Dick Button, whose passionate and sometimes tart commentary on determine skating competitions turned a tv staple over six many years and made him the game’s unofficial spokesman, died on Thursday in North Salem, N.Y. He was 95.
His loss of life was confirmed by his son, Edward.
An Emmy winner, Button taught generations of TV audiences the nuances of triple toe loops, lutzes and axels and the way judges assess a skater’s efficiency. However many followers might not have recognized that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing fashionable determine skating within the late Forties and early ’50s along with his dazzling leaps and spins, together with the primary triple leap in competitors.
Button started working as a TV analyst in 1960 with CBS, protecting the Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif., at a time when determine skating and different winter occasions had but to seize the American public’s creativeness. CBS allotted solely quarter-hour nightly to focus on the Olympic occasions it telecast through the day.
The community’s chief reporters for the Olympics, Walter Cronkite, Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer, had been “very a lot at sea the place winter sports activities are involved,” wrote Jack Gould, a tv columnist for The New York Occasions. However he added that Button and his fellow determine skating commentator, Andrea Lawrence, gave the protection “a determined carry” when “allowed to squeeze in just a few useful phrases.”
Button was quickly contributing much more, as Winter Olympic protection blossomed when ABC obtained the rights to the Innsbruck Video games in 1964.
Working as an analyst at quite a lot of skating competitions — and for all three main networks — Button waxed enthusiastically about sensible performances, however he didn’t maintain again from voicing displeasure.
When Christopher Bowman gained the boys’s singles on the 1992 United States championships, Button referred to as his efficiency “bizarre, boring, sluggish, conservative and sedate.” He stated afterward that he was not attempting to be acerbic however hoped that his critique would inspire Bowman.
“I’m very delicate that it is probably not enjoyable for them to listen to these criticisms,” Button advised The Occasions in 2006, “however I additionally know it is a sport that’s not apple pie and motherhood. They’re making main, main sums of cash — and taking it away from anyone else.”
He advised NPR in 2010: “I don’t assume anyone desires to take a seat there and hearken to anyone say, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh, wasn’t that stunning? Wasn’t that simply too pretty for phrases.’ The heck with that.”
Lengthy earlier than he turned recognized for his on-air observations, Button dominated the determine skating world along with his athleticism.
He turned the primary American to win Olympic determine skating gold and the primary skater to carry out a double axel in competitors when, at age 18, he captured the boys’s singles on the 1948 Winter Video games in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He gained gold once more on the 1952 Video games in Oslo, when he executed the primary aggressive triple leap, a triple loop. He additionally conceived the flying camel spin, through which the free leg is prolonged backward with the knee held above hip stage.
He gained seven consecutive United States males’s titles (1946-52) and 5 straight world championships (1948-52). He was the one American to win a European singles championship, and he obtained the Sullivan Award because the excellent newbie athlete in the USA in 1949, the primary winter athlete to realize that honor.
Richard Totten Button was born on July 18, 1929, in Englewood, N.J. His father, George, was chairman of Button Industries, an organization with different enterprise pursuits. Dick obtained his first pair of skates as a boy of 11 or so, and his father quickly despatched him to a skating college in Lake Placid, N.Y. There, he was tutored by the famend Swiss teacher Gustave Lussi, who would information him all through his aggressive years.
After Button gained the boys’s European singles in 1948, and Barbara Ann Scott of Canada captured the ladies’s title for the second consecutive yr, officers barred non-European skaters from that occasion.
At St. Moritz, the teenage Button startled the skating world when he accomplished his double axel at a time when determine skating was very a lot a balletic affair.
“He did 5 leaps and spins that no different skater tried and made all the things look simple,” The Related Press reported. “At occasions he appeared to hold poised within the air. At others he spun with such rapidity as to be solely a blur.”
Button gained discover as nicely for the quick black jacket he wore to distinction with the daylight background of the snowy Swiss mountains seen from the out of doors Olympic rink. “God, it was a trigger célèbre,” Button remembered. “Right here I used to be wanting like a waiter or, as some sort individuals stated, within the gown code of a naval officer.”
He captured his second Olympic gold medal, making his triple leap, whereas a senior at Harvard. He went on to Harvard Regulation Faculty and turned professional, becoming a member of the Ice Capades and Vacation on Ice, earlier than receiving his legislation diploma in 1956. He didn’t apply legislation, however he flourished as a businessman, founding Candid Productions, which produced made-for-TV skating reveals.
Roone Arledge, who reworked televised sports activities right into a prime-time attraction as president of ABC Sports activities, recalled how he was enthralled by Button’s artistry underneath strain again in 1959.
Arledge, working for NBC’s Channel 4 in New York on the time, was producing and directing a reside program on the Rockefeller Middle ice rink that includes the annual lighting of an unlimited Christmas tree and a skating efficiency by Button. Though the audio feed for Button’s music went out over the air, the general public handle system on the rink malfunctioned, in order that Button needed to skate with out listening to something.
“He stored proper on skating in complete silence, listening to the music in his head and gliding and spinning flawlessly,” Arledge remembered in his memoir “Roone” (2003), printed a yr after his loss of life. “Skater and overture completed impeccably in synch, and people few of us who witnessed it might solely marvel on the unimaginable sangfroid and expertise of this nice performer. Years later, when ABC wanted a figure-skating commentator as cool as he was nicely knowledgeable, I knew precisely who to name.”
In 1962, a yr after Arledge conceived “ABC’s Large World of Sports activities,” Button started a long term analyzing main skating occasions for this system. He gained an Emmy for excellent sports activities persona on TV in 1981.
Widespread TV protection of the Winter Olympics performed a serious position in determine skating’s emergence as a well-liked spectator sport, with Button on the forefront of the commentary.
He marveled on the sport’s artistry, complementing its athleticism. “It’s a theatrical kind,” he as soon as advised The Occasions. “Skaters at all times have one foot within the sport and the opposite in theatrical enterprise.”
For his personal half, Button beloved the lifetime of a performer. He appeared as Peter Van Gleck within the 1958 Hallmark Corridor of Fame TV program “Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates” and in revivals of “South Pacific” and “Mister Roberts” at New York’s Metropolis Middle.
He survived a pair of scary episodes. He incurred a critical head harm in July 1978, when he was amongst a number of males assaulted at random in New York’s Central Park by a gang of youths armed with baseball bats. He suffered a fractured cranium and a serious mind harm on Dec. 31, 2000, when he fell whereas skating at a rink close to his house in Westchester County, N.Y.; he seldom skated recreationally after that.
Button’s final Winter Olympic broadcasting task got here in 2010 on the Vancouver Video games, the second time he offered protection for NBC.
Along with his son, he’s survived by a daughter, Emily Button, from his marriage to the skating coach Slavka Kohout, which resulted in divorce. Ms. Kohout died final March.
Button made his opinions very clear as determine skating’s most outstanding analyst, or “narrator,” as he most well-liked to name his position.
As for the more and more gaudy outfits worn by the skaters, “generally, I really feel caught in a wind tunnel within the costume division on the Metropolitan Opera Home,” he remarked whereas protecting the Vancouver Video games.
However he remained a lot the showman. Requested at Vancouver to touch upon the feelings displayed on the so-called kiss-and-cry space, the place skaters await their scores, he advised The Occasions: “It’s tv, honey, come on. It’s what makes tv.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
