Profile: Chelsie Hightower Hightower Power

April 12, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

You say you’re clumsy. Out of shape. Can’t tell your left foot from your right?

No problemo. Chelsie Hightower can have you doing a world-class rumba in no time.

“Give me two weeks,” she says without an ounce of braggadocio.

Hightower has established herself as one of the best teachers among the pros on “Dancing With the Stars.”

“Some of the best dancers in the world are lousy teachers,” says Conrad Green, the show’s executive producer. “They just can’t translate the techniques to someone who has never danced before.

“Chelsie’s choreography and teaching methods are so smart,” he continues. “She manages to camouflage her (celebrity partners’) weaknesses.”

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment came two seasons ago when she carried rodeo star Ty Murray, who was stiffer than weathered rawhide, all the way to the semifinals.

“I don’t have a bone in my body that is cut out for” ballroom dancing, says Murray, on the phone from his ranch in Texas. “I told Chelsie when I met her that I ain’t going to have a prayer.”

Sure enough, their first televised spin on the dance floor was a disaster.

“It was terrible,” he says. “My ears started ringing and I couldn’t even hear the music.”

But Hightower worked tirelessly at improving his moves.

“Eight hours a day,” he says. “All day long. She’s tough, and she doesn’t have any quit in her.”

“That’s our job,” she says. “To make them look good.”

The astounding part of Hightower’s gift is its precocity. At 20, she is the youngest pro on “DWTS,” tied for youngest ever with Julianne Hough, who like Hightower, was raised Mormon in Utah.

Hightower’s formidable ability is the result of her devotion to craft.

“I pretty much gave up everything for dancing,” she says of the passion that first gripped her at 9. “Wake up, go to school, go straight to the dance studio until 10 o’clock, go home, do my last-minute homework, and then get up the next morning at 6:30.”

By 15, she had racked up some impressively adult credentials, including being a U.S. National Standard Finalist as well as the American representative at the World Ballroom Dance Championship.

“I was competing with 26- and 27-year-olds,” she says. “My partner was 22 because he was the only one I could find at my level.”

The producers of “DWTS” spotted her in 2008 competing on Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance.”

“We thought, ‘This girl is fantastic,’” says Green. “She’s relatable to our younger audience and all our older viewers will want her to be their daughter. She’s charming and a breath of fresh air.”

Success on “DWTS” is determined to a great extent by the luck of the draw. Ginger Rogers wouldn’t have lasted long with a plodder like Steve Wozniak.

The pro-celebrity tandems are established, according to Hightower, “by personality and by height.”

Her first season she drew Murray. The second time, it was snowboarder Louie Vito. This season, she’s working her dance-floor magic on Jake Pavelka, recently of “The Bachelor.”

They waltzed through the first night, but last week was more challenging.

“Jake was all at sea with the Jive,” Green says. “He thought it would be his Waterloo. But Chelsie listens, she’s patient, and she knows what things to insist on.”

Like many viewers, Hightower was shocked when Shannen Doherty and her partner Mark Ballas were the first ones sent packing.

“I was not expecting Shannen to go home,” she says. “I thought it was between Buzz (Aldrin) and Kate (Gosselin).”

Because the results are always unpredictable, all the partners can do is keep plugging away.

“It’s hard to get ready to dance in front of 23 million people in four days,” she says. “Some people don’t realize how frustrating and stressful it is.”

Maybe, Chelsie, that’s because you make it look so easy.