All Victor's Children

Soaps, Braeden doesn't watch. Even his own. "I watch sports," he says. He sees in premier athletes an arrogance that borders on the Newmanesque. "My admiration for Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard is boundless," he says. "Joe Montana's self-possession was almost unshakable."

Compromise has never come easy to Braeden. Born Hans Gudegast in Kiel, Germany, he grew up under difficult circumstances. "My father died when I was 12," he says, "and I saw a lot during World War II. One assumes a kind of armor to cover the pain." At 18 he came alone to the United States, where he attended Montana State on a partial track scholarship. He left Montana without graduating and wound up in L.A. While taking some courses at Santa Monica College he heard that Hollywood was looking for Germans. He turned actor.

Braeden got typed as a Nazi. "The experience was dehumanizing," he says. "I wanted a chance to play a complex human being." That chance arrived 15 years ago when he became Victor Newman. It is now difficult to say where Eric Braeden ends and Victor Newman begins. "We're both capable of enormous tenderness," says Braeden. "And 'Don't screw with me' attitudes."

That attitude sometimes gets Braeden in jams that even Newman couldn't bail him out of. In 1991 he got in a dressing-room brawl with the actor who plays Victor's nemesis. Braeden and his publicist refuse to comment on the incident. Braeden does say that "I have a lot of anger, defiance, rage. You need not to squelch that. Anger is the fuel that fires many people."

Sports, says Braeden, help channel his rage. "They're a way of expressing deeply felt emotions," says Braeden, who has been married to the same woman, Dale, for 29 years. "Isn't love just a jockeying for position? You worship and are worshiped. You leave her, she leaves you. Jealousy is a form of defeat. You fear you've lost the struggle to be Number 1 on the playing field of another's life."

For all Braeden's love of competition, last year's ice escapades of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding left him cold. "I saw the difficulty," he says, smoothing the corners of his mustache. "I saw the artistry. I saw the athleticism. But ultimately, it bored me. And you know why?

"It was soap opera."