Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 3, 1994 TAG: 9401150025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It must have been either 1964 or 1968. We know it was an Olympic year, because the boys were trying to do toe loops and spread eagles, feats they could only have seen performed on television. And from remembering that, we narrowed it down to 1964, because that year we were old enough to be left at the ponds without parents, but not yet old enough to drive ourselves there.
1964: the year the winter Olympics were held in Innsbruck, Austria. When we weren't out on Mr. Peck's ponds, we were huddled around someone's black-and-white television trying to tell the skaters and the skiers from the surrounding TV snow.
I watch figure-skating competitions on television now with a level of enthusiasm that approaches devotion. The minute the TV Guide arrives, I highlight the ice skating. If I can't be home, I tape the shows. Sometimes I watch and tape them, both.
That winter we skated on ponds, 1964, I had my own pair of white figure skates. All of us girls did. The boys had black hockey skates.
As I recall, we girls were quite relieved that our skates - girls' skates - had toe picks, because that made moving forward so much easier. I've lost the logic of this preference; most of us had our fathers file off the pick closest to the ice on our figure skates because it tripped us up so often.
The boys made "hockey" sticks for themselves and crashed into each other as often as possible. They "cracked the whip." Sometimes, they cracked the ice. They tried their toe loops and spread eagles in skates destined to defeat even their finest efforts.
In 1964, I skated around the edges of their mayhem sedately, cautiously, slowly. I hated falling down.
I haven't skated in 20 years, despite my interest in the sport. But last winter a friend and I toyed with the idea of taking figure-skating lessons together. She grew up in Pennsylvania and skated for hours and hours on a river, while I and my friends were skating on our ponds. We reminisced pleasantly.
"It was a great winter ritual," she told me last year. "The cold, the snow. Going to get our skates sharpened."
"Doing what?" I asked.
"Getting our skates sharpened," she said. "We started every winter with newly sharpened skates."
"You have to get them sharpened?" I asked her.
"Yes, of course, to get your edges. Otherwise, you'll just fall down."
So that's what Peggy Fleming and Dick Button have been talking about on all those skating competitions I've watched on TV. Edges. No wonder I had such a time. Certainly my skates weren't sharpened. How could they be, when nobody knew that had to be done?
I suppose the ice on Mr. Peck's ponds was a foot or so thick in 1964. Under what other circumstances would our parents have let us go out there by ourselves? So many innocents whirling around in the afternoon sun, sliding precariously on such thin support. So ignorant! So enthusiastic! So convinced we could do anything!
And, in fact, doing it, after a fashion, simply because we didn't know that we couldn't.
\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB