Dick Button, 95, Art Skating and TV Commentor, Dying

Dick Button, whose passionate and often sour comment on art skating competitions became a TV staple over six decades and made him the unofficial spokesman of the sport, died Thursday in North Salem, new, he was 95 years old.

His death was confirmed by his son, Edward.

An Emmy winner, barely learned generations of TV audience nuances in the triple toe loops, lutzes and axles and how judges evaluate a skater performance. But many fans may not have known that he himself was a two-time Olympic gold medal, where he performed modern art skating in the late 1940s and early 50s with his dazzling jumps and spins, including the first triple jumps in competition.

Barely began working as a TV analyst in 1960 with CBS that covered winter -ol in Squaw Valley, California, at a time when art skating and other winter events had not yet caught the American public imagination. CBS assigned only 15 minutes in the evening to highlight the Olympic events the telecasted during the day.

The network’s main reporters for the Olympics, Walter Cronkite, Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer, were “very much at sea where winter sports are concerned,” wrote Jack Gould, a TV spokesman for The New York Times. But he added that Button and his colleague -art skating commentator, Andrea Lawrence, gave the cover “a decided lift” when “was allowed to squeeze a few useful words.”

The button soon contributed much more as winter -olympic coverage flourished when ABC obtained the rights to Innsbruck play in 1964.

Works as an analyst at a number of skating competitions – and for all three major networks – barely grew enthusiastically over brilliant performances, but he did not hold back from the expression of dissatisfaction.

When Christopher Bowman won men’s singles at the American championships in 1992, Button called his performance “ordinary, boring, slow, conservative and sedat.” He said afterwards he did not try to be Acerbian, but hoped his criticism would motivate Bowman.

“I am very sensitive that it may not be fun for them to hear this criticism,” Button told The Times in 2006, “but I also know that this is a sport that is no longer apple pad and motherhood. They earn large, large sums – and take them away from another. “

He told NPR In 2010: “I don’t think anyone will sit there and listen to anyone say, ‘Ooh, Ooh, Ooh, wasn’t that beautiful? Wasn’t it just too nice for words. ‘The heck with it. “

Long before he became known for his on-air observations, Button dominated the Figure Skating World with his athletics.

He became the first American to won Olympic Art Skating, and the first skater to perform a double Axel in competition when he at the age of 18 caught men’s singles at the winter matches in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He won gold again at the 1952 matches in Oslo as he performed the first competitive triple jump, a triple loop. He also conceived Flying Camel SpinWhere the free leg is extended backwards with the knee held above the hip level.

He won seven consecutive American men’s titles (1946-52) and five equal World Cups (1948-52). He was the only American who won a European single championship, and he received the Sullivan award as the excellent amateur athlete in the United States in 1949, the first winter athlete to receive that honor.

Richard Totten Button was born on July 18, 1929 in Anglewood, his father, George, was chairman of Button Industries, a company with various business interests. Dick received his first pair of skates as a boy of 11 or so, and his father soon sent him to a skating school in Lake Placid, new there, he was taught by the famous Swiss director Gustave Lussi, who would guide him throughout his competitive year.

After Button won men’s European singles in 1948, and Barbara Ann Scott from Canada caught the women’s title for the second year in a row, officials blocked non-European skaters from this event.

At St. Moritz horrored the teenage button the skating world when he finished his double Axel at a time when art skating was very much a balletical affair.

“He made five jumps and spins that no other skater tried and made everything look easy,” the Associated Press reported. “At times he seemed to hang out in the air. In others, he spun with such speed that he was only one blur. “

Hardly also achieved warning for the short black jacket he was wearing to contrast with daylight background of the snow -capped Swiss mountains visible from the outdoor Olympic rink. “God, it was a reason Célèbre,” Barced remembered. “Here I looked like a servant or, as some kind of people said, in the clothing code for a naval officer.”

He caught his second Olympic gold medal and made his triple jump while he was a senior at Harvard. He went on to Harvard Law School and turned Pro and joined Ice Capades and Holiday on Ice before receiving his legal degree in 1956. He did not practice law but flourished as a businessman, basic Candid Productions, which produced Made -For – TV skating shows.

Roone Arledge, who transformed TV sports into a first-class attraction as president of ABC Sports, remembered how he was captivated by Button’s Artistry under pressure back in 1959.

Arlave, who worked for NBCS Channel 4 in New York at the time, produced and directed a live program at the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink with the annual illumination of a huge Christmas tree and a skating after button. Although the audio feed for Button’s music went beyond the air, the public address system worked at the Rink skate, the button had to skate without hearing anything.

“He held just by skating in total silence, hearing the music in his head and slipping and spinning flawlessly,” remembered Arlave in his memoir “Roone” (2003), released a year after his death. “Skater and overture finished impeccably in synchronization, and the few of us who witnessed it could only wonder about the incredible songfroid and talent for this great artist. Years later, when ABC needed a figure skating commentator as cool as he was well informed, I knew exactly who to call. “

In 1962, a year after Arlave was conceived “ABC’s wide sports world”, Button began with a long -term analysis of larger skating for the program. He won an Emmy for excellent sports personality on TV in 1981.

Widespread TV coverage of winter -ol played an important role in the emergence of the art skating as a popular spectator sport, with a button at the forefront of the comment.

He wondered about the sport’s artistry and supplemented its athletics. “It’s a theater form,” he once told Times. “Skaters always have one foot in the sport and the other in theater business.”

For his own part, Button loved the life of an artist. He appeared as Peter van Gleck in the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV program “His Brinker or Silver Skates” and in the revival of “South Pacific” and “Mister Roberts” in the center of New York.

He survived a few scary episodes. He sustained a serious head injury in July 1978, when he was among several men who were assaulted randomly in New York’s central park of a gang of young armed with baseball bats. He suffered a broken skull and a major brain injury on December 31, 2000, when he fell while skating on a rink near his home in Westchester County, new; He rarely skates recreational after that.

Button’s last winter olympic broadcast task came in 2010 at the Vancouver Games, the second time he provided coverage to NBC.

In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Emily Button, from his marriage to the skating Slavka Kohout, which ended in divorce. Mrs. Kohout Died Last March.

The button made his opinions very clear as the most prominent analyst of art skating or “tells” when he preferred to call his role.

As for the increasingly creepy clothes that carry the skaters, “sometimes I feel caught in a wind tunnel in the costume department of the Metropolitan Opera House,” he noted as he covered the Vancouver Games.

But he remained a lot of showman. Asked in Vancouver to comment on the feelings shown in the so-called kiss-and-cry area, where skaters are waiting for their score, he said to Times: “It’s TV, Honey, Come on. That’s what makes TV. “

Ash Wu contributed with reporting.