You don’t remember Dick Button for his competitive record, even though he won two Olympic gold medals and enough international gold to satisfy the dragon Smaug. You don’t remember him as an entrepreneur or a fashionista, even though, in his day, he was both. Dick Button, who passed away on January 30 at the age of 95, will live on in the memory of millions as a voice: the golden voice of American figure skating television.
If you watched the Winter Olympics on American broadcast television anytime between 1960 and 2010, or maybe the World Professional Championships during skating’s American boom years in the 1990s, you heard Dick Button. Button was skating’s champion and interpreter to millions of Americans. He answered fans’ questions in the televised “Push Dick’s Button” segment (also the title of his memoir), and served as a judge on the reality competitions“Skating with the Stars” and“Battle of the Blades.”He taught us what figure skating was supposed to be.
Button’s own skating career focused on athleticism. I have only been able to experience his Olympic programs through re-enactments and short YouTube clips; he’s a fluent skater, fast and fun. He landed the first double Axel jump in competition and the first completed triple jump of any kind. He invented a spin position that involves a leap into the air that lands as a spin. Today, skating is more athletically challenging than it has ever been, with every winning program studded with quadruple jumps (and the inevitable falls when a jump doesn’t land). Dick Button pushed the physical boundaries of his day, but in his commentary, he treated skating as a sport that was also an art form.
Button praised skaters who nailed the toughest jumps—those who have watched the 2017 film“I, Tonya,” which emphasized the opposition the rough-hewn Tonya Harding faced from the American skating establishment, might be surprised to listen to the competition broadcasts in which Button details her skill. But he demanded real artistry of skaters. He would always rather see unusual artistry than unmusical jumping prowess.
Button reached heights of eloquence and emotion whenchampioning artistic, individualistic skaters like Johnny Weir, who won three U.S. National Championships: “He is athletically graceful beyond belief,” Button declared in 2005. “He’s almost like a greyhound…. Look at the way he eases up into the air, just smooth—like a gazelle!” He lavished praise on skaters like Lucinda Ruh, “the Queen of Spin,” a Swiss phenomenon whose jumps were shaky but whose unexpected, breathtaking spins made her look “almost like a bird settling on one leg.” Button taught us to admire the line of a back, to imagine what it would be like to stand on center ice and wait for the music to start: “Such a lonely place to be.”
Button became beloved for his endless supply of memorable descriptions and sock-hop locutions: “He’s bamboozling us with his hands.” “That, I'll bet you a nickel to a plugged donut, secures him a place on the Olympic team….Spiffy.” Sometimes his sheer enthusiasm led him into garbled delights: “I am aghast at how beautiful they skate.”
But that enthusiasm was also his greatest strength as a commentator, and what set him apart from other great televised interpreters of the sport, like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Toller Cranston. The struggle for any televised skating performance is to bring you into the arena: to make you feel the energy pulsing in the crowd, flowing from the skater to the audience and back. When a crowd knows it’s watching something incredible, the air becomes electric.
Dick Button channeled that immediacy—the way great live skating feels so close, even when you’re in the nosebleed seats—through the medium of his voice. You can hear pure triumph as he cheers on Don Jackson’s elegant and innovative program at the 1962 Worlds, or Rudy Galindo in his underdog win in front of a roaring home crowd at the 1996 Nationals in San Jose, Calif. The delight in Button’s voice when he realizes Galindo has skated brilliantly and won, after being all but written off completely, is how I think Button would want to be remembered: overcome with joy at what a skater can do.
Button didn’t keep his Olympic medals. He turned one into a belt buckle for his mother, and the other into a paperweight for his dad. His ex-wife, the skating coach Slavka Kohout Button, died in March of last year; he is survived by two children and his husband.
Dick Button conquered the heights of his sport in his day. He brought as many others to it as he could, through professional competitions like World Pros and Challenge of Champions. He taught Americans how to watch skating, and how to judge it (and how to judge the judging, one of the great gossipy pleasures of this subjective sport!). But above all, he taught us how to love what he called “the beauty and the grandeur and the loneliness of championship figure skating”—and in turn, we came to love him too.
