Her Dad’s Dreams, Her Way : Turner Rejected Her Father’s Methods, Revived Career and Won Skating Gold

Cathy Turner has a sore throat, and in two hours she must perform the national anthem, a song not for the meek of voice, before a Kings’ game at the Forum. But she insists on telling one more story about a woman who has it all.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always picked up pennies and made my ultimate wish,” she says. “Mine was to win an Olympic gold medal. After it happened, after I came home from Albertville, I pulled into a parking spot one day, and there was a penny on the sidewalk. Out of habit, I picked it up.

“Then, it hit me. ‘Wow, what do I wish for now?’ ”

What, indeed? She has two Olympic medals--one gold, one silver--for short-track speedskating in the 1992 Winter Olympics in France, a made-for-television movie and a recording contract in the works and a starring role alongside Dorothy Hamill and Christopher Bowman in the Ice Capades, which runs tonight through Sunday at the Forum.

Athletic, musical, blonde, 5 foot 2 and eyes of blue that glisten when she talks excitedly, which is much of the time, Turner, 30, would be a natural for a role often played by another Olympian, Cathy Rigby, who has become better known as Peter Pan than as a gymnast.

But as wonderful as life is now in Never Land for Turner, it is so only because she climbed out of an abyss so deep and dark that she did not care whether she lived or died.

She did not lose her life, but she did lose her identity in a series of failed relationships.

One was with her well-meaning but overzealous father, who dreamed of Olympic glory from the time she laced on a pair of skates. She rejected his dream temporarily, him maybe forever. For almost eight years, she traveled the country as a singer named Nikki Newland on a road that eventually led to a four-month stay in a psychiatric hospital.

That was a lot for her to think about as she leaned over from the highest level of the victory stand at Albertville to have the gold medal hung around her neck. If only it had been so simple as wishing on a lucky penny.

When Tom Turner speaks of the daughter he adopted when she was barely a year old, after he married her mother, there is hurt and anger in his voice. But there also is pride.

“She was a natural athlete,” he says. “We were a skiing family, water and snow, and she took to skis like she was born on them.”

She also was comfortable on skates, which he discovered when he bought her a pair of figure skates at age 6. He took her that day to the rink near their home in Rochester, N.Y., only to find that there was a speedskating session in progress. No problem. She began racing the other children on her figure skates.

Within a week, she had a new pair of speedskates and was beating most of the other novices. Tom had a new avocation. A telephone repairman, he did not have the time or the expertise to coach his daughter. But he could train her.

“He didn’t really know anything about the sport,” she says. “He just made sure I did these exercises. I had to do a certain amount of miles, seven to 10, a day on my exercise bike within a certain amount of time. I actually had a board rigged up for books so that I could do my homework while I was doing my miles. If I didn’t do a certain number of miles during the week, he wouldn’t let me leave the house on the weekend.”

She is speaking publicly for the first time about her relationship with her father, agreeing to talk about it, as well as the other obstacles she overcame, after receiving permission from actor Martin Sheen’s Culver City production company, which bought the rights to her life story. But it is still painful for her, and she occasionally fights back tears.

“He would just hear of things and make me do them,” she adds. “I had to duck-walk around the house for a certain amount of time. I did 100 one-legged squats every day. I would do all that and then go practice.

“A lot of it was fun at first. I didn’t mind. I would tell myself, ‘Wow, I’m going to be good!’ I loved winning.”

She won almost every time she raced. But the more success she had, the more she had to have to satisfy her father, she says.

“It was a big deal to him. I was in the paper every weekend, and everyone was calling him ‘Cathy’s father.’ We even had a boat called ‘Cathy’s Father.’ That’s how much he lost his identity into me, into my success as an athlete.

“So when I won, I made him look good. But if I didn’t win, it made him look bad, and he took it out on me. There were some incidents when he just took me off the ice, out of the meet. I was embarrassing him. That’s what he would say.”

In her early teens, as she became recognized as one of the nation’s up-and-coming talents, she realized that the sport had become a job. Her father, she says, would not let her participate in other sports at school unless they were beneficial to her speedskating.

“Diving and track were OK, but he wouldn’t let me swim because it elongated my muscles,” she says.

It was no longer as much fun for her, she says, and she began to rebel.

Tom says she needed discipline.

“She didn’t listen to me; she didn’t listen to her coaches,” he said from his home outside Rochester. “A lot of coaches quit her. She was very hard-headed. Her favorite words were, ‘I know.’ I’d start to say something, and before I could finish the sentence, she’d say, ‘I know.’ ”

He sighs, as if this discussion over the years has worn him down.

“You know of any athlete who ever did well if they didn’t have somebody pushing?” he asks. “Once they make it, they look back at the hard times, and they have to blame somebody.

“World-class athletes are made, not born. I definitely didn’t make her, but I certainly pushed her in the right direction.”

Cathy’s mother, Nancy Price, says that her daughter did not need pushing, that she was so motivated in sports that she ran on the boys’ cross-country team in high school, and in her studies that she was allowed to bypass the eighth grade.

“He was forgetting that she was still a child and still growing up,” says Nancy, now remarried. “He meant well. If kids have talent, they’re not going anywhere unless their parents help them pursue it. But, in this case, Tom’s attitude almost destroyed it. I don’t think he looked at it as abusive. He didn’t physically threaten her. But, yeah, in a way it was abusive.”

She says that Tom also was too demanding of their son David, who, although also a good athlete, quit sports because of the pressure at home. When she defended the children, she says that she and Tom fought.

Cathy says that she and her brother sometimes buried their heads under the pillows in their beds upstairs and cried during their parents’ loud, occasionally violent fights. There were other problems in their marriage and other reasons to argue. Money was tight. But they agree that most of the tension revolved around their different approaches to raising the children.

“Eventually, it broke us up,” Nancy says.

By that time, Cathy, at 16, had left home.

When Turner, in defiance of her father, moved in with a man 12 years her senior, she believed that her troubles were behind her.

And they were for a time. She had her best season to that point as a 16-year-old in 1979, winning the U.S. short-track championship and a silver medal in a relay at the World Championships. She also was considered a prospect for the 1980 Olympic team, although long-track racing was not her strength. Short-track did not become an official Olympic event until 1992.

“Boom, it was just like that because I went to competitions by myself and didn’t have that pressure,” she says. “For the first time, I was doing it for myself.”

But, as she now realizes, she had gone from one domineering relationship to another. The difference was that she willingly, even eagerly, accepted her dependent role in the latter because the man offered love, companionship and security, a trap that she says ensnared her time and time again as she grew older and prevented her from developing into the person she wanted to become.

When she went to Europe in late 1979 to train with the national team, he did not write to her. So she cut her trip short and went home, probably costing herself a berth on the Olympic team. When he wanted her to go to college, she went to college. When he wanted her to find a job, she found a job.

Even so, the relationship did not last, and it was her subsequent decision to return to speedskating that led her to singing. While searching through a newspaper in an attempt to find cheap fares to cities with speedskating ovals, she spotted an advertisement seeking a singer for a band to travel with comedian Joel Dane.

Having received compliments for her voice, she auditioned. Much to her surprise, she got the job. She had a new career, new wardrobe--”High heels. C’mon, I couldn’t even stand up in them”--and a new name, using Nikki Newland in her act because she thought it sounded more hip.

That job lasted only eight months, but there were others over the next few years with bands specializing in rock, jazz, rhythm and blues and even ‘40s show tunes. She also wrote songs. “Sexy Kinky Tomboy” was her first. Eventually, she became successful singing for national commercials and lead-ins for HBO specials.

“It’s a tough field to get your foot in the door, and she had her foot in,” her mother says.

But she did not think her daughter was happy.

“There was something wrong,” Nancy says. “She and I have always been very close, but it was hard for me to touch base with her in those days. She wasn’t comfortable with what she was doing.”

In one respect, Cathy says, she was having a great time. “I was flying all over the place, recording in L.A. and Toronto, decked out in nice clothes, riding in limos, living in the fast lane,” she says.

Something, however, was missing. Or, more specifically, someone. Her.

“I’d be seeing sporting events on TV and wishing I was like the athletes,” she says. “There’d be times during performances when I’d get so caught up in, ‘God, I’m an athlete; what am I doing in these clothes?’ that I’d have to go out that night and run 10 miles. I couldn’t walk for the next couple of days, but I’d do it. I just kinda lost it, who I was. I could ignore all that only when I was in a relationship. That took care of everything. You know, you’re happy when you’re with someone who takes care of you and loves you. But you’re not happy when you’re by yourself. When that happens, there’s a crisis.”

Turner’s occurred on a trip to the Caribbean in 1987.

“I don’t want to tell you about it,” she says. “Just say that it forced me to realize that I’d better do something quick or I’m going to die.”

Nancy Price went to the airport to pick up her daughter, who told her, “I’m hurting so bad inside I just have to get some help.”

After rejections from two hospitals, one of which told Turner that she did not have a problem, she was admitted to a Rochester psychiatric hospital. Later, she was transferred to a ward operated by the University of Rochester.

She was there, off and on, for four months. She had to be readmitted once because she took too many anti-depressants.

“I didn’t do it intentionally,” Turner says, adding that she never tried to commit suicide. “I was very up-tight, very bummed out. I just took a couple of extra ones to calm me down quicker. I vividly remember now that I wasn’t supposed to take more than was prescribed. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep to escape for a while.”

She does not have pleasant memories of the hospital. Her mother says, however, that she believes her daughter received good treatment.

Doctors, Turner says, told her that she suffered from severe depression, caused by an identity crisis.

She says: “There’s me writing on a piece of paper, ‘Who am I? I am an athlete. That’s what I am. I’m going to. . . . No, I’m a musician. That’s what I am. I’m going to be a recording star.’ I would do that daily, trying to find out who I was so I could get the hell out of there.”

While sitting at the kitchen table in her mother’s home one morning in September, 1988, Turner discovered the answer.

After reading a newspaper article about cyclist Connie Paraskevin-Young’s bronze-medal winning performance in the Summer Olympics at Seoul, Turner announced to her mother that she was returning to competition. The two athletes had competed against one another as speedskaters in the ‘70s, and Turner figured that it was not too late for her if Paraskevin-Young could still be an Olympian.

“My mom said, ‘If that’s what you really want to do, you should do it,’ ” Turner says. “I ran upstairs and called one of my old coaches, and he said, ‘Well, get your butt over here.’ One week later to that day, I had my bags packed and was on my way to train in Calgary (Canada). I couldn’t do two laps at first, but I never looked back.”

Turner’s comeback is the stuff of Olympic legend.

Although she popped in and out of the sport, earning an alternate’s berth on the 1984 national short-track team and setting a national record in ‘86, she was not a serious competitor for almost eight years.

But after she returned, she was nothing but serious.

Her coach, Jack Mortell of Evanston, Ill., says that she has all the physical attributes necessary for a short-track speedskater--”fairly diminutive, strong as a bull, terrific balance”--but that it was her mental approach that convinced him she could return at a high level.

“The way she worked was incredible,” he says. “I’d train the team for two hours, and she’d train as hard as the men, and then lift weights and do exercises. Then, she’d come out and run hard with me for an hour. I run fairly well, but I couldn’t drop her in an hour. She made up her mind to win the gold medal, and she did it.”

She improved from 18th in the overall standings at the 1989 World Championships to 10th the next year and would have finished among the top four in ’91 had it not been for a fall. By the start of the 1992 Winter Olympics, she was a medal favorite in the only individual short-track event for women, the 500 meters.

But it is not entirely correct for her to say that she never looked back. In regular sessions with a sports psychologist, Brad Olson, at the U.S. Olympic Education Center at Northern Michigan University, where she trained and completed her degree in computer science, she explored her childhood.

“From early on, she demonstrated this unbelievable drive,” Olson says. “Her dad’s style did contribute to that ultimate motivation. But that could also have been detrimental to her. When parents push a child, that child might develop the feeling that he or she can never accomplish enough. It can result in psychological distress.”

From the sessions, Turner concluded: “I was the little skater, and he was Cathy’s father, and I searched all those years for some identity beyond that, even to the point that I changed my name in the music business. I had to develop my own goals and aspirations.”

They turned out to be the same as her father’s for her--to become an Olympic champion. The irony is not lost on her, but the difference, she says, is that she worked toward that goal this time for herself.

So it stunned her on the night of the 3,000-meter relay at Albertville when she spotted Tom Turner in the stands, wearing a T-shirt boasting that he was “Cathy’s Father.”

“Can you believe that?” she says. “After all those years--I hadn’t seen him for more than a couple of minutes here and there--and he comes out of nowhere trying to claim all the credit. And you know what’s weird? I still had this feeling I wanted to make him proud of me. But I had to be selfish. I had to remind myself that I was there for me.”

With Turner skating the final laps, the United States finished second in the relay. Two nights later, with her father again in attendance, again wearing the T-shirt, she won the gold medal in the 500 with a dramatic lunge at the finish line.

“She was on a mission,” Tom says. “I was quite proud of her.”

But that later turned to hurt when his daughter confronted him about his appearance at Albertville.

“She got the idea I wanted publicity or whatever, but I never wanted to crash her parade,” he says. “The only thing I wanted was just to revel in the experience with her. I just wanted to be part of it.

“I was told that I did nothing for her after 15 years and $60,000 of sacrifice. That’s OK. We try our best as parents, and we all fail in one respect or another, but I feel good about how she was raised. The people who love me, my family and friends, know what I did for her. I know what she did for herself, too.”

Acknowledging her father’s contribution when she was younger, Cathy says: “I was really good because I was forced to do all that stuff, all those exercises.”

But, she adds: “In the end, it didn’t get me anywhere. I might have gone on to the Olympics earlier, but it wouldn’t have been because it was what I wanted to do.

“Nothing is going to satisfy you unless you do it for yourself. When I decided for myself what I wanted, I did everything in my power to make it happen. Now, I feel like I can make anything happen.”

Even the movie based on her life.

Her father is fighting it.

“I used to tell people that Freddie Krueger was going to play me,” Tom Turner says, joking. “But then I got a letter from Freddie Krueger telling me that I was making him look bad.”

But in case the movie gets a green light, she already is working on the musical score. The theme song, she says, will be called, “Take My Hand, I Know Who I Am.”