“Competition. It’s not so much going head-to-head and trying to defeat somebody,” Scott Hamilton says. “It’s putting yourself out there and getting the feedback you need to get where you want to be. Without that you're flying blind.”
Austin Lord
Hamilton is no stranger to competition.
At the height of his career Hamilton had placed first in every World Championship figure skating competition between 1981 and 1984. His charismatic routines captured the hearts of American viewers, thanks to his intricate footwork—the backflips!—and technical prowess. His skating skills and obvious sense of joy on the ice made him one of the greatest showmen in figure skating history. (He created Stars on Ice, after all). He took home a gold medal at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics and turned professional the year after.
But while fans (and history) remember Hamilton for his successes, it was his failures that gave him strength. In fact, it was the ability to leverage failure that created the resiliency that would make him a national—and Nashville—treasure. As a child, his stunted growth was the result of a rare disorder that limited nutrient absorption. As a newcomer on the international stage, he was pulled aside by a world judge and told he was too short to be competitive. Talented as a skater, he found himself losing. And losing. At one point, he counted 41,600 times that he had fallen in his career.
“I was tired of losing, so I decided I would welcome change,” he says. “Once you start building resiliency, and understand that failure isn’t the end it’s the beginning, it turns things upside down. Failure is not devastating or humiliating; it doesn’t preclude you from advancing.”
Hamilton is still only one of six American men to win a gold medal in figure skating and was inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1990. All of that resiliency would prepare him for 1997, when fear and failure weren’t an option. It was after his first cancer diagnosis in 1997—twenty years after his mom passed away from the disease—that a sense of true optimism and power overcame him.
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“The fear was just unbelievable,” Hamilton says of his diagnosis. “I don't know if it was five minutes, one minute or one nanosecond, but that fear was instantly replaced with a sense of power, determination, clarity of mission, and courage. It was an awakening.”
He beat the disease that year, but in 2004 doctors found a pituitary tumor in his brain. And again in 2010. And most recently in 2016. Miraculously, doctors have said, this one has shrunk. But no matter the outlook, Hamilton is steadfast in his foundation of faith and optimism. He chooses to be so every day. “The more you endure and the more you survive, the more capable you feel about surviving the next thing.” Through his Scott Hamilton CARES Foundation (Cancer Alliance for Research, Education and Survivorship), he connects with the patients he works with and the children he speaks with, asking them if they recognized a moment when fear was replaced with courage. Wide-eyed, they say, “Yes! I felt that!” Like someone, finally, understands them.
“It was like something that had been subdued or something that had been laying dormant all those years then I got that first diagnosis, it sort of awakened it—who you truly are to your essence is revealed. And it's like, ‘OK, from now on, we’ll be fine no matter what.”
Throughout his journey with cancer, there have been moments he’s “dogeared”—marked in his memory intentionally—things he would change for others going forward. It was out of his survivorship that he realized just how many gaping holes there were in the cancer community. “I realized that I didn't have a lot of the ammunition to understand how I was doing. And I wanted to fill those holes.”His first order of business through the CARES initiative was working with Cleveland Clinic to fundraise and build chemocare.com, which educates patients first and foremost using language that can be easily understood. Written in eighth grade English and Spanish, it lists every single drug used with chemotherapy, offers information on managing side effects, survivor testimonials, complementary medicine, educational videos, and more. The site garners three million hits a month.
Another dogeared moment was when Hamilton couldn’t get an answer to how sick was he going to get. “Moderate to severe,” his doctor said, but what does that even mean?
“I realized that I had three angels in my cancer journey: my oncologist, my oncology nurse, and my family and friends. What was missing was a fourth angel: somebody who’s been there done that. They’ve been through it. They understand emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally what it takes to get through it,” Hamilton says.
So he started the Fourth Angel Mentoring Program, which pairs newly diagnosed patients with survivors and has since grown to more than 1,000 mentors in 50 states. Hamilton is a transcendent human who can relate to just about anyone in the room, and while he’s busy teaching lessons through the Scott Hamilton Skating Academy at the Ford Ice Center in Antioch, continuing a broadcast career with NBC, booking speaking engagements, taking pen to paper as a best-selling author, running his foundation, and championing Nashville as the next epicenter for figure skating, there’s one task that trumps it all: changing the identity and treatment of cancer. “It's kind of novel because most cancer foundations really go after a disease site or type, whether it’s lung cancer or breast cancer. We’re going after treatment,” he says. Specifically immunotherapy targeted drugs and precision targeted beam proton therapy.
Austin Lord
“We want to change the way cancer is treated. Once you do that and prove it's viable for all forms of cancer, that's the silver bullet to me. There's no collateral damage that comes with traditional forms of treatment like chemotherapy and radiation.”
It’s no wonder then that Hamilton and his CARES Foundation played a large role in bringing proton therapy to Middle Tennessee. Opened in 2018, the Provision CARES Proton Therapy Center in Franklin is one of only about 30 in the country, and has the capability to treat up to 1,500 patients each year with cancers ranging from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma to prostate cancer. An advanced form of radiation therapy, proton therapy allows radiologists to more accurately target tumors, minimizing the risk of collateral damage to healthy tissue around it. Unlike traditional radiation, which uses x-ray beams that hit healthy tissue before the tumor site, using proton therapy physicians are able to control the timing, dosage, and deposited area.
“It treats the cancer and spares the patient,” Hamilton says. “I want to do the work of fundraising for cancer treatment options, and I will shout from the rooftops anytime anybody asks me about proton therapy—I'll wear them out. Anytime anybody is going through something where they need radiation, I tell them please get an opinion at proton therapy, you'll be so happy you did.”
Hamilton met Terry Douglass, Founder of Provision Healthcare, in Knoxville some years earlier. Hamilton was immediately intrigued upon learning of his first proton therapy center there. “As an engineer, [Douglass] figured out a way to make proton therapy smaller, better, and less expensive—he’s knocked 80 percent of the cost off the top.” Douglass and Provision liked Hamilton’s CARES platform and helped them get off the ground as a private foundation in 2014. Today, their offices are in Provision’s Franklin center. “I think they knew that I'd be their best advocate,” smiles Hamilton.
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He’s an advocate for many: for people, for the growth of a sport he loves, for Nashville. He’s ecstatic to be a part of the new Predators Ice Center opening this fall in Bellevue. And he’s currently petitioning to get the U.S. Figure Skating Championships back to Nashville after more than 20 years.
“I've never been in a city like this before, one that is so by identity philanthropic, naturally kind, and generous,” he says of the town in which he’s planted roots with his wife and four children. “It’s got all the big city amenities, but it's got this really beautiful, almost small town honesty and accountability. People here are good people.”
It might seem like Hamilton is a serial optimist, and that’s because he is. He often admits it, that he’s lucky to have gone through what he’s gone through.
“My wife said something in an interview after my last brain tumor that just knocked me down. She said, ‘Joy isn't the lack of fear and suffering. It's how you go through it.’”