'A tough little cookie'

For Lipinski, it's skating -- and nothing else

Posted: Mon February 16, 1998 at 12:18 PM ET

Lipinski gets into the spirit at the opening ceremonies at Nagano   AP

NAGANO, Japan (KRT) -- A photograph of her first day on the ice hangs in the condo that Tara Lipinski shares with her mother.

"It reminds us all," Tara says, "of the day our lives changed forever."

Day 1 on ice skates, by her own account, was not pretty.

"I was a mess. My ankles bent in. My elbows bent out. And I kept ending up on my backside. My parents were a little surprised I was so awful."

But in the space of time it took Pat and Jack Lipinski to wander off for a cup of hot chocolate that day, their miniature daughter had found her skating legs -- and discovered what would become her life's work.

Tara Lipinski of Sugar Land, Texas, is only 15, but she's the world figure skating champion, a kiddie millionaire too young to drive. She has a credit card, but she's not sure what kind. She collects stuffed frogs and shoes, and she has a weakness for Oreo brownies. She has an agent, a publicist, an autobiography and a Web site.

And now the quick arc of her career has brought her here, to Nagano, to the Olympics, to the verge of forever celebrity.

"I toured with her all summer and she's the most consistent skater I've ever seen," says 1976 Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill. "She's really a tough little cookie."

Pat Lipinski had fully intended to take her tiny daughter to a movie.

But as Pat looked in the paper to check the show times, she saw that a roller-skating rink was giving away Care Bears for new customers. At the rink, Tara burst into tears at the prospect of having to wear brown rental skates -- until she noticed another little girl wearing them. It wasn't long before Pat Lipinski had signed up Tara for Tiny Tot lessons, and there soon followed Christmas roller-skating pageants, daily private lessons, medals, ribbons and, when Tara was 9, a national title.

And there was that pig-tailed fling with roller hockey.

"A hundred and fifty boys -- and one girl. Me! ... I loved it until one day when one of the boys accidentally skated over my fingers."

The ice skating began in Sewell, New Jersey, when Tara was 6, and within a week of her first foray onto the ice the Lipinskis had hired a figure skating coach, Scott Gregory, and Pat was driving Tara to lessons at the University of Delaware, an hour each way. Tara roller-skated three days a week, ice-skated three days a week, and did both on Sunday.

"Hectic," she calls it. "I got used to eating dinner off a tray in the back of the car, changing my clothes while zipping over the Delaware Bridge, and doing my homework by a light attached to the dashboard."

Little wonder that most evenings, by the time they got home, Pat had to carry Tara to bed.

Jack Lipinski was moving up in his business, and his next promotion sent the family from New Jersey to Sugar Land. It was not an easy move for Tara, but her parents were nothing if not indulgent. They bought her a white Arabian horse, she says, "to cheer me up."

The Lipinskis say they were simply trying to broaden their daughter's outlook, to offer her a diversion other than skating. They even encouraged her to try the violin and the piano. But this was not a child content to dabble in her hobbies, and between the skating lessons and the riding lessons, something had to give. They sold the horse.

In Sugar Land, Pat and Tara took to getting up at 3 in the morning to accommodate before-school skating lessons in Houston. After school, more lessons. In the summer, skate camp in Delaware.

It remains to be seen if Lipinski can take the lead on Kwan and sieze the gold   AP

The direction of Tara's young life -- she knew and her parents knew -- was now irrevocable.

It's almost inevitable that would-be elite figure skaters, like budding gymnasts, will have to relocate to find suitable coaching and training facilities. The Lipinskis surrendered to the inevitable: Pat found an apartment in Delaware, Jack stayed behind in Texas, and they refinanced the house in Sugar Land to pay for the apartment and Tara's lessons with new coach Jeff DiGregorio. Their little girl was 11.

Within months, Tara had passed the skills test that qualified her as a "senior lady."

"Not bad," she writes in her book, "Triumph on Ice," "for a 12-year-old." Internationally, she was still eligible for the junior world championships, and she finished fifth in the 1995 event.

She was making progress, that was clear, but there was trouble brewing. The Lipinskis had decided to jettison DiGregorio and, as Tara puts it, they began to "visit" new coaches.

"Audition" is a better word. They traveled thousands of miles in search of a new coach, losing key training time right before the 1996 U.S. Championships. They eventually decided on Richard Callaghan, an accomplished coach who had guided the career of U.S. men's champion Todd Eldredge. Callaghan, working out of the Detroit Skating Club, had recently parted company with the reigning women's champion, Nicole Bobek.

Lipinski was the youngest competitor at the '96 nationals in San Jose, California, but she skated well enough to finish third behind Michelle Kwan and Tonia Kwiatkowski. Bobek, injured, had withdrawn after the short program and then lost her place on the three-woman U.S. team headed almost directly to the World Championships.

Lipinski's lack of experience finally showed at the worlds, held in Edmonton, Alberta. She was completely awed by sharing ice time with skaters she had only read about in magazines. She was in 23rd place after the short program -- out of 30 skaters -- but she regrouped to land seven triples in her long program and finish 15th overall.

Eldredge, Callaghan's principal student and Lipinski's new rink-mate, won the world title.

Lipinski fields questions from international journalsits in preparation for the women's figure skating showdown   AP

"I couldn't believe we had the same coach," Lipinski says of Eldredge, who finished fourth in the men's competition in Nagano last week. "I felt as if I'd hit the big time."

The big time was only a year away. Lipinski bore down in her lessons with Callaghan, perfecting the triple loop-triple loop combination that no skater had ever landed. She hired skating's top choreographer, Sandra Bezic, plus an agent, a publicist, an assistant coach, a costume designer and a ballet teacher. Team Tara was in place.

Within the year she had won the '97 U.S. Championships and the prestigious Champions Series Final, then became the youngest world champion in figure skating history by winning the '97 Worlds in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The year before, all three of those titles had belonged to Michelle Kwan. Suddenly the story line for the 1998 Winter Olympics was set.

It is now part of figure skating lore that Tara Lipinski, at the wizened age of 26 months, while watching the 1984 Summer Olympics on TV, clambered atop a Tupperware bowl to pretend she was accepting a medal.

Pat Lipinski says the story is true, and anyone who knows 15-year-old Tara Lipinski knows it certainly could be true. She is a driven, determined perfectionist who has never wanted to do anything but skate. Like any devout gym rat, she has had to be dragged out of countless practice rinks on countless evenings. Like young Larry Bird having to make 10 straight baskets before letting himself go home for dinner, Lipinski has always made herself do a string of five perfect jumps before leaving the ice.

"After the 1997 Worlds, I told Tara that I wanted her to come back 20 percent better, and she has," says Richard Callaghan. "The performance level is way better."

Lipinski made her mark when she won the 1997 U.S. Championships and the Champions Series Final   AP

Performance, Callaghan knows, has always been Lipinski's weakness. If she has a vulnerability, it's in her performance and artistic impression ... that subjective measure known to skating insiders as "the second mark."

Her first mark, the one given for technical merit, has never been a problem. She jumps with Rolex precision, and her triple jumps are as reliable as point-after attempts. Frank Carroll, Kwan's coach, is particularly admiring of Lipinski's quick, tight turns. "We think Tara's a wonderful skater," Carroll says. "What's not to like? She rotates, my God, like a bat out of hell."

Lipinski has so far managed to avoid the kind of dramatic growth spurt that has tilted the gyroscopes and wrecked the careers of any number of female skaters and gymnasts. She was 4-foot-9 and 76 pounds at the U.S. Championships a year ago; she says she's now a strapping 4-11 and 82 pounds ... give or take a slice of Domino's.

She probably hasn't been going for the double cheese and pepperoni since losing to Kwan at the season-opening Skate America, and her Olympic-season repertoire has clearly been a work in progress. Team Tara has rethought everything from her music to her haircut.

And there might be some more tweakings to come. Lipinski had a slipski during her short program at the U.S. Championships last month and her confidence was badly shaken. But she came back to skate well in the long program, finishing second to Michelle Kwan and ahead of Nicole Bobek. Overall, she seemed delighted to have made the Olympic team.

Although Lipinski has fallen on a few of her triple jumps this season, she remains a marvelous acrobat. She might not have oceans of air under her jumps, but she's still the only woman ever to have levitated the triple loop-triple loop combination in a competitive event.

Some months ago she noticed Kwan practicing (and nailing) that very same combination, and she was shocked to think her rival could appropriate what had become her trademark move. So it was quickly back to the rink to work on two new bits of pretzel logic ... the more difficult triple Lutz-triple loop combination and a mind-boggling sequence of two triple loops followed by a double.

"Just upping the ante," says Callaghan. "Tara always wants to."

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