If given the chance to rewrite his story, figure skating icon Scott Hamilton wouldn’t change anything.
That includes having cancer.
“Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “If you combine fame and money, it’s a really good recipe for disaster. I started letting the tail wag the dog, and cancer was the fork in the road that stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reevaluate.”
The 1984 Olympic gold medalist and cancer advocate headlines the 30th annual Evening of Stars on Nov. 12, a benefit for the Central Illinois chapter of the American Red Cross.
“Their whole identity is to look after people,” Hamilton said. “If we can find a place in our world to be pouring back into the community, it’s a life better lived. And I think the Red Cross, just by their identity, are there to help people that are truly impacted in profound ways.”
Hamilton’s foundation, Scott Hamilton CARES, raises money for cancer research.
“Any type of thing that treats the cancer and spares the patient is our lane,” he said.
The organization focuses exclusively on immunotherapy and targeted therapies — innovations in cancer treatment that did not exist when Hamilton was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1997. He believes there will be a cure during his lifetime.
“I always thought it was presumptuous to think our bodies created the cancer, why can’t our bodies destroy it? Now, it’s the silver bullet for cancer: identifying a cancer cell, training our bodies to recognize and destroy it and leaving the rest of the body alone. I’m only here because I had chemotherapy and lots of it, but I can’t wait to get rid of it. There’s a better way and we need to work towards that.”
Today, Hamilton is one of the world’s best-known athletes in any sport, and among the United States’s most-decorated skaters — but success was not guaranteed.
“It’s like any skater: You fall down, you get up. You fall down, you get up. I fell a lot more than other people,” he said.
Hamilton grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, skating at a rink built to house a hockey team. His competitors came from established clubs and pedigreed coaches. A childhood illness stunted his growth.
“I can look back and say it makes absolutely no sense that I would ever have won an Olympic gold medal,” he said. “I was always the guy that came in last at nationals. I was always the guy that didn’t like parts of the job. I didn’t like compulsory figures. My only goal in life was to be an ice show comedian.”
Podium as platform
Cancer came later, both to Hamilton and his mother. And a recurring pituitary tumor has meant repeated treatments throughout his adult life.
“My mom didn’t get a second chance; she died of cancer,” he said. “I’m given a second chance, what am I going to do with it now? I wanted to live better and more intentional. I wanted to live in a way that honored the people that poured into me."
As a commentator for decades, Hamilton had a ringside view of how figure skating evolved.
Compulsory figures, a tedious event involving precisely etched shapes on the ice, were abolished in 1990. His signature jump, the triple lutz, is only impressive among grade schoolers. Skaters he saw rise to the same world stage, like Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir, now sit in his commentator’s chair. And the sport’s diminished professional circuit has meant more skaters see the Olympics as the end of their stories, rather than the beginning.
“From first steps to Olympic gold was 17 years,” he said. “My touring life as a professional skater lasted 20. For a lot of people, the Olympics is the end-all, be-all for a skater. They don’t know the former reality of using the podium as an ability to build a platform.”
