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Including the coach's salary (Debi's coach since she was ten has been a Scot named Alex McGowan), a world-class training program is likely to cost a skater's family $25,000 a year. "I'm kind of a spoiled brat," Thomas says. "It's like, my mom didn't always have the money for something, but we'd get it anyway." The "brat" fails to mention all the dresses she personally sewed and beaded, or the years she made do with other people's customized boots. She does say, "Sometimes I went without lessons for a few months until we'd catch up on the bills." Of her father, who also works in the computer industry, Thomas notes carefully, "He helps now, but it was my mom who put it all on the line for me."
Janice Thomas, a veterinarian's daughter, grew up in an atmosphere of achievement around Wichita, where it took her a while in the '50s to realize that blacks were restricted to the balconies of movie houses; she thought it was the preferred view. Quickly married and divorced, she occasionally toted an infant son to physics class at Wichita State. Her second brief marriage produced both a daughter and a transfer to San Jose. The baby girl audited graduate school and made early memories of symphonies, operas, ballets and ice shows. "Debi comes from several generations of people who refused to think in black-and-white terms," her mother says. "But I communicated my lunch- counter experiences to her, and she's had a few of her own. When Debi was eleven, we came home from a competition to a cross burning in the front yard. But our reaction to awful things written on the garage door, or eggs splattered all over the car, was to recognize them as isolated incidents, to wipe them off and not make a big deal of it."
In a sport so subjective and judgmental, not to mention whiter than several shades of snow blindness, a black child might be excused for factoring racism into indecipherable marks. Especially during Thomas' dues-paying years, peachier opponents without even a double Axel (2 1/2 rotations in midair) were outscoring her triple jumps. After one such disappointment, Janice suggested a refinement. Motioning toward a competitor, Debi whined, "That one doesn't do it." Her mother answered cheerfully, "Well, that one's got blond hair, and you don't." In the usual skating course, the painstaking progression (procession?) ultimately has as much to do with stick-to-itiveness, politics and reputation as it does with skill. She made her way.
Since the age of five, after Thomas was enchanted by the ice-show antics of Werner Groebli, the Swiss Mr. Frick of Frick & Frack, she has kept an expression of joy and a capacity for wonder, even through the past twelve years of six-hour-a-day practices. Her coach always has been and always will be "Mr. McGowan," but she says, "I've never been a puppet on a string." Her earliest impression: "You know what's the best thing about skating? You can walk without moving." As a tomboy, she gave momentary consideration to a career in ice hockey, and still wrinkles her nose and bats her eyelashes when she purrs, "Figure skating is such a bea-u-ty sport." She is given to regular flights of whimsy ("Why do they throw flowers? Why not pizza?") that occasionally leave the galaxy. "What I'd really like to be is the first skater in space. Can you imagine what that would be like? Once you start spinning, you'd never stop."