Turin – He sounds like Hoss Cartwright and skates like Hans Brinker. Dadgum, truth really is stranger than fiction.
At 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, there’s a cowboy chatting with me on the telephone, about to bust his britches, so excited to tell how he got himself a gold medal at these here Winter Games.
“The best thing about winning gold is I don’t have to explain to the folks back home anymore what the heck is this crazy thing I do for a living,” Chad Hedrick says in a drawl thicker than humidity on the Fourth of July in Texas.
And I’m asking myself: When did calf roping become an Olympic event?
“My parents owned a roller rink. As a baby, I learned to walk on roller skates, when Mom and Dad locked the wheels,” Hedrick said. “I never skated on ice until three years ago.”
And now Hedrick wants us to believe he beat everybody in the world for 5,000 meters around a sheet of ice slicker than horse spit?
And I’m thinking: Yeah, right.
How in tarnation did this cowboy find the Winter Games? Did Hedrick make a wrong turn at Amarillo and keep going until he hit the Italian Alps? Can a sports champion really be born in a joint where you put your left foot in and do the hokey pokey? Is that what it’s all about?
The beauty of the Winter Olympics is you can get to know some of the most wonderful, weirdest characters in the world, if you’re willing to open your mind to wacky sports that initially seem like fun only as an alternative to shoveling snow.
Alone, stuck on the back of a nearly empty media bus rumbling down from the mountains toward Turin at the end of the first day of competition at the Games, I picked up my cellphone. Hedrick was on the line, crackling with delight. This was supposed to be a conference hookup with U.S. media, but when roll was taken, mine was the only voice that answered the call.
Hedrick wanted to give everybody in America a happy bear hug, but settled for bending my ear. As a journalist from Japan snored in a nearby seat on the bus, I shook my head in disbelief as Hedrick, a former in-line skating ace, explained how shortly after watching the last Winter Games on television in a casino, he decided to take up world-class ice skating at age 25.
Sure. Why don’t you crack open another bottle of Lone Star beer, pardner, and tell us some more tall tales?
Hedrick is all too happy to oblige. The skating cowboy has more stories than singing cowboy Gene Autry had campfire songs.
For example: Before the race at the Oval Lingotto, shaken by the memory of his deceased granny Geraldine, who passed away exactly 13 years ago this day, the tough guy was crying like a baby in the stands.
“I kind of felt like a sissy,” said Hedrick, who scrawled his grandmother’s name on his skates in tribute.
Then, Hedrick went out and put an old-fashioned whupping on some dude named Sven from the Netherlands, and won the 5,000-meter speedskating race by almost two seconds.
I reckon Sven found out what everybody down at the Hedrick family roller rink learned a long time ago. Don’t mess with Texas.
In Italy, first lady Laura Bush now cheers him as an All-American hero. Bob Costas of NBC-TV wants to sit Hedrick down and record his life story for posterity on videotape. And some guy on the phone wants to know what’s the highlight of his first day as an Olympic gold medalist.
“I don’t know,” Hedrick said. “Ask me tomorrow what it all means.”
What it all means is with four more races and plenty of chances to take precious metals back to the States, Hedrick could be the name Americans remember from these Games longer than Bode Miller or Michelle Kwan.
I’m on a bus, chatting with my new best bud. Hedrick is on the phone, spinning tales as big as Texas.
It’s 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, there’s cold beer to drink and more gold to be mined. Life is good. The long, strange, wonderful ride of these Olympics has only just begun.
Happy trails, cowboy.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
