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Real Guys do figure skateAfter Kurt Browning was named Canada's top athlete of 1990 another day, some folks wondered how the vote could have sat withLionel Conacher, the old lion of Canadian sports that the award has been named for. Browning is the first figure skater to win theConacher honor since its inception in 1932. Con was known as the Big Train, a man who did just about what an athlete can do exceptfigure skate. Hey, in his day, real men did not figure skate. In the dark ages of 1950, a bunch of sports editors voted Lionel this country's athlete of this half-century. I knew him a littlebit in those years just prior to his death in 1954 and I think he'd have fainted, hearing about Kurt Browning winning his award.This reveals something about the social climate of the other half-century and something about the way sports have changed in thisparticular one. **[https://www.facebook.com/Best-Skateboards-Review-For-Beginners-Pro-Top-Skateboards-Brands-1900830253574102](https://www.facebook.com/Best-Skateboards-Review-For-Beginners-Pro-Top-Skateboards-Brands-1900830253574102)** There were not many people around who gave people notion to figure skating back as soon as the century was halfover. Oh, we went slightly daffy over Barbara Ann Scott later she won her Olympic gold in 1948 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, howevershe was a woman, and figure skating was for women, right? When there was a guy around who really skated in these humoroushigh-laced boots, who had time for him?But for somebody like Lionel Conacher, it was a different story. This is a man. The Big encounter played all the tough sports andhe was great at all of these. Good? He had been damned nearly awesome. He scored three touchdowns in the 1921 Grey cup game.Really, he had been so good at soccer that the Americans imported him to play Rutgers University at New Brunswick, N.J., in 1927. He played outfield for the Toronto Maple LEafs if they won the Small World Series in 1926. He reveled in the opportunity to gothree rounds at an exhibition against Jack Dempsey. He played lacrosse and wrestled strong men when wrestling wasn't the televisedcomedy hour it's become.  And in baseball, which was his third-best sport because he did not learn to skate until he was 16, he hadbeen an NHL all-star defenceman three occasions and played on two Stanley Cup winners (Chicago and Montreal). And hard? Say,Lionel carried something like 600 stitches-- 600. He'd 150 in his face and mind alone and his nose had a bend in it such as astreet , so much as I know, he had no time for athletics that weren't rugged, and such days males who guess skate are still seen moreas dancers than athletes. That is a circumstance that truly bothers Kurt Browning. Another day writing in The Toronto Sun,columnist Steve Simmons recognized a luncheon conversation with Browning in the Royal Glenora Club in Edmonton, where 24-year-oldBrowning operates on his ice patterns. "Everybody would like to understand about all of the gays in figure skating," Simmons quotes the reigning world champion. "I knowthis will probably disappoint a lot of people, but almost all of the male skaters in Canada I know are directly. I don't thinkit's any different in skating than in society, than anyplace else."Back in 1988, Browning burst into sports fans' consciousness from the world's championships in Budapest. He completed a quadrupletoe loop, a dazzling, twirling manoeuvre never before achieved in contest. **[https://www.quora.com/profile/SkatesZone/Skateszone/How-To-Choose-Buy-A-Best-Complete-Skateboard-For-Beginners](https://www.quora.com/profile/SkatesZone/Skateszone/How-To-Choose-Buy-A-Best-Complete-Skateboard-For-Beginners)** Fulfilling this promise, the young native of Caroline,Alta., won his first planet's name in Paris in 1989 and repeated last March in Halifax.Evidently, Browning is a professional, decades removed from the multi-sport era of Lionel Conacher. That's how it is with nearlyall of today's superstars, an exception being the squat, muscled Bo Jackson, a power-hitting outfielder for the Kansas City Royalswho follows up the baseball year by wrecking National Football League defences, carrying the ball from his halfback position withthe Los Angeles Raiders. This transition from generalist to specialist is a product of the cold fish attention of television--or, more exactly, theundreamed-of money created by it. Television took sports to the living rooms of anyone who wanted it, which in turn attractedpanting advertisers into the video doors. Soon, the skyrocketing price of television rights has been creating team owners andpromoters wealthy, a circumstance that encouraged expansion of teams and seasons.Before Long, there were professional teams in all the densely populated cities, and agents popped up continent-wide to representthe performers and extract enormous sums from the television-rich owners. To adapt the flood of new groups and to keep the verysmall displays up for their athletic supporters in games, the seasons have been lengthened. There was seldom time left for gamersto focus on more than 1 game, far less the half-dozen that inhabited Lionel Conacher. From 1990, the need to fill rosters was sogreat that men were making $2 million annually for being good enough to avoid being hit on the head by fly balls.Oldtime athletes can play games around the clock, moving out of baseball to soccer with the seasons, partially because the demandsin their conditioning weren't rigorous. Natural talent alone carried them together."We played into shape," Frank Morris advised me after, talking of the six Grey Cup-winning seasons as a lineman with the TorontoArgonauts in the 1 940s along with the Edmonton Eskimos throughout the 1950s. Later, Morris added six Grey Cups as the director ofplayer development for the Eskimos during the 1970s and 1980s. "We'd establish fat in training camp," he recalled, "and bymidseason, we would be prepared to go."It was that way in most sports. Ball players utilized to invest the long cold winters catching up on their beer drinking and,since John Lardner once wrote, "their appetites were as wide as their moustaches." **[https://medium.com/@skateszone/different-types-of-skateboards-list-2d17282da1a1](https://medium.com/@skateszone/different-types-of-skateboards-list-2d17282da1a1)** Hockey players spent their summers in asleisurely a style, coming for fall training, in the term of an eminent afterdinner speaker, Jake Dunlap, "with bellies on liketame bees."But now the long long seasons in the big spectator sports need yearlong conditioning, and no sport puts harder demands on itsactors compared to figure skating, especially guys who can perform quadruple loops. Perhaps in the dark days, Conacher could havefrowned on a skater's eminence, but chances are that if he had been around today, he would spare more than a passing glance forKurt Browning.