figure skating podcast interview
figure skating podcast interview
DECEMBER 2007
An interview with David Santee, two-time Olympian, World Silver Medalist, now Coach and Technical Specialist. 45 minutes, 28 seconds long.
Thanks to Fiona Mcquarrie for transcribing these interview highlights:
On his most embarrassing skating moment: If you skate for as long as I have, there are many. I was at an ice show in Kansas City, and I had been there for several years as a featured skater, and it was right after I got the Rocky music, which of course became my signature. And we didn’t have time really to come up with a new costume, so we kind of made do, and created a costume of the proper colors based on Rocky I, which were red and white, from an old costume. And the old costume was from a Tony Orlando and Dawn number, for which I had white suspenders and a white bow tie and a straw hat and a red shirt. So we took off the suspenders and the bow tie, and had just the red shirt and the white pants. So I’m doing my number, and after you do a few ice shows you get a feel for what the audience is going to react [to], you know, like the death drop, and I had a pretty good death drop so I knew that the audience would react to that. So you’re used to that. And this one night in Kansas City, I started out, and I was landing jumps, and I wasn’t getting the normal reaction. It was kind of like, there was applause, but there was also a buzz. There was something that wasn’t right. So I finished the program with the death drop, got up, did a fast scratch spin, finished the program, and went to bow. And as I went to bow I noticed the zipper had broken, and the red shirt had come out through the white pants. So needless to say I didn’t stick around for the rest of the bows.
The funny part in retrospect is that the name of the show was That’s Entertainment, and the announcer on his script would say, “Now if you think that’s entertainment, let’s bring him back for more”. Well, by this time the crowd was completely in hysterics. And then they also decided that they were going to let people know that I was not coming out for an encore because of an “equipment problem” [which had been] very clearly noted by everyone in the audience [laughs]. And after the finale they let me come out and do my encore in black pants, which was just as embarrassing.
On some little-known facts about him: I played trumpet. And in 1975 I was Outstanding Teenager in Illinois, and I think I was top three in the country. That was pretty cool. They had an assembly at the end of the school year, and everybody else was getting these awards, and they announced this thing and it was almost an Emmy-like statue, so for one day I was like the king of this school with this statue [laughs].
David Santee with Agnes Zawadski
On being bullied in high school: One of the stories I like to tell is my freshman year, I was about 4’11”, 4’10”, and being a male figure skater, I used to get picked on by pretty much everybody, even the ones who were super small. They were small but I was even smaller, the smallest. So after my freshman year I grew about nine inches, and went back and found the guy who had really given me the hardest time. And I was now about five or six inches taller than him. I didn’t say anything other than “You remember me?” and he was like “Um, uh, yeah”. [And I said] “I’m the guy you picked on all last year, so don’t ever pick on me again”. No force, no nothing, but that was the end of that. The good part about that was maybe about five to six years ago, my older son was at the same school, and they asked me to speak for their homecoming. So I kind of gave that story in the speech, and I could see my son’s reaction – he’s a late grower, too, he’s grown a bit in the last couple of years. He’s in college now but at that point he was one of the smaller ones in high school, and he thought that was great. And all of his friends thought it was great.
On what he learned about c[...]
