What a night. Keegan Messing finished third in the men’s short program at Skate America. But he won much more than a placing. About a month ago, his younger brother, Paxon, a father of three little ones, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Alaska. I heard the news by text in the waiting room […]
Keegan Messing
Hardly Birds of a Feather
Ever see the internet photos of the cats curled up with canaries, cozy and all? Fawns and owls cavorting happily with dogs? Chimpanzees stroking kittens? Heifers licking up turtles with long tongues, happy as clams? Count Nam Nguyen, the son of Vietnamese boat people and Keegan Messing, man of the north woods, in with those […]
Keegan Messing: Perfect Duet
The Pink Panther has faded. Singing in the Rain has dried up. Charlie Chaplin has waddled into the sunset. The Keegan Messing of yesterday is not altogether the same as the Keegan Messing of today. He’s all grown up. (Sort of) And he’s in love. The 27-year-old Alaskan took a giant life step on Aug. […]
The Road Less Travelled
It had to happen this way: Keegan Messing finding an endlessly adventurous way to prepare for a figure skating competition. There are no straight lines in his approach. He has swung up ladders with heavy merchandise on his back, hurled his way up tall poles, Leaped across a mountain peak or two, picked through […]
“Pretty danged cool”
LAVAL, Que. Keegan Messing is chalking up the good times. They keep rolling in, like a wave. Last Saturday, he got engaged on a windy mountain ridge. He forgot the matches to light up the stove for soup. Everything went wrong. But Lane Hodson said yes. “If she says yes when everything goes wrong, you […]
Keegan Messing: What Now?
Finally, the world knows who Keegan Messing is, now that he’s turned 26. He’s a light-footed dazzler, with a penchant for rotating jumps at the speed of a tornado, and he has a collection of heart-thumping spins, to boot. If he slips and falls on anything, he has a way of skating back into an […]
Keegan Messing, speechless
VANCOUVER Keegan Messing got the call late Saturday night, hours after the men’s final at the National Skating Championships. His coach, Ralph Burghart called him to tell him that yes, he was on Canada’s Olympic team and he’d better be ready to pack his bags for Pyeongchang next month. Because it was so late, Messing, […]
The men's short program in Vancouver
VANCOUVER From the mists of Vancouver finally emerged Patrick Chan. And he is shedding some rust. “It’s slippery,” he said, after he fell on his opening quad toe loop, then sliding unceremoniously on his side. Thinking on his feet, he added a triple toe loop to his triple Lutz, but then stepped out of a […]
Boys to Men
One thing leads to another. Keegan Messing finished fifth at the Canadian championships last season. That landed him on the national team. That meant he got some financial help for training. And it means that this season, he is actually a full-time skater.Skate Canada photo All of these upticks in his personal situation rolled into […]
Keegan Messing: his excellent adventure
OTTAWA Finally, they got Keegan Messing, a 24-year-old high-flying, quad-jumping, tousle-headed guy from Alaska, who is just not like anybody else at all. At all. Messing has been skating to Pink Panther for a couple of years now. I can’t explain how it fits, but it does. And what he did with The Pink (actually […]