Thin Ice

by Frank Coffey

  “I heard screaming when I was walking away from the ice,” Scotvold said. “All I could think of was, ‘Where’s Nancy?’ I thought she was OK because she was not on the ice. But sure enough, it was her.” He added sarcastically, “Great security.”

  A video camera captured the aftermath of the assault, captured in vivid images the sad and sorry spectacle of America’s once and future ice queen lying on the ground, moaning in pain and fear.

  “It hurts so bad,” Kerrigan said through her tears. “Please help me.”

  As the crowd around Kerrigan quickly grew, security guards took off in pursuit of her assailant. For a moment, when he reached a Plexiglas door, it looked as though he might be stopped before he had a chance to leave the building. He would be captured, arrested, locked up, and revealed as the loony he was.

  But this was a big man, six feet tall, 225 pounds. A strong man. And he was clearly not out for publicity, not interested in seeing his face on the evening news. He had no intention of getting caught, and so, he lowered his head and crashed through the Plexiglas door. He tumbled out into the street and was instantly lost among the hundreds of people who were in the area for an international auto show being held next door. He then sprinted away, into the snow, presumably never to be seen again.

  Two

  Back inside, Nancy Kerrigan remained on the floor, weeping, wondering who could have done this to her. Why would anyone do this to her? Kerrigan’s father, Dan, was at her side now. He gently picked up his daughter and cradled her in his arms, as if she were not a grown woman, but rather his little girl again.

  “I’m so scared,” she sobbed. “Why me? Why now?”

  That was the question of the day, and of the days to follow. Predictably, and not illogically, public response was one of outrage. It was presumed at the time that the attack on Nancy Kerrigan was merely another example of the decline of decency in Western Civilization–a brutal act of violence perpetrated on a lovely, charming young lady for no particular reason; a disgusting incident that lent credence to the theory that our society–America’s–is the most violent on the planet.

  This brutal act also sparked interest and debate and moral outrage on another level, most notably from sociologists and psychologists who specialize in analyzing the peculiar and frequently uneasy alliance between celebrities and their fans. Over the years, tales of twisted fans obsessed with rock stars and movie actors and television personalities have been all too common. A fan attempts to kill President Ronald Reagan to express his own deep and unending love for Jodie Foster. A woman breaks into the home of David Letterman–several dozen times. These are pathetic and depressing stories. And sadly, inexplicably, they are not unusual.

  Until quite recently, however, such actions had been limited to the world of entertainment–fantasy entertainment. But in the months prior to the attack on Kerrigan, fan violence in its most bizarre, lurid form had moved squarely into the world of athletics. That should not come as a great surprise, actually, since athletes have become stars of the first magnitude. They earn millions of dollars, spend most of their professional lives in the public eye, and are supported, nurtured and molded by some of the best and most efficient publicity machines in the world. It was, then, probably inevitable that they would provoke the same sort of fanaticism previously reserved for stars in other areas of the entertainment industry.

  So it was that in the minutes, hours and days after the attack on Kerrigan, speculation pointed to the likelihood that the assailant was a deranged fan. Images of a similar attack on tennis star Monica Seles in April, 1993 came rushing back, usually paired on television reports with pictures of the Kerrigan assault. Seles was stabbed in the back by a German tennis fan who was obsessed with Steffi Graf. It was his deranged mission to hurt Seles, then the top-ranked female tennis player in the world, so badly that she would be unable to compete for a lengthy period of time. (Incredibly Seles’s assailant had the temerity to mount a defense of his actions: “On no account did I want to kill Frau Seles,” Parch said at his trial. “I just wanted to hurt her slightly so that Monica wouldn’t be able to play for a couple of weeks.”) In that way, Graf, the number two-ranked player, would assume the top spot.

  His plan worked, too: In January Seles announced that she would not be competing in the Australian Open, as originally scheduled, and that her return to competitive tennis had been postponed indefinitely.

  There had been other strange examples of demented fan behavior, including at least two within the skating community. In 1992, two-time Olympian Katarina Witt of Germany was harassed by a man who repeatedly sent her obscene and threatening items through the mail. He was eventually arrested, convicted and sentenced to 37 months in a psychiatric facility. He also was ordered never to come in contact with Witt again. And there was a strange case involving Tonya Harding, who pulled out of a competition in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, in November, 1993, after she said she received a death threat.

  “It’s just horrifying,” Kerrigan’s sister-in-law, Tammy Moscaritolo, told reporters during an interview at Boston’s Logan Airport shortly after the attack. “Why would anyone want to hurt Nancy?”

  Kerrigan’s brother, Michael, claimed that Nancy had never been stalked or harassed by anyone. She had never experienced anything but a warm relationship with the fans who came to see her skate. Still, the world responded to the news of her attack with the gigantic presumption of copycat fan violence. Kerrigan’s twisted, weeping face appeared on the cover of just about every newspaper and magazine in the country. Columnists devoted thousands of words to the supposedly intertwined subjects of fan violence and inadequate security.

  Generally, there was agreement that the world is a sick place and always has been a sick place and always will be a sick place–and this was just another terrible, distressing example of that sickness. For her part, Kerrigan tried to remain upbeat. “I’m not going to lose faith in all people or anything like that,” she told ABC television. “It was one bad guy. I’m sure there are others and this kind of thing has happened before in other sports, but not everybody is like that.

  “The people who were worried about me, wondering what happened, those are the people I want to tell that I’m OK. It’s not the most important thing–skating–so if I can’t [compete] I’ll have to deal with it. It could have been a lot worse.”

  Kerrigan’s sense of perspective was deemed admirable by all who heard her words. That measured perspective did not mean, however, that she had ruled out skating in the nationals.

  After the assault, however, fear began to spread to other Olympic athletes. “We compete in crowded places,” said track star Gail Devers, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist in the women’s 100-yard dash. “There is a lot of trust we put in the fans that they aren’t going to harm us. But you can’t help but think about it after you see what happened to Nancy Kerrigan and Monica Seles.”

  Shortly after the assault, Kerrigan was examined by Dr. Steven Plomaritis, who determined that her leg had not been fractured, but “the discomfort could preclude her from participating at her capacity.” Indeed, that is precisely what happened. On the morning after the attack, the swelling in Kerrigan’s leg, caused by a severely bruised kneecap and quadriceps tendon, had not so much decreased as moved. It now resided in the anterior portion of her knee, which prevented her from bending the joint fully. Doctors injected the knee with a local anesthetic and removed some fluid.

  Kerrigan’s range of motion was severely limited and the joint could withstand only a fraction of the stress it would be subjected to during a four and a half-minute free skating program. She tried to hop on the leg; the pain made it nearly impossible. There was no choice: she would have to withdraw from the nationals.

  “I cried and cried,” Kerrigan later said. “I’m pretty upset and angry that someone would do this, but I’m trying to keep my spirits up. I want to prove all this work hasn’t been a waste.”

  The USFSA championships went on without their defend
ing champion. Kerrigan’s absence far overshadowed the performance of Tonya Harding, who, like Kerrigan, seemed to have discovered a new passion for the sport. Harding, a powerfully built (5’1”, 105 pounds) skater, appeared fitter and more determined than she had in years. Not since 1991, when she posted a stunning upset victory at the nationals, had Harding skated with such confidence and style.

  Harding’s victory, though, and the runner-up performance of Kwan, were lost amid the swirl of publicity surrounding the Kerrigan attack. Even from the private box of Detroit Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch, where she and her seven-year-old cousin, Alison Schultz, watched the finals of the women’s competition at Joe Louis Arena, Nancy Kerrigan was the center of attention. She was The Story, overshadowing the magnificent performance of Harding, who now appeared to be on the comeback trail, and the stunning progression of the waif-like Kwan.

  Nancy Kerrigan.

  What would happen to her? Would she heal? Would she ever skate again? And if fate smiled on her sufficiently to allow a full recovery and a subsequent return to the ice, what would happen to her dream of Olympic gold? The nationals were supposed to serve as the U.S. Olympic Trials. If Kerrigan did not compete in the Trials, how could she possibly qualify for the Olympics? Well, only through a loophole, of course–and there was a loophole. USFSA officials turned to their rule book and quickly underlined rule 5.05, on page 193. The rule states that the International Committee of the USFSA has the right to choose athletes who, for whatever reason, had not skated in the previous nationals.

  As Carol Heiss Jenkins, a member of the committee and coach of Lisa Ervin and Tonia Kwiatkowski, two highly ranked U. S. skaters, told Sports Illustrated, “We’re not so cutthroat as a sport that we don’t recognize the right thing to do. Even if one of my skaters were bumped because of Nancy, I’d vote for it.”

  Fortunately, a similar sentiment was voiced by Frank Carroll, whose skater, Michelle Kwan, was ultimately displaced by Kerrigan. A team is allowed only two representatives at the Olympics, and in light of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Kerrigan’s inability to compete at the nationals, and the prognosis for a full recovery, Kwan was demoted to first alternate.

  “It’s a tragic thing,” Carroll said. “It’d be more tragic if Nancy wasn’t given the opportunity to go. There’s no question in my mind that if she’d competed, she’d have finished in the top two.” Kwan, for her part, accepted her demotion gracefully, agreeing with her coach that it was “the right thing to do.”

  Those closest to Kerrigan predicted that she would come back from the assault, both physically and emotionally, in short order.

  “Nancy Kerrigan is not a victim; she’s a survivor,” Cindy Adams, Kerrigan’s sports psychologist, told Sports Illustrated after watching the nationals with Kerrigan. “That’s how we’re going to look at this. She doesn’t understand what’s happened or why, but she’s not going to let this get in the way of what she’s set out to do. She’s going to be a little cautious around people for a while, but we should all be a little cautious. Nancy’s not a worrywart. She’s not someone who dwells on things. She’s a strong individual, and she is loved a lot–and that helps a great deal.”

  Added Mary Scotvold, who choreographs Nancy’s routines and helps her husband, Evy, sharpen Kerrigan’s skating skills: “Nancy might be fragile mentally when it comes to her skating, but she’s a tough little girl off the ice. She’s not as vulnerable as she might seem.”

  Few observers of the skating scene had ever applied the word vulnerable to Tonya Harding. Her awesome talent notwithstanding, Kerrigan’s chief rival had long been viewed as an interloper in the glitzy world of women’s figure skating. She was not, and never pretended to be, a charm school graduate. Rather, Harding was brash and gifted and terribly driven to succeed. Often she said the wrong thing. Occasionally she angered and even embarrassed skating’s elite, simply by being herself.

  It was assumed, though, that she and Kerrigan would represent the United States in the ’94 Games. While they were anything but mirror images, the two young women were, indisputably, the two best figure skaters this country had to offer. And, truth to tell, their differences could make for a neat bit of drama in Lillehammer.

  Certainly those differences would make for great television: the delicate, soft-spoken Nancy Kerrigan, with her tasteful, feminine outfits, her perfect makeup and perfect teeth, in one corner; in the other, Tonya Harding, the cigarette-smoking wise-ass who cares little for proper public relations and, at times, even less for proper training.

  The truth is, neither woman sprang from a particularly genteel background. Kerrigan’s father is a welder from Boston’s south shore who worked extra jobs to help offset the enormous cost of his daughter’s skating career. Hers is, in fact, a decidedly blue-collar background, but she adapted to the image of a glamorous, gracious figure skater with relative ease.

  Tonya Harding is something else. Oh, is she something else! Her background is hardscrabble, her life marked by violence and poverty. Skating rescued her, maybe kept her alive. At the very least, it gave her something to live for. Harding is decidedly unapologetic about her rebellious attitude, which can be traced to a dreadfully unhappy, impoverished childhood. She is what she is, and if you don’t like it, well, root for someone else.

  The image she presented at the nationals in Detroit was just that: fiercely independent and focused. Perhaps she wasn’t mean, skating competitor Elaine Zayak offered, but certainly she was “cold.”

  In the aftermath of the Kerrigan attack, and her own victory at the nationals, while most of the world expressed stunned sympathy, Harding reacted with this callous statement: “It won’t be a true crown until I face Nancy, and that won’t be until the Olympics. And let me tell you, I’m going to whip her butt.” The sheer insensitivity of Harding’s comments spoke volumes about her character and, in retrospect, proved revelatory of darker currents that would soon swirl around the incident.

  Small wonder that rumors began to surface, rumors about the attack on Kerrigan, and how maybe it wasn’t a random act of violence, but rather a “hit” arranged by Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding.

  Tough Tonya.

  Crazy Tonya.

  Pool-hustling, drag-racing, cigarette-smoking, trash-talking Tonya.

  Unpredictable, uncontrollable Tonya, the self-described “Charles Barkley of figure skating.”

  And then composite sketches were passed around and people started talking and cracking under pressure, and pretty soon it wasn’t just rumors.

  Within days after the attack Harding’s entire entourage was under suspicion. Within a week they were being hauled into court.

  First there was her bodyguard, a hulking, 320-pound buffoon with delusions of grandeur named Shawn Eric Eckardt. Then the alleged “hit man,” a 22-year-old Rambo wannabe named Shane Minoaka Stant. Then Stant’s cousin, the driver of the getaway car, 29-year-old Derrick Brian Smith. And, finally, Jeff Gillooly, 26, Harding’s ex-husband, allegedly the brains behind the whole perverted operation–an operation born of greed and hatred and a lust for power, and filled with so many mistakes and double-crosses and so much ineptitude that it rapidly became the tabloid story of the year, if not the decade.

  All four men were charged with criminal conspiracy to commit second-degree assault against Nancy Kerrigan. Until January 27th, Tonya Harding had been implicated, but not charged. Then, in an emotionally charged press conference, Harding told the world that although she did not have “prior knowledge” of the attack on Kerrigan, she was privy to facts about the case which she had not shared with either the police or the FBI. Her place on the U.S. Olympic team was, for the time being, secure, but she was alone. The world, it seemed, had turned against her, vilified her for something she insisted she did not do, linked her to a sick plot to maim her rival, even though Harding, until the afternoon of January 27th, claimed to have no knowledge of that plot.

  In her mesmerizing press conference, Harding, ever resilient, asserted
that despite her mistakes, her lawyers had assured her that her actions–or in this case lack of actions–did not constitute criminal behavior.

  So, as always, Tonya Harding stood proudly, defiantly at the center of the storm.

  Just as she’d always done.

  Three

  There is a perception of the figure skater. As a woman she is elegant, proper, the embodiment of a traditional, perhaps antiquated notion of femininity. She is delicate, soft, non-threatening. The model has, admittedly, evolved somewhat over the years–power and speed, and yes, even muscle definition, are now acceptable in the sport–but it has not changed all that much. Nancy Kerrigan, after all, is not so far removed from Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. There is an innate charm to the figure skater, an ability to be part actress, part runway model, part athlete, part beauty queen … all at the same time.

  Or maybe there is nothing natural about it at all. Maybe the behavior is learned, like any other behavior. As a small girl, the figure skater learns how to lace up her skates. Then she learns how to smile for the crowd and, especially, for the judges. She learns how to execute a pirouette. Then she learns how to apply just the right amount of eye shadow. Maybe her teeth are fixed, maybe her nose is straightened.

  It’s all in the name of art and sport, right? And anyway, most of the little girls who enter the sport of figure skating come from families that can afford the cosmetic surgery and the lessons and the equipment. Most can afford the annual tab of $30,000 that it costs to groom and house and refine a world-class figure skater.

  Most of them.

  Tonya Harding was different. She does not conform to the stereotype of the figure skater today, and she did not conform to that stereotype when she was a little girl. There was, in her childhood, little pampering or privilege. There was a good deal of pain and suffering, interrupted on occasion by brief flashes of joy. To her, though, those flashes of joy were merely a tease, and she learned to ignore them after a while. Skating, almost from the time she could walk, was her release, her means of escape.