Dick Button, whose passionate and often tart commentary on figure skating competitions became a television staple over six decades and made him the sport’s unofficial spokesman, died on Thursday in North Salem, N.Y. He was 95.
His death 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 how judges assess a skater’s performance. But many fans may not have known that he was a two-time Olympic gold medalist himself, advancing modern figure skating in the late 1940s and early ’50s with his dazzling leaps and spins, including the first triple jump in competition.
Button began working as a TV analyst in 1960 with CBS, covering the Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Calif., at a time when figure skating and other winter events had yet to capture the American public’s imagination. CBS allocated only 15 minutes nightly to highlight the Olympic events it telecast during the day.
The network’s chief reporters for the Olympics, Walter Cronkite, Chris Schenkel and Bud Palmer, were “very much at sea where winter sports are concerned,” wrote Jack Gould, a television columnist for The New York Times. But he added that Button and his fellow figure skating commentator, Andrea Lawrence, gave the coverage “a decided lift” when “allowed to squeeze in a few helpful words.”
Button was soon contributing a lot more, as Winter Olympic coverage blossomed when ABC obtained the rights to the Innsbruck Games in 1964.
Working as an analyst at a variety of skating competitions — and for all three major networks — Button waxed enthusiastically about brilliant performances, but he didn’t hold back from voicing displeasure.
When Christopher Bowman won the men’s singles at the 1992 United States championships, Button called his performance “ordinary, boring, slow, conservative and sedate.” He said afterward that he was not trying to be acerbic but hoped that his critique would motivate Bowman.
“I’m very sensitive that it may not be fun for them to hear these criticisms,” Button told The Times in 2006, “but I also know this is a sport that is no longer apple pie and motherhood. They’re making major, major sums of money — and taking it away from somebody else.”
He told NPR in 2010: “I don’t think anybody wants to sit there and listen to somebody say, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh, wasn’t that beautiful? Wasn’t that just too lovely for words.’ The heck with that.”
Long before he became known for his on-air observations, Button dominated the figure skating world with his athleticism.
He became the first American to win Olympic figure skating gold and the first skater to perform a double axel in competition when, at age 18, he captured the men’s singles at the 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland. He won gold again at the 1952 Games in Oslo, when he executed the first competitive triple jump, a triple loop. He also conceived the flying camel spin, in which the free leg is extended backward with the knee held above hip level.
He won seven consecutive United States men’s titles (1946-52) and five straight world championships (1948-52). He was the only American to win a European singles championship, and he received the Sullivan Award as the outstanding amateur athlete in the United States in 1949, the first winter athlete to gain that honor.
Richard Totten Button was born on July 18, 1929, in Englewood, N.J. His father, George, was chairman of Button Industries, a company with varied business interests. Dick received his first pair of skates as a boy of 11 or so, and his father soon sent him to a skating school in Lake Placid, N.Y. There, he was tutored by the renowned Swiss instructor Gustave Lussi, who would guide him throughout his competitive years.
After Button won the men’s European singles in 1948, and Barbara Ann Scott of Canada captured the women’s title for the second consecutive year, officials barred non-European skaters from that event.
At St. Moritz, the teenage Button startled the skating world when he completed his double axel at a time when figure skating was very much a balletic affair.
“He did five leaps and spins that no other skater attempted and made everything look easy,” The Associated Press reported. “At times he seemed to hang poised in the air. At others he spun with such rapidity as to be only a blur.”
Button gained notice as well for the short black jacket he wore to contrast with the daylight background of the snowy Swiss mountains visible from the outdoor Olympic rink. “God, it was a cause célèbre,” Button remembered. “Here I was looking like a waiter or, as some kind people said, in the dress code of a naval officer.”
He captured his second Olympic gold medal, making his triple jump, while a senior at Harvard. He went on to Harvard Law School and turned pro, joining the Ice Capades and Holiday on Ice, before receiving his law degree in 1956. He did not practice law, but he flourished as a businessman, founding Candid Productions, which produced made-for-TV skating shows.
Roone Arledge, who transformed televised sports into a prime-time attraction as president of ABC Sports, recalled how he was enthralled by Button’s artistry under pressure back in 1959.
Arledge, working for NBC’s Channel 4 in New York at the time, was producing and directing a live program at the Rockefeller Center ice rink featuring the annual lighting of an enormous Christmas tree and a skating performance by Button. Although the audio feed for Button’s music went out over the air, the public address system at the rink malfunctioned, so that Button had to skate without hearing anything.
“He kept right on skating in total silence, hearing the music in his head and gliding and spinning flawlessly,” Arledge remembered in his memoir “Roone” (2003), published a year after his death. “Skater and overture finished impeccably in synch, and those few of us who witnessed it could only marvel at the incredible sangfroid and talent of this great performer. Years later, when ABC needed a figure-skating commentator as cool as he was well informed, I knew exactly who to call.”
In 1962, a year after Arledge conceived “ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” Button began a long run analyzing major skating events for the program. He won an Emmy for outstanding sports personality on TV in 1981.
Widespread TV coverage of the Winter Olympics played a major role in figure skating’s emergence as a popular spectator sport, with Button at the forefront of the commentary.
He marveled at the sport’s artistry, complementing its athleticism. “It’s a theatrical form,” he once told The Times. “Skaters always have one foot in the sport and the other in theatrical enterprise.”
For his own part, Button loved the life of a performer. He appeared as Peter Van Gleck in the 1958 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV program “Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates” and in revivals of “South Pacific” and “Mister Roberts” at New York’s City Center.
He survived a pair of frightening episodes. He incurred a serious head injury in July 1978, when he was among several men assaulted at random in New York’s Central Park by a gang of youths armed with baseball bats. He suffered a fractured skull and a major brain injury on Dec. 31, 2000, when he fell while skating at a rink near his home in Westchester County, N.Y.; he seldom skated recreationally after that.
Button’s last Winter Olympic broadcasting assignment came in 2010 at the Vancouver Games, the second time he provided coverage for NBC.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Emily Button, from his marriage to the skating coach Slavka Kohout, which ended in divorce. Ms. Kohout died last March.
Button made his opinions very clear as figure skating’s most prominent analyst, or “narrator,” as he preferred to call his role.
As for the increasingly gaudy outfits worn by the skaters, “sometimes, I feel caught in a wind tunnel in the costume department at the Metropolitan Opera House,” he remarked while covering the Vancouver Games.
But he remained much the showman. Asked at Vancouver to comment on the emotions displayed at the so-called kiss-and-cry area, where skaters await their scores, he told The Times: “It’s television, honey, come on. It’s what makes television.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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