater who had begun the evening in first place skated last, and she knew exactly what she needed to do—skate cleanly. She did not have to add any extra jumps, she did not have to take any risks. All she had to do was not fall down.

And that's how she skated, like someone who was determined not to fall down. And she didn't fall. But her skating was leaden and lifeless. Her artistic-impression scores were weak.

The judges try to be fair, but they also have to think about what is good for the sport. And there was no doubt after this evening's gutsy performance that the delicious little Amy Legend, even if she couldn't jump, was very good for the sport.

Amy had won because she had made a mistake, because she had forgiven herself for making a mistake.

 

After they hung the gold medal around her neck and played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she did all the fun things that Olympic medalists get to do. She carried the flag at the closing ceremony. She sat beside Mickey Mouse on a float at the Disneyland parade. A warmly smiling grandfatherly butler opened the door to the White House, and when the Olympians gathered for their picture in the East Room, a press aide made sure that she was the one standing next to the president.

She taped some commercials, toured with the other
Olympic skaters, posed for a poster, made a television special, toured some more. Designers started lending her clothes. And everyone seemed to love her.

But she still had to lift weights.

 

Gwen and Hal stayed at the restaurant until four o'clock. That night she wrote him a proper note, thanking him for lunch, inviting him to her house for dinner. He called within five minutes of getting the note. He'd love to see her again. He couldn't wait. They shared that dinner, then an evening at the theater, followed by an afternoon drive through the wintry countryside and phone calls every evening.

Neither one of them could believe what was happening. They had never expected anything like this.

Hal was a scholar. He gathered information; he collected every variant verse of a song. But for the first time in his life, he seemed to have enough information immediately. From the moment he had seen this quiet, elegant woman alerting people not to trip on the extension cord, he had known enough.

They had grown up in surprisingly similar homes, Gwen in Maryland, Hal in Wisconsin. Their parents were educated with values and incomes that were comfortably middle-class. They readily admitted that had they met as teenagers, they would not have been drawn to each other. Early in their lives both of them had wanted adventure; they had wanted to be married to someone different from themselves. Gwen had chosen John and the itinerant life of the military while Hal had married Eleanor, aristocratic, earthy, unconventional. But with those long, satis
fying marriages behind them, they were now ready for similarity, for ease and comfort.