t was the usual arranged skating marriage. He'd never met her. She'd never met him. He was in Delaware, she was in Massachusetts. But somebody thought they'd make a lovely couple, so . . .
''My coach was talking with Sheryl Franks, who said there was this girl up there I should try out with,'' Philip Dulebohn remembers. ''She said she was really good, that it might be something that would work out.''
Dulebohn was a lefty. So was Tiffany Scott. In pairs skating, lefties can't be choosers, so . . .
Scott went to Delaware, the pairs capital of America, for a tryout that lasted a week. ''We had fun,'' Scott recalls. ''We got along really well.'' That didn't mean, though, that they were ready to go steady.
Scott, who comes from Hanson, had already put in a year at Regis College, where she was running on the track team. She wondered, ''Do I really want to leave?''
Dulebohn, who'd been skating singles, didn't know if he was ready for another partnership. ''I didn't know if I wanted to skate pairs again,'' he says. ''Karl Kurtz, my coach, said, `Well, if you're going to do it, you should definitely skate with Tiffany.' ''
So Scott decided to try it ''just for the summer.'' Five years later, they're close enough to Olympus that they can see the treeline. ''I don't think people anticipated us getting to this point when we first started out,'' Dulebohn muses.
Most people who saw Scott and Dulebohn then couldn't see them together then, much less now. Maybe it was the lefty thing, but they . . . just . . . didn't . . . look . . . right.
''People were wondering why we were even doing this,'' Dulebohn says. ''We heard: `You guys are no good.' Karl got so many comments like that from other coaches. But he was very good at seeing what could be - which is very tough when you're looking at something that isn't.''
The raw materials, though, were there. Dulebohn, whose brother Paul was also a nationally-ranked skater, had a solid resume. ''I looked up his credentials,'' Scott says. ''I read these old skating magazines. It was like, oh, he went to nationals. He must be pretty good.''
Scott had done enough singles skating to know one edge from another. And she'd been cross-country captain at Whitman-Hanson High School. ''She's a jock,'' Dulebohn says.
More important, they liked being around each other. ''With so many skaters, there's no spark there,'' Dulebohn says. ''We were compatible both on and off the ice.''
Not that it was obvious. ''It took us a while to click,'' Scott concedes. ''We had a rough start.'' At their first junior regionals, she and Dulebohn were fifth out of five. ''People were like, what are you doing?'' Scott remembers.
Skepticism was suspended after a buoyant handful of minutes at the 1997 Junior Nationals in Nashville, where she and Dulebohn finished third. ''That was a big moment,'' Dulebohn says. ''We proved ourselves that day. There had been a lot of pessimism about us.''
Pessimism is skating's word for cattiness, and it's most prevalent in the his-and-hers events of pairs and dance, where everyone has an opinion about who should and shouldn't be skating with whom.
Once Scott and Dulebohn had a medal around their necks, they suddenly looked pretty damned attractive. But once they moved up to the senior ranks for the Olympic season, they saw that the queue for the awards stand stretched halfway around the block.
There were Kyoko-and-Jason, Jenni-and-Todd, Shelby-and-Brian, Danielle-and-Steve, and who knew who else, plus injuries that kept them out of rhythm. Whenever Scott and Dulebohn were making progress, it seemed, one of them would get hurt. Bad back, bum ankle, whatever.
The lefties were an orthopedist's picnic. But they never thought of bagging it. ''Never,'' Scott says. ''We're not quitters.''
Scott and Dulebohn didn't have a prayer of making it to Nagano, and they knew it. They finished eighth at Nationals, wished everyone a good summer, and kept working.
Once the Games came and went, once the usual retirements and split-ups happened, there would be some room on the ice. The breakout year was 1999, when Scott and Dulebohn finished fifth and got an invitation to the Four Continents event, their first international.
The Chinese were there, the Canadians . . . ''I was amazed at all of them,'' Scott says. ''You see them and you say, I want to be like that.'' The throws, the lifts, the artistry - it was a world beyond Delaware. But that didn't mean it wasn't within reach.
Scott and Dulebohn got an instructive taste the next autumn when they skated the Grand Prix circuit, and what they sensed was that they were in the chase. Then, last spring, they were on the world stage for real, at the global championships.
Their upward domestic leap, from fifth to second and a place on the US team, was aided by the absence of two previous medal pairs. Laura Handy and Paul Binnebose were sidelined when he fractured his skull in a fall. Then Danielle and Steve Hartsell went down when she broke her kneecap. Still, Scott and Dulebohn thought they might have made the squad anyway.
''I thought the opportunity was there even before the injuries,'' Dulebohn says. ''I thought we were competitive with those other teams. It wasn't so much that they were hurt. It was that we were at that level and could compete at it all season.'''
How they got to Nice wasn't as important as how they did there. Expectations were modest - Scott and Dulebohn were the second American pair behind Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman. ''I tried not to think of it like, oh my God, this is Worlds,'' says Scott. ''I tried to keep it on the down-low.''
The pairs event was crazy enough as it was. Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the defending champions, pulled out before the competition after she'd tested positive for a banned drug a month earlier. Stephane Bernadis was slashed on the arm by an unknown man when he opened his hotel door. A Ukrainian skater whacked his head on the ice and was hauled off to the hospital. ''It was a crazy event,'' Dulebohn said. ''All the pandemonium.''
Scott and Dulebohn cruised through the maelstrom, finished a creditable ninth, and pronounced themselves delighted. ''I just wanted to let it soak in and relish it,'' said Dulebohn. ''Because you never know when you're going to be top 10 in the world.''
The lefties have made it to the millennium, which is not what their early observers would have bet on. They're Tiffany-and-Philip now, a matched pair. Whoever said arranged marriages don't work?
