Is Bowman Enough of a Showman?

CALGARY, Canada —  When a milk company plastered his face on an advertising billboard, on the same Van Nuys street corner where he lived, Christopher Bowman would come home at night to find paint balloons splattered all over it, pantyhose draped across the scaffolding, mustaches drawn beneath his nose and arrows painted through his temples.

When he played a blind boy on the TV show “Little House on the Prairie,” Michael Landon would be working with him on a scene, acting or directing, when suddenly he would catch Christopher rocking his head and rolling his eyes. “Bowman, you look like a stupid pinball machine!” Landon would say. “You’re supposed to be blind, but you’re looking for flies on the ceiling!”

When he was recuperating from a stress fracture in his right leg a couple of summers ago, Bowman was riding his bicycle home during rush hour, when a careening pickup truck sideswiped him onto the sidewalk. Gushing blood from his left calf which had been impaled by a spoke, Christopher limped off toward a nearby hospital, lugging the totaled bike over one shoulder and his tennis shoes over the other shoulder, because, “You may be dying, but don’t get any blood on your $60 Reeboks.”

Christopher Bowman does not get easily sidetracked or discouraged. He knows, for instance, that when the men’s figure skating competition at the Winter Olympics begins this morning with the compulsory round, the must-see guys in the eyes of interested North Americans in the audience will be Our Brian and Their Brian, the clear-cut crowd favorites, Brian Boitano of the United States and Brian Orser of Canada.

Yet, it was Bowman who outskated both of them, if you ask some of those who were there, at the world championships in Cincinnati last March, and it was Bowman who, after taking a six-month sabbatical to reconsider his way of life, skated well enough even on an injured ankle at the U.S. nationals in Denver last month that he was anointed, with Boitano and Paul Wylie, as one of America’s Olympians.

It did not discourage Bowman the Showman when, just before he was scheduled for a warm-up at Denver, he reached into his locker for his skates and found that one of the blade edges had been burred. He had no way of knowing if somehow, carelessly, he had mishandled the skate and damaged it himself, or if some prankster had waited until Bowman wasn’t paying attention and then deliberately sabotaged his equipment.

Bowman ran into the arena, skates in hand, and found his coach, Frank Carroll. “Look, Frank!” he said, dangling the evidence.

“Arrrrgh,” Carroll said.

They determined not to panic. It was important not to let anything disrupt Christopher’s concentration before the turning point of his 20-year-old life. And besides, any figure skater worth his sequins had to become accustomed to the nasty little mind games that took place in the locker room before a main event. It is not unlike that “Pumping Iron” documentary, which showed Arnold Schwarzenegger psyching out Lou Ferrigno and the other bodybuilders before a Mr. Olympia competition.

“You’d be amazed at what goes on,” Bowman said here Monday, during a break from practice. “Somebody’s always pulling something. One guy will come back from his performance and tell you, ‘Watch out, the ice is really bad out there tonight.’ Another guy will come back and say, ‘Well, I really skated great that time. Try and top that one.’ They’re really toying with your head in there.

“Some guys have to tune it out by wearing stereo headphones. Or, they lock themselves in the bathroom. They even go outside the arena to get some peace and quiet. Then it’s time for them to skate, and they reach for the door, and somebody’s locked it, and they’re stuck outside in the frozen snow, banging on the door for somebody to let them in. It’s hilarious.”

As for himself, Bowman acts so carefree before a skate that the other guys in the room usually wonder what the heck is wrong with this guy.

“I channel my energy by acting real silly and ridiculous. Everybody’s standing around pointing at me and asking, ‘Why’s he acting that way?’ But the way I look at it, you can’t sit there worrying about every little thing. You can’t worry if the other guys are going to be great. It’s the Olympics, man. Everybody’s great. OK, so it’s the Battle of the Brians, and that makes it real spicy. Great. But Boitano and Orser don’t have to go into the locker room and go straight for one another’s throats. It zaps all your energy.”

Nor does Bowman mope over the fact that everybody here--judges, too, possibly--already is conceding the Olympic gold, silver and bronze to the Brians and the Soviet Union’s Alexander Fadeev. Bowman just shrugs it off that 1992, not 1988, is supposed to be his year. Asked to talk about competing here against three world champions, Bowman the Showman put on a show.

“Can I talk about it?” he said, making a face. “Can I cry about it? Can I laugh about it?”

Bowman is being a good sport, in more ways than one. His sort of Olympic anonymity comes with the territory, as with a prince who has to wait for the demise of the king. Boitano and Orser are so much the focus of the men’s figure skating that the Calgary Herald published a full-length photograph of Bowman in Tuesday’s newspaper, and identified him in the caption as Wylie.

Bowman does hope to make a name for himself someday, if not in skating, then in acting. A Hollywood-born baby who even got sit-com work as an infant, he later had roles in TV shows like “Little House” and “Archie Bunker’s Place” during hiatus from high school classes in Reseda, and also has done some stunt work, most recently in the film “The Lost Boys.”

“I played a vampire named Dwayne,” he said.

Who also, no doubt, tried not to spill any blood on his Reeboks.

“Some people say acting is a matter of waiting for your lucky break, but it’s not. It’s just like skating. It’s hard work,” Bowman said. “You have to be good at what you do, or you don’t get those breaks. I could become the greatest figure skater in the world, but if my image is that of a cute little kid instead of a good actor, then nobody’s going to cast me for a part where I’m up there on the screen kissing, oh, I don’t know, Brigitte Bardot or somebody. If they think I’m just a cute little kid, the only acting work I’m going to get is if they come up with another Mickey Mouse Club.”