A conversation with ... Kurt Browning
The beloved Canadian skating icon dishes on the 'perfect' ending to his touring life, his favourite moments and inspiring an older generation to enjoy their time on the ice.
There’s an old saying about work and life that goes something like this. Find something you’re passionate about and figure out how to get paid for it, and you’ll never feel like you’ve worked a day in your life. It’s one of the secrets to happiness, or so we’ve been told many times over the years.
Kurt Browning knows he’s been one of those people. Feels it in his bones, which are older today than when his ‘job’ started 30 years ago. That would be when the Canadian skating icon leaped from a competitive career in which he produced four World championships, landed the first-ever quadruple jump and helped usher the sport into a massive new level of popularity in his homeland, right into a life as a touring professional. A job that couldn’t have been more right for a guy with a gift for entertaining audiences and making them smile, or even enjoy a laugh or two. Right into his fifties.
“Nobody imagines that!” Browning says with a tone of incredulousness when asked if the twenty-something guy who hung up his competitive skates in 1994 thought he’d still be skating in the spotlight until days before his 57th birthday. “I remember Kristi Yamaguchi saying ‘I’m going to do 10 years of Stars On Ice and retire.’ And I’m like ‘how can you say that?’ First off, you don’t know. And secondly, why only 10 years? Scott Hamilton has done more than that already.
“So right from the beginning, my attitude was different. She did 10 years exactly and quit, just exactly like she said she would do. It’s so Kristi Yamaguchi. But it just made sense to me (to keep going longer). It made sense to my body, it made sense to my personality, and I was having fun. It was the perfect job for me, right? The perfect job.”
And such a perfect job should demand a perfect ending, right? A special kind of sendoff that reminds you of just how much you were appreciated for your efforts over the years. And Kurt Browning, being fortunate one more time, got exactly that back in the spring. Five months later, he marvels at just how well it turned out. Just how perfect his farewell tour was for him — a two-month love fest between a beloved skater and the audiences who still adore him — and how it brought him such joy and satisfaction.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how perfect the tour was,” he says now, with enough time having gone by to truly reflect upon it all. “It was great. It was absolutely wonderful.”
The memories flow back quickly as our conversation continues. The emotions were deep, they were real and open for all around him to see. Maybe it’s because this time Browning knew this truly was it — he thought he was quietly done in 2015 and then again in 2018, but the lights kept drawing him back for various reasons. Maybe simply because this needed to end the right way after all these years. And 30 seemed like a nice round number to him.
“In 2018, it was a great year to step out because Stars On Ice didn’t need me because they had the best team ever (the gold-medal winning Canadian Olympic team, with featured four World champions). So I sat in the audience with a beer in my hand and clapped and Elvis Stojko did a triple Lutz. Holy crap, Elvis, nice job!” says Browning. “But I kept going, for one reason or another. Byron (Allen, SOI’s long-time producer) called because Tessa (Virtue) and Scott (Moir) quit Stars On Ice, so he’s like, can you come back? Alissa (Czisny, Browning’s wife) got asked to do Stars and I wanted to do shows with her before she and I both hang them up.
“So then I’m back on Stars. Then COVID (came along), and I’m not letting COVID be the reason that I stopped Stars On Ice. Because I waited through COVID, I said OK, when I retire, I’m going to announce it and hopefully give Stars a little boost. And also make it official, so I did that. That’s how that came to be and it was SO much better than 2015 and 2018, where I thought I was done and it was just nothing, just like walking away.”
Browning no doubt knew he was setting himself for an emotional ride through a dozen Canadian dates and eight more in the United States. He felt it right from the dress rehearsal in Halifax, the traditional starting point of the Canadian Stars On Ice tour. Scotiabank Centre, which was known as the Halifax Metro Centre for many years, is also the building in which he won his second World title in 1990 before a wildly cheering home crowd (the noise you hear by the end of his long program there will give you the chills). So yeah, there were some emotions there. And many more to come.
“The dress (rehearsal) was really emotional, because Jeff Buttle created a scenario where I hug every skater at the end of the first act. During the choreography, when everything was getting situated and I suddenly realized what was about to happen, I kind of turned away from the group and glided and looked up at that Halifax wall and that stands, and it was something — that rink means a lot to me for obvious reasons — and I just started crying, just started bawling,” he recalled. “When I finished in Toronto, I got off the ice after that (show) and that was my biggest cry as well. There were like 60 personal guests at that show. I just bawled and everybody came in and nobody said a word. Everyone as a group just hugged me and we all just hugged for probably 20 seconds. So yeah, the emotions were real, and it was a longer journey that anyone on that tour can really understand. And on June 4, when we were done, in the dressing room Evan Bates was saying stuff about how I influenced him as a kid and how he can’t believe I’m sitting in the same dressing room. And I was like, I didn’t know you even really knew me then. So that was really an emotional moment to have him say those things.”
Fortunately for Browning, he had a little help from his friends — as the old Beatles song goes — to pick him up when needed along the way. Three-time World champion Patrick Chan hadn’t performed anywhere in more than three years, but he wanted in on the opportunity to celebrate someone who influenced him in many ways. And the friendship between Browning and his onetime skating rival, Elvis Stojko, was on full display every night.
“Patrick Chan, I think he’s just at a place in his life where he’s a father now and he let go of skating and then he brought it back. He missed being Patrick Chan, and I think he came back to the sport with such a huge open heart and he was such a gift to me on that tour,” said Browning. “Just to really, really, really have him be so present and so giving and so good for me and my ego when you’re scared. You’re want to be worth all of the attention you’re getting and you don’t know at your age if you can do it. So Patrick was really good for me. And Elvis and I, in the last four or five years or six years, we’ve really gotten to know each other. And so I wanted to do a duet with him, and that duet was so much fun.”
It also gives him a warm feeling thinking about the skaters on tour who had no idea what the Browning magic has meant to skating, but savoured the chance to find out first hand.
“Loena Hendrickx didn’t know me. She didn’t know who Elvis and Kurt were. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know who we were, like at all. It was pretty charming to realize that this kid doesn’t even know who you are. And then you get to June 4 and you have a new friend,” he said. “That’s probably one of the things I’m going to miss, just that being in the dressing room and holding hands as you bow and being a part of the latest and greatest.”
And Browning felt he fit right in with that greatness, and says without hesitation that he became a better skater as a professional than the World champion who dazzled fans around the globe with his immense talents.
“Scott Hamilton has a famous quote, from when he was selling Stars On Ice at the very beginning. And that quote was ‘Stars On Ice is the place where champions go to get better.’ And for me, the answer is yes. I agree with Scott,” he said. “Working with people like Sandra Bezic and Michael Seibert and Lea Ann Miller — lots of great choreographers — and also skating side by side and being compared to, because you’re skating side by side and doing group numbers with the best skaters in the world … hell, yeah, you bet we got better. Absolutely. I think Loena Hendrickx and Isabeau Levito are better skaters because they did all these shows with Stars On Ice. It absolutely makes you a better skater. For sure.”
He’s lost track of how many different programs he’s done over the years, from his competitive days to now. Ask Browning about his absolute favourite (an impossible ask, I knew, but I thought I’d give it a whirl) and there’s no singular answer that really comes to mind.
“Absolute favourite? No. I have favourites, and because I get asked that question a lot, I answer it differently all the time, because I do have lots of favourites,” he said. “The ones that the fans have liked the most are the ones that I have liked the most. The power three are the clown, Singin’ in the Rain and Brick House. There’s just been all sorts of things that I did because I was curious … I used to do eight to 11 or 12 new numbers a year back in the day, because we had so many events that demanded new numbers. I think it was 66 to 69 solos a year that I did with Stars On Ice, because we made a T-shirt and put them on the back. So that’s just within Stars. But what about all the competitions, professional competitions, other shows. Steve Disson shows where they had a singer, so you have to skate to the Bee Gees. Or whatever. So how do you have a favourite, right?
“Probably the one that left me feeling the most elated was the clown. When people laughed and you felt that natural engagement with humour, and people reacted that way, that was pretty awesome. I skated it for the Queen and her quote was — I met her afterward — ‘it is infinitely more difficult to amuse than simply to entertain.’ And I agreed with her. It’s one thing to be fun and light-hearted, but to actually be funny, it’s a real challenge.”
And now it’s time for a new challenge in Browning’s skating life. He thought TV commentary would be a large part of it, but with CBC pulling back from covering live events, that window may well have closed. But Browning plans to devote plenty of time toward working with adult skaters, and helping them find the love for the ice that he’s always had.
“That’s sort of where I’m going to put my energy moving forward. Having my attitude and my personality in skating really meshes well with the adults. But I do seminars with kids and we really have a blast on the ice,” he said. “But I’m going to try to carve out a space in my future to focus on adults, and create seminars and an online presence and that sort of thing. Alissa and I are working on that (they’ve already done seminars with adults in Australia), and that’s the next thing that is going to get my attention.”
And Browning loves the idea of doing it with the woman he married back in August of 2022 (they have plans to build a home in the Niagara Region).
“We genuinely like each other, we just love each other’s company every day. And we both love skating,” he said. “We do seminars together and she has her way of teaching and her specialty, which isn’t mine, which is convenient. Even before I started teaching seminars with Alissa, I was like ‘nah, I don’t teach spins.’ I can say something about it but I do not teach spins. And she does. She is a spin master, and she is really getting a good reputation for having that magic touch that gets people spins. So she does that a lot.”
Browning also expects he’ll stay involved with Stars On Ice in some capacity, though he’s not quite sure yet in what way.
“I’m waiting to see how that figures itself out, too. We’ve had conversations, but nothing inked or nothing firm. But I think I’ll be a part of Stars On Ice for a bit of time to come,” he said. “I think I’d like to be a part of the creative team, but we don’t know how yet. I think each year it will be different. I’m hoping to be a presence … the way Scott stayed in touch with the tour.”
(UPDATE: It’s been announced the Browning will take on a significant new role with the Canadian Stars On Ice tour in 2024. From a tour press release: “Fans will be thrilled to learn that the iconic Kurt Browning, a staple of Stars on Ice since its debut in 1991, is not bidding farewell just yet. While 2023 marked his final year skating in the Stars on Ice tour, Kurt is set to take the reins as the Director and Choreographer of the upcoming production. His intimate connection with the Stars on Ice audience and unparalleled skating expertise will infuse each performance with creativity and charisma, ensuring an unforgettable experience for all”).
And as Browning has made clear, Stars On Ice gave him the perfect job for so many years, which came to a close on June 4 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was the perfect place for the finale in his mind.
“Hershey actually has a wonderful history with Stars On Ice. It was always three shows from the end, back when we did 45, 55, 65 cities. And we would have a blowout party there. Golf and movies that we had been making for a month. It was a lot of fun,” he said. “So, as a gift from Stars On Ice (after the final show), they put Alissa and I up at The Hotel Hershey, which was memory central. It was really cool.”
So, too, was that final night in Hershey, and when Browning left the ice for the final time … well, that was the perfect ending, too. There was a lot of that along the way, to be sure.
“It was really special, it was really good and on June 4, when I was coming off the ice, I felt that feeling that skaters get when they’re done competing. Just that elation of having done it, done it well, survived and the results be damned, you’re just proud of yourself,” he explained. “And that’s what I’m feeling right now. It’s just been an ongoing ‘wow, that was a long haul full of love, determination and hard work.’ But it was long. I was 56, and 16 days from 57, and asking my body to do backflips and stuff like that. I pushed the limit and survived it and came out of it with, I think, my integrity intact. I was skating well enough to make myself proud and I am ecstatic and I am so happy about that.
“It’s baffling to think of how long that career was. I missed one half of a show out of 925 shows, over 33 or 34 years. And I missed that half a show because the plane arrived late. Somehow, I’ve been able to do a full show 925 times over the years, so I’m pretty lucky.”
And how lucky were we to witness so much of that fun over the years?
An eye opener in Chongquing
It was short program day at the Cup of China on Friday and of all the results at that Grand Prix event, perhaps none was more of a head turner than the rhythm dance. A Canadian team ended up on top of the standings, but not the one you probably think. In a surprising twist, Quebec-based Marjoie Lajoie and Zachary Lagha sit in first place with 82.02 points (just .07 off their personal best), which put them 0.98 points in front of reigning World bronze medallists Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier (81.04).
It was a “thriller” of a result for Lajoie and Lagha, whose rhythm dance features the iconic Michael Jackson tune, and puts them in prime position to qualify for their first senior Grand Prix Final. They’ve already got a silver medal from Skate America in the bag and a silver or gold in China would punch their ticket to the Final, set for Dec. 7-10 in Beijing.
The same applies to Gilles and Poirier, the Skate Canada International champions, who weren’t entirely pleased with their skate Friday. The two Canadian teams will duel for the gold early on Saturday.
It appears another golden day is in the offing for Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps, who hold the lead after the pairs short program. The Canadians scored 70.39 for their “Oxygene” short program, which was 4.06 points better than Rebecca Ghilardi and Filippo Ambrosini of Italy.
Stellato-Dudek and Deschamps were emphatic victors at Skate Canada International last month and a repeat title in China would send them back to the Grand Prix Final, where they were fourth a year ago. It would also give Canada a second entry in the pairs event at the Final. Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud qualified last weekend with a gold medal at Grand Prix de France.
Wonderful article. GOAT.