Winning Attitude

His successful career has taken figure skater Kurt Browning, one of the world's most popular entertainers, far from Alberta. But he still remembers his childhood in the tiny foothills town of Caroline - and his decades in Edmonton - with fondness.

Indeed, it is in Edmonton that Browning developed from a skater with potential to the four-time world champion.

"I had an excellent time growning up in Edmonton," Browning said in a telephone interview from Greenville, South Carolina, where he was having a rare day off from the professional skating grind.

"Also, the group of skaters that I grew up with at the Royal Glenora are still good friends, on my e=mail list, we all keep in touch," he continued. "Edmonton is just such a great place. We didn't get into trouble there, but there was so much to do. We tried hard to get into trouble a couple of times."

Browning credits the local atmosphere with giving him the environment in which to mature.

"I think it's that laid back, western Canada attitude," Browning said.

"In the place I skate now, in Toronto, I probably wouldn't have had that freedom to just go ahead and be normal. Just like everybody, I just want to go out and have my own life, too. In Edmonton, you're allowed that."

In Caroline, where Browning grew up, all the kids skated - there wasn't that much else to do. Initially he focused on hockey, but getting out on the ice was the important thing.

"We all skated," he said. "It didn't matter what it was called - figure skating, power skating, inverted upside down skating, we didn't care, as long as you got on the ice and got to skate.

"I just didn't get off the ice when everyone else started to get to be 10 or 12 years old and said: 'I don't want to be figure skating with the girls.'

Browning received some important early encouragement for his skating from a neighbour, Marvin Trimble, who was 15 at the time he was 11.

"He was a long-distance runner, and someone I looked up to," Browning recalled. "And he had real figure skates, and knew all the steps to the dances. If he could do it, so could I. There's a chance that if Marvin hadn't skated, I wouldn't be talking to you right now."

Trimble was there when Browning won the Canadian Novice Championships. A family man who continues to live in Caroline. Browning describes him as a good friend all the way through.

Browning's career has spanned many changes in his sport, including the concepts of amateur and professional.

"I was really, really young," he said. "When I was 25, I was going on 18. Skaters now, when they're amateur, they're getting so much professional exposure, for example, shows and television specials, or even touring, that I never had."

"What a time-line my career has had," Browning muses. "To be able to span so many changes in my sport. Figures are gone. To be a world champion when there were figures and also then again afterwards. I'm the only person who ever did that an that's all because of the weird time-line that I had."

At the beginning, it was as if there were the Berlin Wall between them, he noted.

"There were rumours when I was a kid that someone got paid money to take a girl through a dance and lost his amateur status.

"But now reality has caught up. Now, in tennis and basketball, the professionals go [to the Olympics], and in those sports the professionals are the best. But not always in our sport. It's always sort of been that the amateurs were the best in our sport."

Some changes have benefited Browning, who won his first world championship in 1990, and did so in part because of the understanding his coach, Michael Jiranek, had of the changing figure skating landscape - telling him to concentrate on his figures even though they were being dropped.

Browning had already experienced what he describes as the best moment of his skating career in 1988, when he was approached by an interviewer after landing a quad jump in his long program.

"The first thing he says is: 'How does it feel to be the first one to land a quad, and you'll be in the Guinness Book of World Records?' That's basically how I found out that they counted it. That was one of the best moments of my life. It would be fun to see that interview again, actually. I'm like 22 years old and don't have a clue."

Browning's biggest disappointment was one shared by skating fans across Canada: the Olympics.

"Not winning the Olympics was a big disappointment for me," he said. "In Albertville [in 1992], my back was completely messed up, and it would have been more than a miracle if I would have skated great. The big disappointment was in Lillehammer [in 1994].

"All my competitors had already skated badly," he continued. "All I needed to do was to stand up. I decided to do a double flip in my short program, a simple jump that I never practised, and I fell on it. That wipe out set a chain of events going in my head that made me fall. I tried to laugh it off, but it actually made me nervous.

"I went into the triple flip [in my long program] with my mind going a thousand miles an hour instead of focusing on what I had to do. It was a fine jump, but I just let it fall. It was just a mental error, and maybe some bad advice from the other side of the boards."

Now a grizzled veteran of 33, Browning made the move from amateur champion to seasoned pro five years ago. Since then, he has won three Canadian and three world professional championships, as well as many other titles.

"The phone has rung often and a lot, and I have certainly been busy working," he said. "Of course, one of the complaints is that you don't get home much but, that's always a self-inflicted wound. It's mostly the touring: if you say 'yes' once, then you're gone for like five months, and it's a long haul.

"But it's a wonderful opportunity. You learn so much when you perform five nights a week in five different cities for three or four months straight. That's what I've been doing for the last five years: learning to entertain."

Browning is not really complaining. "What's great about my work is that a lot of people have to travel, travel, travel, but at the end of my work day, the people stand up and applaud. It's really not a ad way to make a living."

His zest for life comes across during his shows. Wearing his heart on his sleeve is one of the things that makes him so popular with his fans.

"One of the coolest things that ever happened to me in my life was being named honourary captain of the Oilers," Browning enthused. "You get to practice with them. That was fantastic. I got to celebrate with the Cup. I've never felt so famous in my life as I did when I was hanging out with those guys."

Browning found time in his busy schedule to have a personal life in Edmonton, and that included meeting the woman he would later marry, ballerina Sonia Rodriguez.

"We got married four years ago. Where did I find the time?" Browning laughs. "I found the girl in front of the fireplace in the upper ballroom lounge in the Royal Glenora Club.

"When I moved to Toronto a couple of years later, I ended up meeting her again. She's still dancing, we've got a home in Toronto, and it's been fun ever since.

"I'm away from home perhaps seven-and-a-half months a year. I hate my suitcases, but when I'm home, it's like being on holiday. It's wonderful to be there."