My Sporting View: Weir Science: the Power of Pluck

Is there more pressure when you are trying to win for the first time, or when you are trying to win for the second time to prove the first time wasn’t a fluke?

We’ll never get the answer from Johnny Weir, at least, because the 20-year-old from Newark, Delaware stood up to that pressure both times to capture his second straight National Figure Skating Championship Saturday in Portland, Oregon.

As for the pressure? Well, Weir has said many times that when he’s on the ice, he zones out into his own little world and concentrates only on the music. Everything flows.

Everything flowed flawlessly for him Saturday in the long program. He was second after the short program to comeback-bound Timothy Goebel, who did a fine job skating before Weir on Saturday to hold onto his first place lead. But Weir came up with a stunning, flawless work of art, a ballet that earned him perfect 6.0’s from half the judges.

He skated to understated piano solo music through the first two thirds of his program, which swelled into the appropriate crescendo at just the right point.

Before any scores came in, Goebel lost it emotionally, knowing he’d been beaten.

ABC TV commentator Dick Button, who usually chatters through performances about the good and bad points of execution, was jaw-dropped. He was stunned into silence throughout by the beauty of Weir’s execution and had nothing but superlatives when it was over.

It was a slam dunk for Weir over the legion of usual detractors eager to see him unable to prove that last year’s first-time national title was no aberration.

He moves on now to a tsunami relief benefit skating event in Detroit next month and the World Championships in March with an eye on the Olympics next year.

Little noticed about Weir is that he spins clockwise in the air, the opposite of about 85% of other skaters. He is amazingly light on his feet, elevating effortlessly like a feather on his spins.

He has a huge smile, and while he’s got an abundance of self assurance, he’s not cocky. He’s more plucky than cocky. Pluck reflects a kind of “can do” resolve with just a twist of panache.

It’s that pluck that brought him back from a near career-ending moment in the national championships just two years ago, when in a bizarre mishap just after his program began, he caught a skate in the tiny crevice between the ice and the sideboard, twisted his ankle and fell. He tried to start over, but fell again and withdrew.

He had to fight back from that like he was starting his career from scratch. As he told this writer in an interview published in the News-Press last March, he never doubted for a moment that he could make it back, even if everyone else did.

Despite having been the U.S. junior national champion, he was excluded from the rosters of the Grand Prix competitions later that year, and had to compete to qualify. He had to fight every inch of the way to get another shot in the national championships.

Last January, he did not fail. In one of the greatest comeback stories in sport, the then 19-year-old took only one year to rebound from a humiliating pratfall before a national television audience to a national championship.

Now, Johnny has demonstrated there was nothing “flash in the pan” about that. He’s the nation’s best male skater without a doubt, and the nation can be mighty proud.

As for the pressure about proving it still again, I guess it’s now more apropos to pass the question to Michele Kwan, who with her flawless performance Saturday notched her ninth U.S. title.

Mike Hume may be emailed at mhume@fcnp.com