The Terrific Trio

Just so that next week no one can complain that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, here's what we've got in Hamilton. Three of the 10 most important figures in the entire history of men's figure skating. Brian Orser, Kurt Browning and Elvis Stojko are all part of Browning's annual TV special, Gotta Skate IV, to be taped at Copps Coliseum tonight.

The Fab Three have performed on the same bill before, even competed against each other in a couple of programs in the late 1990s, but not often and rarely at the corner of Bay and York. And who knows how many more times they'll gather together before retirement or other interests beckon one or more of them?

Canadian men have been so good for so long on the international scene that an entire generation of skating fans has grown up in the reflected glare of their success, unaware that it was not always thus.

You've got to be a bit of an oldtimer to remember that before this trio got started, Canadian men's skating had been a parched two-decade wasteland. Yes, there were oases of creativity in Toller Cranston and Ron Shaver, but from the time Don McPherson won Canada's second world championship in a row (Don Jackson took the first) in 1963 until Brian Pockar won a bronze with Orser a narrow fourth in 1982, Canadian men brought home exactly one world medal: Cranston's 1974 bronze.

Orser won a bronze and three silvers before striking gold in 1987 at Cincinnati and for the next decade, it was pretty well all Canada. Orser lost the '88 Worlds to Olympic champion Brian Boitano, but only because of figures. His freeskate was considered to be among the greatest competitive performances of all time.

At that same world championship, Browning finished sixth and landed the world's first quadruple jump. And the next year, he won the first of his four world championships in five years. Then Stojko took over, winning three titles in four years.

So in 11 years the three Canadians won eight world titles, losing the other three because of figures, Stojko's rare fall on a short-program triple Axel in 1996 and Victor Petrenko's momentum a month after the 1992 Olympics. And in that transition year of '92, Browning and Stojko finished second and third.

It's been written often in this space, but it bears repeating. With due respect to Donovan Bailey, the greatest relay team in Canadian sports history has been Orser to Browning to Stojko. Their baton was a torch, the flame of Canadian leadership in world men's figure skating. That torch now lies barely flickering, begging for a successor to refan it. It wasn't just that the Canadians won, it was what they brought to the sport. You could look this up. In the nearly four decades after Canadian Donald Jackson landed the first triple Lutz to win the 1962 Worlds, until current wunderkind Evgeny Plushenko unleashed the first quad-triple-triple combination, there wasn't one recognized technical "first" in men's skating that wasn't performed by a Canadian.

And this trio led the way, which is why they are among the top 10 "impact" players in men's "amateur'' skating history. Vern Taylor may have established the world's first triple Axel, a shaky but clean landing at the 1978 Worlds, but Orser did the next nine triple Axels executed in competition, including the first one performed by a junior. He passed the quarter-century anniversary of his first Axel earlier this year. And three years ago, he became the first 40-year-old ever to successfully land the Big Daddy of triples.

Browning nailed the world's first quad and Stojko became the first to do the quad in combination with another jump, a double. He also became the first practitioner of the quad-triple, now de rigueur for a world medal, right here at Copps Coliseum at the 1997 Grand Prix final.

"I think once you're around people who've done that kind of thing, you want to push that envelope yourself," Browning has said of Canada's out-of-proportion contribution to skating's technical evolution. "You are influenced by the other great skaters in your country."

If Orser taught Canadians that they finally could win, Browning taught Canadians they could win often and Stojko taught them they could win under any circumstances. He took his second global title in 1995 with what was virtually a broken ankle. And his performance at the 1998 Olympics, when he'd completely torn his groin muscles, was astonishing: six triples on one leg.

A personal list of the 10 most important men in skating history would be heavily weighted to the latter quarter-century, as skating scrambled out of its niche category and into major-league status.

Olympic and four-time world champion Scott Hamilton, who led that emergence, has to be on the list. So probably does Alexei Yagudin, the only one of several Russian/Soviet world champions to earn worldwide appeal and influence. An undisputed member of the top 10 and probably right at the top would be Dick Button, who popularized the men's division on a continent which thought figure skating was only a women's sport and often not a sport at all.

A combined entry of Cranston and his rival, the late John Curry, would make the list because they broke new artistic ground and influenced a generation of skaters with their mid-1970s poetry on ice, culminating in Curry's 1974 Olympic gold, with Cranston winning bronze.

Ulrich Salchow, for whom the jump is named, won the first Olympic title at the 1908 Summer Games, when host England wanted to show off its new mass-refrigeration capabilities. He also won 10 world titles, including the first five of the 20th century.

Gillies Grafstrom, a two-time Olympic champion from Sweden in the 1920s, probably gains the remaining berth or you could argue for Willie Bockl or Karl Schafer, who won 11 of 12 world titles between them after 1925 when men's skating was essentially an Austrian house league.

But you could only pick one of Grafstrom, Bockl or Schafer, who dominated when the skating world was small and reserved essentially for the finer classes.

Because you absolutely have to leave room for the three Canadian men who will be performing here tonight.