“Send In the Clowns”: Patrick Chan Farewell

I like to watch Patrick Chan skate for the same reason I like to watch Audrey Hepburn act, or Lang Lang play classical piano or Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, or a craggy hill in Scotland beckon, all misty and verdant.

Chan’s presence on the ice is one of life’s little pleasures: that slip and slide of his, the three strides he takes to get from one end of the ice to the other, the edge quality, the sudden speed he creates out of air. These are things you don’t forget.

We lost him for three years after he retired, as he navigated life without ice. But back he came last year for Kurt Browning’s farewell tour with Stars On Ice, and lo and behold, this season too.

However, after he finishes the Canadian Stars On Ice tour in Victoria, B.C. on May 16, Chan will fade into the forest again and step away from performing. His life is full. And getting fuller. He says he is not saying good-bye forever – no job will ever fulfil him like skating, he says – but it will be a long time before we see him again.

He is married to former skater Liz Putnam. They have a young son, Oliver. They are expecting another son in June. So Chan has responsibilities. And he has switched jobs, stressful at the best of times. Commercial real estate is out. Financial planning and advising is in. He just finished a Canadian Securities course before he started the tour in Halifax.

“It was so much fun last year, just to be back on the road,” Chan said, talking from a bus on his way to the next stop. “It was a big challenge to get back into shape and you lose a lot of the feeling in three years. I gained weight. There was a whole process to get to tour, but it all came back really quickly.”

Skating on that tour was like “putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes,” he said. He ended last year’s tour, thinking he might perform on it for another five years. Then reality struck.

Preparing for this year’s tour became difficult. Putnam, expecting, helped Chan choreograph new programs for the tour. “My son is a little older, so you can’t just strap him on us and go to the rink,” Chan said. “We have to coordinate with a baby sitter and try to find time in our busy schedules to work. To try to choreograph in one-hour chunks, three times a week, is not ideal.”

And Chan had a full-time job. He didn’t have the luxury of spending days on end, creating programs.

Choreography aside, Chan spent a week in Halifax while the tour (Kurt Browning is director and choreographer) created group programs and rehearsed. With Halifax and Moncton now delivered, the tour snakes from Ottawa (tonight April 28); Laval, Que., (Apr. 30); Toronto (May 3); St. Catharines, Ont (May 4); London, Ont. (May 5); Regina (May 9); Calgary (May 10); Edmonton (May 12,) Vancouver (May 14); and Victoria (May 16.)

A few weeks before the tour started, Putnam and Chan looked at each other and said: “Yeah, this is going to be impossible to do.”

Chan could have hired a choreographer to work for him, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he would be leaving his wife on her own for a month with a young child and another on the way. “I just didn’t feel very good about that,” he said.

Since last October, Chan has been working for the Nicola Wealth company, which focuses on financial planning for high-net value cllients, entrepreneurs and professionals. He’s an intern, learning at the moment. Getting his license to advise is well down the road. He has had no financial experience. “I’ve never worked at a bank as a teller or anything,” he said.

But he loves the people he works with. He quickly learned that was most important to him (as it was in skating). “It’s finding people you love to work with and feel excited to come into work and see and discuss things and different ideas,” he said. “Everyone has just been so helpful. They are not making me feel like I don’t belong there. People can’t wait to help me learn and become more well versed in this industry. It gave me more of a reason to make this decision.”

In the commercial real estate field – where he also had no experience – he felt a lack of comraderie or team work. He had been working in this field for two years and felt “no spark.

“It didn’t feel right,” he said. “I wasn’t happy. I was coming home to Liz and Oliver and being in a miserable mood all the time. Sunday would come around and in anticipation of Monday, I would not be in a happy mood.”

People told him that he should go back to school and take all sorts of courses related to real estate. He applied to the Urban Economics online course at the University of British Columbia and was accepted.

He was about to register for courses, when he got a gut feeling that it was just wrong.

It was a two to three-year program. “I thought, boy, that’s a long time to be doing something that you are not 100 per cent sure you want to be doing,” Chan said.

Chan took a pause to think. And this is where skating helped him, he said. He reached out to a few people, did some fireside chats with a financial company, which spawned a coffee meeting. One thing led to another and he ended up having lunch with David Sung, the president of Nicola Wealth.

Sung immediately saw the similarities between financial planning and skating at a high level. He could see that Chan already had skills that would work. With commercial real estate, Chan had felt he was pushing away his identity as a skater because “I felt like that wasn’t helping me,” he said. “I felt like it made people feel like I wasn’t serious about the career.”

But Sung said: “No,” that he thought there were so many similarities between preparing to be a top athlete with strategizing, planning and execution. “All of those aspects are things that we talk to our clients about,” he told Chan. Preparing for an Olympics? It’s about setting goals, adjusting plans to lifestyle and new horizons, and how do you see yourself in a few years? That is financial planning to a T.

All of these things appealed to Chan. He felt energized. When he came home, he burst open the door and told Putnam: “This is it! This is what I’m doing!” He had never quit a job in his life. That was a learning experience, too, leaving commercial real estate.

He knows as he continues on this new path, the commitment will get more intense.. There will be study and courses to take. And he’s embracing it. He hadn’t realized he enjoyed finance. “It’s all very exciting,” he said.

Meanwhile the two programs he is doing for the Stars on Ice tour are poignant and perfect for a guy with his skills and his place in life. One of them is “A Lovely Night,” from the 2016 movie “La La Land.” It’s a fun number from a rare musical that combines comedy and romance.

“It’s a littie more Gene Kelly-esque, or Kurt Browning-esque,” Chan said. “There is a little bit of tap dance, jazz styling to it.” In the movie, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone tap dance to alluring jazz music as the sun sets.

Chan says this routine is very physically demanding. Who could do it but him?

“It’s hard to imitate tap dance and jazz,” he said. “It’s so unnatural. So you end up doing a lot of stuff on your toe picks and that is just a leg burner. I find that my quads and my calves are really really tight and sore and tired by the end of the program.

“That’s the price you pay to try to emulate the Gene Kellys.”

His routine in the second half is an appropriate farewell song: “Send in the Clowns,” as sung by Frank Sinatra.

“Just when I stopped opening doors,

Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours

Making my entrance again with my usual flair

Sure of my lines.

No one is there.

Don’t you love farce?

My fault, I fear,

I thought that you’d want what I want.

Sorry my dear!

But where are the clowns?

Send in the clowns?

Don’t bother. They’re here.”

At the first stop on the Stars On Ice tour, Chan received a long, long standing ovation when he finished this number.

“Halifax has been such a special part of my experience as a professional skater,” said Chan, who spent 10 years with the tour before he retired (the first time). It made him recall his first Stars on Ice experience in Halifax, with the “old gang,” like Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford, Joannie Rochette, Andrew Poje and Kaitlyn Weaver.

“There have just been so many memorable moments in Halifax and they gave me a beautiful farewell,” Chan said.

“I don’t know if I’ll be getting a standing ovation in every city, but I’m just happy that I got it in Halifax, because they have a special place in my heart for sure.”