Scott Hamilton Interview (page: 5 / 9) Olympic Hall of Fame	Print Interview

It's said that if you fall down it's important that you get up. I'm sure you live that phrase while you're out there.

Scott Hamilton: You're going to fall all the time.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You've got to fall down a lot. You've got to make a lot of mistakes. And you've got to fight for your place in the world, whatever it is. You know, whether it is in business or entertainment or the media or whatever. And you've got to take a lot of knocks and you've got to spill some blood in order to get there. And, that's part of the process.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

What do you tell yourself when you have fallen on the ice?

Scott Hamilton: Well, the longer you lie there, the colder you get. So the first thing and the obvious thing is to get up. I always say in my commentary, "The hardest jump in figure skating is the one that follows a fall." Because your confidence is shaken, your timing is obviously off, and that's where you really prove yourself.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you can fall, get up and do the next triple jump, you've got guts. You've got real good intestinal fortitude. And, it's amazing. It's the same with anything that you do. If you go into a test and you just choke, I mean you look at the paper and the words are just jumbled and you can't figure out -- I know I studied for this, I know I know this stuff. If you can get past that and you can just calm down and slowly, you're feeling the same thing everybody else has felt. You know, if you fall, sometimes it hurts. Sometimes you twist something and you can't really get up right away. Sometimes you get stitches. Sometimes you fall and your pants rip and you're humiliated in front of a large group of people. I mean, anything can happen. You just have to accept that you cannot succeed unless you're willing to fail. And, you fail a lot.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Do you have a most embarrassing moment?

Scott Hamilton: I don't want to share it, but I will since you asked. Who wants to share embarrassing moments? I was in Ice Capades and we were in Philadelphia. , Philadelphia is where I trained, and that's what I represented when I went to the '80 Olympics. I stayed with the Philadelphia Skating Club throughout my amateur career.

So, I'm in Philadelphia, we're in Ice Capades, and there's about that much water on the ice, because the place is full. And all the skaters came up from Wilmington, Delaware, which is another huge training site. So, it's opening night in a brand new building. We're just getting used to the layout and everything. There's that much water on the ice and I'm wearing my Olympic speed skating suit that I wore, the blue thing with the red. And I'm skating this big Olympic number with aircraft lights behind me and I throw this big shadow.

So I go around, and I'm kind of nervous, and the ice is wet and I don't like wet ice, because it tends to leave marks on your costume when you fall. And I hit the best triple lutz. Boom, swish, bam. Land a triple lutz. I'm showing them how good I am, right?

I go around, and I have a combination of axle, half-loop, mazurka, triple toe. Well, I got up in the air for triple toe, and your feet are supposed to be crossed in the air because it helps you rotate. My feet got stuck and they didn't cross and I got lost in the air. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was going to be around twice, or three times, or whatever. So I opened up just a little bit to get my bearings because you're really spinning fast.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My toes hit the ice forward and it was like a hinge, I went, bam, like right down, like flat, like this, but I put my elbows down so that I wouldn't get hurt, right? So the next thing I do is I go down, then up. And as I went down to go into this spin I noticed that I had two wet marks on my knees, my elbows were soaking wet and right in my crotch was another wet spot. And everything else was dry, and I had to skate for three and a half minutes with these -- and it was really humiliating. It was like I wet my pants and it was just from the fall. And, I had to stay out there for the rest of the performance and people were -- I'd go by them and they'd point, and they'd laugh -- I mean, that's pretty embarrassing.

You get up and you have to finish. You can't say. "I'm embarrassed, so 12,000 people can just sit there and listen to the rest of my music without skating." No. You've got to finish. And as much as you don't want to, you gave somebody a fun memory.

One of the most inspiring parts of your life story is how you conquered adversity and medical problems early on. How do you see that experience?

Scott Hamilton: I really didn't do anything. It wasn't like I faced or conquered anything. I accepted it as a fact of my life that I was sick, or that I wasn't growing. It wasn't a choice thing. It slowly went away. I was very fortunate that there was no surgery involved, not a lot of pain. It was just that I didn't grow. I really had a hard time with food. I was being congratulated for something that nature took care of. What came out of that illness was a lot of time alone at a very early age, which is scary. I had to learn to be independent from the second I could understand what independence was. My mother was there for me every single day, but my parents couldn't be there 24 hours a day, so I was surrounded by strangers in a very scary place.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So of all the things that I'm proud of as far as my illness, it wasn't getting past the illness, it was getting through the day to day life of being away from a normal situation and healthy children. There was a lot of other kids like me who were sick and whose parents were very scared. And it's kind of an odd way to grow up. And so, getting past the illness and dealing with a lot of the hardship around it I think was something that gave me great strength. It wasn't so much that I faced the physical ailment or disability and won, it was: I accepted it and it slowly went away. But, everything that it brought was a little bit challenging.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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