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Skater's manager a winner

Joan Ryan
Sunday, September 5, 2004

Linda Lever is standing on the other side of the rink at the Oakland
Ice Center, bundled in a black jacket and gloves, her eyes following
her skater, Brian Boitano.

He glides across the ice as he works on a new routine, called the
Cha-Cha Lesson, for an upcoming TV special. He will be skating with
a coatrack as his dance partner, and for the time being, he is using
a pole he nailed into a wooden disc that slides easily on the ice.
The four or five other skaters here at midday try not to stare.

Lever watches as Boitano tries different moves with his
choreographer. She knows the translation of every sigh, every raised
brow. She says nothing right now, just watches, because that's how
it works between them. What needs to be communicated will be, at the
right time and in the right way. Sometimes nothing is said, and the
message gets across anyway.

Such is the intimacy of an unusual relationship that has spanned 33
years.

Boitano, the superstar skater who won the 1988 Olympic gold medal,
will be 41 in November. Lever has been coaching or managing him
since he was 8 years old. Their three-decade-long partnership might
be unprecedented in sports.

"I've never heard of anything like it,'' says Yvonne Gomez, a skater
who trained for years with Boitano and Lever and considers both her
closest friends. She is now a San Francisco-based television
director of skating shows and lives five minutes from Boitano's
Russian Hill house. "It's based on complete, 100 percent,
unwavering, unquestionable trust.''

Lever, 61, is now Boitano's agent and manager, a role she never
imagined for herself. She was a coach and a Los Altos mother of two
daughters when Boitano became the hottest property in skating after
the '88 Olympics. She had no business background. She is quiet and
unassuming, a listener more than a talker. Perhaps that's why so
many promoters and network representatives have underestimated her.
Just weeks after the Olympics, she and Boitano's father, a banker
who manages Boitano's money, negotiated the skater's first big
contract with Champions on Ice, getting him 17 times what the
promoter first offered.

But all the top skaters had big-time agents, and all the big-time
agents were beating down Boitano's door in the wake of the Olympics,
offering the moon. Boitano's father had each write a proposal, and
super-agent Leigh Steinberg was chosen. The relationship lasted just
a year. Disappointed and disillusioned by the experience, Boitano
and his parents asked Lever to add contract-negotiating and managing
to her coaching duties, which were beginning to dwindle as Boitano
moved from the amateur to the professional circuit.

"It was perfect, because who did I trust more than Linda?'' Boitano
says. The three of us are sitting at a metal picnic table in a
little room by the rink. As he talks, he breaks off a piece of an
oatmeal raisin cookie and passes it to Lever, who breaks off a piece
and pushes it back. "My parents have a hard time trusting anybody,
and they trust Linda.''

"I've known them forever,'' Lever says, as if that were the
explanation.

The truth is, as anyone close to them knows, Lever has always looked
out for Boitano as if he were a beloved son. She was never
possessive, even when top coaches were trying to steal Boitano away
as he rose through the amateur ranks. His success was more important
than building herself into a famous coach. "If he wants to go,'' she
once told Gomez, "I want what's best for him. '' But Boitano never
considered it.

And since Lever took over as his agent and manager, more than 15
years ago, he has never considered leaving for flashier pastures.
She fields and negotiates all the offers, but as she says, "I never,
ever speak for him. He makes the decisions.'' Boitano says Lever's
work has set him up financially for life.

What has sustained the relationship is, of course, trust and
loyalty. Lever is as fiercely protective of Boitano's private life
as he is, for instance. But humor has been nearly as important. The
knee-jerk defensiveness about a criticism or difference of opinion
eventually dissolves through jokes and teasing.

"I'm developing a treatment (story outline) for a TV show that I
think will be very cutting edge,'' Boitano says, offering an
example. "It's a little racier than most skating shows.''

"I had reservations,'' Lever says.

"She thought it was going to ruin my whole career," Boitano
says. "She overreacted. She steamrolls you. I call it dropping the
nuclear bomb.'' He makes a sound like a bomb exploding.

Lever is laughing as Boitano talks.

Boitano and Lever have also had fun with his elevation to cultural
icon. If you type in his name in Google, many of the top hits have
to do with the Comedy Central animated show "South Park.'' The show
has a recurring superhero character named Brian Boitano who wears a
plunging-neckline skating top. There is even a South Park song,
wildly popular with the teen set, called, "What Would Brian Boitano
Do?'' The lyrics go, in part, "When Brian Boitano was in the
Alps/Fighting grizzly bears,/He used his magical fire breath/And
saved the maidens fair./So what would Brian Boitano do/If he were
here today,/I'm sure he'd kick an ass or two,/That's what Brian
Boitano'd do.''

Boitano poked fun at himself by skating to the song in one of his
shows, and he soon will be selling T-shirts emblazoned with, "What
Would Brian Boitano Do?''

In the next few months, Boitano will star in four television
specials, compete in ABC's "Ice Wars'' and appear as himself in the
upcoming Disney movie "Ice Princess." Now that the schools have
reopened, he will be reigniting his "Youth Skate'' program, in which
San Francisco school district students spend one morning a month
skating at Yerba Buena skating center with Boitano, Lever, Gomez and
other pro skaters.

"Brian literally walked through the 'golden door' at the Olympics,
looked back and pulled me through with him,'' Lever tells me later
by telephone. "He would have been extremely successful if he walked
through that door alone and sent me a card every Christmas.''

Because he didn't walk through alone, they have a friendship and a
bond that is not easily categorized. They are too much like best
friends, too much of a partnership, to be compared to a mother and
son. They are not possessive enough to be likened to a married
couple. They have carved out something uniquely their own.

"We've been through so much for so long,'' Lever says, including
Gomez in what the three call their "cabal.'' "We are joined forever
and ever."

E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@....

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