Double-Double

Six judges in rubber overshoes shuffled carefully out onto the ice rink of the Empire Stadium at Wembley, England last week, to confirm what a crowd of 8,000 already knew: that Dick Button of Englewood, NJ. was the best figure skater in the world.

What the crowd and judges had just seen was Harvard Sophomore Button in the free-skating event of the 1950 world's championship. All the judges had to do was to score Button (on a decimal scale from 1 to 6) for his performance.

The Impossible. Up went the judges' cardboard squares, and up went a roar of approval from the crowd: Button's severest critic gave him 5.7; one judge hoisted skating's highest accolade--the "impossible" 6. Later, when all the scores of the two-day competition had been tabulated, Olympic Champion Dick Button had run away from the opposition like Citation in his prime. Button's score: 1,419.47 points out of a possible 1,537.2. Hungary's Ede Kiraly,* European champion, won second honors with 1,344.92.

When Button first donned figure skates at the age of twelve, he was a short (5 ft. 2 in.), fat (162 lbs.), awkward youngster. Eight years later he had gained 10 lbs., 8 in., and his third successive world title. Part of the explanation of his success, Dick Button says, is his Swiss-born coach Gus Lussi, who spotted him eight years ago on the Olympic rink at Lake Placid, N.Y., was impressed with the youngster's determination, if not his skill. Together they spend long hours sketching intricate free-skating routines to supplement the required "school figures" which Button hates but which are part of all championship competition.

This year Button, Lussi & Co. had sketched a corker: something called the double-double-Axel.

The Future. The garden variety of double-Axel, which was the Button sensation of 1949 in the free-skating event, requires the performer to come into the jump skating backwards. The rest of the requirements: a tremendous leap, 2 1/2 body spins, a feather landing, and a smooth blade-cut left in the ice. Few skaters can think of attempting it; this year Button did two in a row, to make it a double-double without the slightest pause, covering 30 ft. in the whole involved maneuver in about two seconds. He was glad when the double-double was over. "Those two jumps tired me more than all of the rest of the time I spent out there," he said.

Since Dick Button had won everything in sight in amateur skating, rink fans wanted to know what he would do next. Last year, when he was still a Harvard freshman, word went round that he might turn pro after the 1950 championships, to cash in on his crowd appeal as 1948 Olympic Women's Champion Barbara Ann Scott had done. Last week Sophomore Button settled that rumor. Said he: "Think I'm crazy enough to sweat through two years of Harvard and then not finish?"

* Afterward, Skater Kiraly made more news of his own. As many another Iron Curtain athlete has done since World War II, Bachelor Kiraly made up his mind to choose freedom, announced that he had British permission to stay in England.

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