Another Sports Wreck: Skater Bowman Found Dead
Christopher Bowman ... remember him? Skating star? Sometimes known (by his own admission) as "Bowman the Showman" but also "Hans Brinker from Hell"? The big-jumping, flamboyant party animal who was fourth in the men's skating competition at the Albertville Olympics in 1992?
He was found dead Thursday in a Budget Inn in North Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. He was 40. His death is being investigated as a possible drug overdose.
Anyway, another sports casualty. Too much, too young, too narrowly focused, probably unprepared to deal with real life. It's a common theme in the sports world, and particularly in the claustrophobic ice-skater universe.
Bowman didn't much like to practice, and struggled with the rigors of the figure-skating existence. Frank Carroll, the former Ice Castle International resident coach (best known for coaching Michelle Kwan), dumped Bowman as a pupil ... when Bowman improvised most of his free-skate program at the 1990 world championships. Which is so far out of the box you can't even see if from there.
Bowman won the U.S. national championship twice, and was a leading medal contender at the Albertville Games. But he didn't get it done, and he finished fourth, behind Victor Petrenko, who won, and fellow American Paul Wylie, a gutty little guy from Harvard who got a silver (and all the attention from American media for the rest of the Games).
I did a story on Feb. 7, 1992, before the skate competition, out of a Bowman interview session in Albertville in which he was amusing and goofy, as he often was. I mean, he was a party-hearty kind of guy, by his own admission. And the demons he so often confronted (he already had done drug rehab, in 1988) weren't quite so obvious.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, 10 years hence, he said, "He loved his sport and he did it a long time ... and if it isn't Mexico and it isn't new, why is it called New Mexico?"
He was capable of great flair, and was more athletic and less precious than many of his contemporaries. Fans tended to pay special attention when he was on the ice. But he was dependably erratic, and that meant he rarely could put together a clean short and long program -- and a high finish.
Some of the other things he said, back in 1992:
"I'm an emotional person. In the rink, that makes me an emotional skater. But I'm a human being first and a skater/athlete second.
"Sometimes, athletes at this level lose sight of that and I find that to be terribly sad."
And in perhaps the spookiest part of the story, he added, "I don't want to end up burned out, belly up in the bathroom ..."
I ended the story with one more sentence from "Hans Brinker from Hell" -- "If I can go out and have one person in the stands say, 'That guy was special,' that's enough for me."
Well, he was special. A guy who never lived up to his potential but left a mark on the sport anyway.
The AP news story on Bowman's death can be found here.