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How will the World deal with Orser?
He always figured it was no one's business but his own, but a palimony suit has brought it into the open and now he'll have to live with the jibes of the red-necked and ignorant anywhere his pro figure skating career takes him.
He'll deal with it. Every figure skater does, eventually. As every athlete seen with a beer is a drunk, every figure skater who dons flamboyant show-biz garb and spins and twirls over the ice with fixed and pearly smile MUST be gay. Jeez, Fred, he looks like a bleepin' begonia!
Small boys who love to skate and work through the pre-dawn darkness morning after morning, month after month learn early that with the dream come the taunts of other boys engaged in games the world has deemed more he-manish. Some of them quit, and who knows how many among them might have been another Elvis?
"Sure, it can be a problem," Kurt Browning said a few years back. "Especially when you hit 14 and the testosterone starts acting up and you're expected to hang out with The Guys, chasing girls and being the king hockey player.
"It's just perception. They'll see you going off to figure skate and they'll make cracks. What they WON'T see is the 14-year-old boy going off to take part in a sport where the ratio is 8-1 girls."
It made me wonder then as it does today: What will happen, how will the world react, when a professional hockey player steps or is ratted out of the closet and admits that he is gay?
There are gay hockey players. Why wouldn't there be? There are gay golfers, gay lawyers, gay doctors, gay comics, gay figure skaters, gay any vocation you can name. Sexual proclivities are not a matter of profession or education. They just are.
But how would we deal with it?
Are we grown-up enough to say "So what?"
Would he get booed out of the profession? Would the NHL, the league that worships before the idol of the great god Marketing, quietly work to get him shipped to the minors, or say "Find another 25 of 'em and we'll put a franchise in San Francisco."
Times change.
When Billie-Jean King's long-time female friend filed a palimony suit, the tennis world's interest shifted from forehand to foreplay. A few years further down the road, Martina Navratilova simply shrugged and said "Yes, I'm gay," and aside from the fact that the market mavens poured all the endorsements on her hetro fellow professionals, that was pretty much it.
You'd like to think it will be that way when the first NHLer comes out of the closet. Chances are, you're dreaming.
One of the sad effects of a story like Orser's is that the entire sport takes the hit. It happened six years ago when a story headlined TRAGEDY ON ICE hit the wires claiming that "at least 40" figure skaters and coaches had died of AIDS.
Parents of young skaters bombard local associations with word that their sons had come home from school saying they'd just spent the worst day of their lives.
It was all the old stuff recycled, the limp-wristed waves, the falsetto cooing, the careful-where-you-bend-over-kid, the if-you-skate-you-must-be-gay. Kid stuff -- unless you're a kid and peer pressure is the biggest hurt of all.
"What would you tell the kids?" I asked Browning.
"It's hard," he said. "But if a kid has the right kind of friends, maybe when they start teasing him about figure skating and calling him a fag and a queer and all those things, he can sit down with them and explain what he's doing and why he's in the sport and what it takes to be good at it.
"If they don't listen and keep it up, well, maybe he should take another look at the kind of friends he has."
The same logic will apply when hockey gets its inevitable turn in the sexual spotlight. You just wonder how many will listen.