Scott Hamilton, Olympic gold-medal-winning skater, cancer survivor and philanthropist, turns adversity into remarkable opportunities.
In November 2008, Scott Hamilton asked his good friend Kristi Yamaguchi a favor. The Bowling Green native and his fellow Olympian had just co-hosted an annual skating show at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena to benefit the Scott Hamilton Cancer Alliance for Research, Education and Survivorship (CARES) Initiative at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, and Hamilton was eager to secure her services for the fundraiser’s 10th anniversary in 2009.
“Will you come back next year?” he asked.
“I will if you will,” Yamaguchi replied.
The seemingly innocuous answer was a challenge. Yamaguchi had skated in the show; Hamilton had not.
In fact, the figure-skating icon hadn’t performed in front of a crowd since March 2004, just months before Clinic doctors discovered he had a tumor on his pituitary gland. A single high-tech radiation treatment reduced the benign inoperable growth to a mere 5 millimeters, eliminating the headaches, blurred peripheral vision, lethargy and lack of strength he had experienced. But Hamilton had remained off the ice, ostensibly so he could concentrate on raising sons Aidan and Maxx, now 6 years and 22 months respectively, with wife Tracie. He now admits that he simply didn’t want to push his aging body and live with the discomfort most professional athletes tolerate. As a result, he gained 17 pounds and lost muscle mass, stamina and flexibility.
“I was destroying my health,” the 51-year-old states as he sits in his suburban Nashville home. “Even though I was in the gym, nothing does it for me but skating. And in order for me to take skating seriously, to get the health benefits that I really needed, I had to have a goal. It had to be more than just showing up at the rink and pushing myself around.”
Twenty-five years after winning his Olympic
gold medal, that goal is to perform at the 10th annual “An Evening With Scott Hamilton and Friends” ice show Nov. 7 at Quicken Loans Arena. The mere announcement that he will skate at the event, which has raised $10 million to date, has already generated plenty of media buzz. But Hamilton’s decision to mount a comeback in such a fashion resonates in other ways. Just as skating has proven to be a great healer in his life, cancer has turned out to be a great motivator — he’s developed a remarkable knack for turning his bouts with it into amazing opportunities. It was his well-publicized battle against Stage 3 testicular cancer in 1997, for example, that spawned his second career as a philanthropist, cancer-patient advocate and motivational speaker/author.
“I’ve always responded better to challenge than to success,” he explains. “Certain milestones around my health issues have reset my path to lead me to a better place.”
Cancer may have begun shaping Scott Hamilton’s life as early as the age of 2, when he developed a mysterious ailment that sapped his energy and stunted his growth. His parents, Bowling Green State University professors Ernest and Dorothy Hamilton, had adopted their middle child when he was six weeks old and had no family history to suggest a plausible cause to the baffled physicians who examined him. Hamilton now believes the problem was caused by the brain tumor, which may well have been present at birth.
“It normally shows itself by a lack of growth early in life,” he explains, citing resources he received after his diagnosis. “But in every brain scan I had during my [treatment for] testicular cancer, it never showed up. And in the early ’60s, doctors didn’t have the technology to find it.”
After six years of misdiagnoses and unsuccessful treatments, a specialist suggested the Hamiltons simply let their son lead a normal life. Shortly thereafter, the boy enrolled in skating classes at a new rink on the BGSU campus. He enjoyed the sport and, miraculously, his symptoms began to dissipate. Although he stopped growing at 5 feet 3-1/2 inches, he enjoyed a happy adolescence hanging out at Finders Records, Crankers Hamburgers and Pisanello’s Pizza when he wasn’t on the ice. Childhood friend Dave Meek says Hamilton never held a grudge against those who ridiculed his participation in a female-dominated sport, a fact evidenced when he was honored at a hometown winter festival in February.
“Those same people who called him a sissy were the first ones wanting an autograph,” Meek says. “If I was Scott, I wouldn’t have given them the time of day. But Scott treated them just like everything was fine.”
Hamilton was training with former Olympic pairs champion Pierre Brunet by the age of 13. But he admits to consistently underachieving on the ice until his mother died of breast cancer in 1977. The loss spurred him to work harder, to honor the sacrifices she had made to ....
