Thin Ice

by Frank Coffey

  Diane was playing Pygmalion to Tonya’s Eliza Doolittle. She would take the street urchin with the legs of steel and the heart of a champion and give her a velvet sheen. She would make her more presentable, help her fit neatly into the stuffy skating community. That was the idea.

  “Our plans for Tonya basically start with revamping her from her head to her toe,” Vicky Mills said in the same 1986 interview with Sandra Lukow. “Hair, makeup, nails, clothing—on and off the ice. The total new Tonya.

  “I’m looking to make Tonya into a skater, a little bit like Dorothy Hamill, a little bit like Peggy Fleming, a little bit like Linda Frattiani. Put them all together and mix them up so then we have a special Tonya. Because you’ve taken the best from everybody that’s been the best.”

  Try as they might, they never were able to pour Tonya into a mold. She remained fiercely individualistic, almost as if she got a charge out of being different from the other girls, with their perfect teeth and their perfect noses and their comfortable upbringings.

  They dressed conservatively.

  She chose daring, provocative outfits.

  They skated to classical music.

  She skated to ZZ Top.

  Tonya tried to act as if she enjoyed her “Rebel on Skates” image, but in truth the ongoing turmoil in her personal life was spilling over into her athletic life. She was unable to focus. As a skater, Harding showed scant improvement in those middle years, finishing fifth in the senior nationals in both 1987 and 1988, and Olympic year. For the first time in her career, there was some doubt as to whether she would ever fulfill her immense promise.

  At the senior nationals in Baltimore in 1989, the first held after Debi Thomas and Caryn Kadavy had retired from amateur skating, Harding moved up to third place. Her performance was impressive, though not quite impressive enough. Only the top two finishers at the nationals qualified for the world championships in Paris, which meant Harding would have to settle for alternate status.

  “I thought I could have won at the worlds that year,” Tonya told Sports Illustrated.

  Maybe she could have, but she hadn’t earned the right to prove it. Her response to that disappointment was one of indignation. If she had once been the model of self-discipline, she was now becoming almost cavalier about her skating. She was alternately hostile and sweet (a description that still applies, according to many of her closest friends). And she was, for some reason, not nearly as driven as she once had been.

  In the months that followed the 1989 nationals, Harding trained less and less. Predictably, her relationship with her coach and mentor began to sour. After 14 years, Rawlinson decided she had had enough. At the very least, she felt it was time for a break.

  “The bottom line is, it wasn’t working,” Rawlinson told Sports Illustrated. “Tonya wasn’t training and wasn’t meeting the goals she had set for herself. So I delegated her to Dody.”

  Dody Teachman, a former pupil of Rawlinson’s, had developed into a pretty fair coach in her own right. Teachman had worked with Harding previously, helping her with her compulsory figures and cardiovascular training. Now, though, she was solely responsible for making sure that Tonya did not squander her ability and for helping her compose the proper ending to what should have been a beautiful, moving fairy tale.

  “Tonya and Diane are both pretty stubborn,” Teachman said. “They didn’t get along very well by the time I got involved. They had spent a lot of years together. The older Tonya got, the more she wanted to do things her own way. My philosophy was to remember what I was like at that age. I knew Tonya had a rough exterior, and I’d heard all these horror stories, but I also felt that inside there was this nice little girl trying to get out.”

  Their relationship was less rigid than Harding’s and Rawlinson’s. They were coach and athlete, but they were also friends.

  “Dody was more like a big sister than a coach,” Harding told Sports Illustrated. “All I wanted to do was be happy, and I wasn’t happy skating for Diane. Nothing was ever good enough for her. She tried to control everything. Everything. Who I’d talk to. How I’d talk to them. How I wore my hair. She basically tried to be my mother.”

  Considering what has happened since, it’s interesting to look at Rawlinson’s take on that crack in their partnership. At the time, she was cautious, diplomatic, mature. Much more so than Harding, she left the door open for a reconciliation.

  “My whole association with Tonya has been like being on an adventure,” Rawlinson said. “I wanted to be a wonderful, positive role model for her, and I feel very proud of what I did for Tonya and Dody both.”

  The new coaching arrangement was supposed to be better, healthier for all parties involved, but the following year at the nationals proved to be an even greater source of disappointment.

  In Salt Lake City, in 1990, Harding skated well in the compulsories and short program. Heading into the free skate portion of the competition—which represents 50 percent of the skater’s final score—she was in second place. She was in perfect position, mentally and physically prepared to make the leap to the next level—the leap to stardom.

  As it often had, though, fate threw Tonya Harding a curve. She had been feeling weak and ill throughout most of her stay in Salt Lake City, and on the day of the free skate program her illness, exacerbated by her asthma, kicked into high gear. On the morning of her performance she had a fever of 103 degrees. She was told by doctors to stay in bed, but she refused. Gallantly, she took the ice, hoping that spunk and talent would carry her to victory and pave the road to riches.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Harding made just three of the seven triples she had planned in her routine and wound up finishing 10th in the free skate. Overall, she was seventh, her worst finish ever at the nationals.

  “She was so humiliated from skating poorly,” Al Harding, who was there that night, told Sports Illustrated. “But she told me, ‘At least I didn’t quit.’ ”

  If she had given up the sport then, if she had walked away for good, quietly, humbly, her departure would have sent no shockwaves through the skating world. Tonya Harding had few friends in her sport; she would not have been missed. She was too rough around the edges … too unusual. She frightened people, almost challenged them to dislike her.

  “People like her because she’s a great skater, not because she’s Tonya,” said David Webber, whose daughter was one of Harding’s closest friends. “She has an air about her that puts people off, an air of, ‘If you don’t like it, tough luck, that’s me.’ That’s a hard way to make friends. You and I give a little and bend a little to make friendships and to keep them. Tonya doesn’t. She has no security.”

  One of the few people who made her feel secure—in the beginning anyway—was Jeff Gillooly. After dating for more than three years, they were married in March, 1990, shortly after Tonya’s dismal performance at the nationals.

  “I never liked you,” Al Harding reportedly told Gillooly at the reception. “But welcome to the family.”

  LaVona was no big fan of Gillooly, either.

  “I tried to talk them out of getting married,” she told Sports Illustrated. “I knew Jeff had a violent streak. Once when Tonya was living with me and my new husband, he tried to break down the door because he thought she had gone out with another boy. It turned out it was her brother she’d been with.”

  From all those who knew Harding, it seemed, Gillooly was getting low marks. Another person who came away unimpressed was Dody Teachman.

  “He was a controlling kind of guy,” Teachman said in an interview with Knight-Ridder newspapers. “Most of the problems I had with Tonya started with Jeff. We didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.”

  In fairness, it should be pointed out that Harding’s marriage to Gillooly seemed to rekindle her interest in and dedication to figure skating; less than a year after their wedding, Tonya experienced what surely was the high point of her career, at the 1991 senior nationals at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

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sp; There, on a cold February night in the upper Midwest, Tonya Harding proved all of the doubters and disbelievers wrong. She put on a stunning performance, rich in athleticism and courage and sheer drama. For more than four minutes she held the audience spellbound, enthralled, as she landed one triple after another. In a particularly historic moment, she landed a triple Axel, the first time any American woman had successfully completed that maneuver. Only Japan’s Midori Ito had matched Harding’s feat.

  Imagine how it must have felt to her that evening, with the crowd rising to its feet and cheering for nearly a minute afterward, roaring their approval and appreciation. They had accepted her. They loved her. And so did the judges, one of whom awarded a 6.0 for technical merit, the first perfect score any woman had received in that competition in nearly two decades.

  She was a winner.

  An artist.

  Finally, she was a champion.

  One month later, at the world championships, the dream continued. Harding finished an impressive second behind teammate Kristi Yamaguchi. All seemed to be well in her life: her marriage was sound and she had found a coach with whom she could forge a solid, caring working relationship, built on mutual respect. Most important of all, she appeared to be happy, the effects of the abuse of her early years having all but melted away.

  She was healthy and contented and rocketing toward stardom.

  She was 21 years old and not even at her physical peak.

  Surely this was only the beginning.

  “Tonya was ready to do this a while ago,” Teachman told Skating magazine in 1991. “It just took some time to put it all together and have it all peak at the same time.”

  As usual, though, long-term happiness proved elusive for Tonya Harding. Beneath the surface tranquility, her marriage to Gillooly was already straining. They fought bitterly, violently, though few people knew it at the time.

  Quicker to come to light were problems between Harding and Teachman. With no warning, just one month after her runner-up performance at the world championships, and two months after the nationals, Harding announced that she was severing ties with the coach who had made her a household name.

  If it was shock value Harding sought, she succeeded. To fire her coach just weeks after the greatest accomplishment of her career—a coach she supposedly loved and respected? What was she thinking of? What was she trying to prove?

  This was crazy, even by Tonya Harding’s standards.

  “I was real hurt,” Teachman told Sports Illustrated. “We’d had a couple of rocky phone calls, and she told me she couldn’t work with me right now.”

  That was only part of the explanation, and not even the strange part. Harding, a classic example of a gifted pupil in need of proper teaching, announced to the world that henceforth she would be coaching herself. Well, not entirely. She would periodically solicit advice from her former coach, Diane Rawlinson, but mostly she was on her own.

  Assisting the self-coached star would be Jeff Gillooly, who knew virtually nothing about skating but who knew his way around a camcorder. He would tape Tonya’s training sessions and provide a strong shoulder to lean on. Later they would review the tapes at home and make the necessary adjustments.

  “We worked well together and everything,” Harding told Skating magazine. “But for the past two years, I’ve been in charge. I made all my own decisions. When things started to change and I wasn’t in charge, that’s when I decided to work with myself.

  “I have my family and everyone behind me, and I have my choreographer, and that’s basically all I need.”

  Another piece had been added to the puzzle, another chapter in the story of an extremely complex, volatile young woman. Less than a year earlier, when she was at her lowest point, Harding had been grateful to have Teachman on her team. Now, at the top of her game, she no longer needed her coach. She no longer needed any coach.

  “I wanted this (championship) so much. I think just wanting it and training my own way is what made the difference,” Harding said. “I worked hard from Pacific Coast up until two weeks before nationals. Every day the long program twice a session, the short program once a session. Then in the last two weeks I slacked off a little, but I still worked. I did the program once through. People were telling me to skate more sessions, but I did it my way, and—Boom!—I’m national champion.”

  The real reason behind their split had less to do with independence than finances. According to a story in Sports Illustrated, the breakup stemmed from a dispute over the distribution of USFSA training funds; specifically, whether or not Harding had given Teachman permission to sign her name when submitting expense receipts.

  Teachman said she had; Harding disagreed. So the student flunked the professor.

  Whether there were glitches in Gillooly’s taping methods, or whether Harding was simply lonely and lost, the experiment in self-coaching did not last long—seven weeks, to be precise. Tonya went back to Teachman, contrite and apologetic. Teachman welcomed her with open arms.

  “I went back and said, ‘Dody, I need you,’ ” Harding told Sports Illustrated. “It was miscommunication. I learned you have to talk things out.”

  So they were back together again, a happy team: Dody, Tonya and Jeff—for a little while, anyway. Within a month, it would be Jeff’s turn to be fired.

  On June 17, 1991, not long after her reconciliation with Teachman and only 15 months after she and Jeff Gillooly were married, Tonya Harding filed for divorce. To some, the announcement came as a shock. One month later, in the July issue of Skating, Harding fairly gushed about Gillooly. The interview, which had obviously taken place a few months earlier, quoted Harding professing her love for Gillooly. They had put off their honeymoon for a year, and a recent trip to Europe had, according to Tonya, solidified their bond.

  “He gave me an anniversary ring,” she said. “It’s super nice.”

  What is shocking to some, though, is mundane to others. Sadly, those closest to Harding weren’t the least bit surprised when she left Gillooly.

  “We were never in a competition where they weren’t in a fight the night before we left,” Teachman told Sports Illustrated.

  In that same story, Al Harding, who has since returned to Portland, blamed himself for his daughter’s marital discord. “I feel like I deserted Tonya when I went to Boise,” he said. “I don’t think she’d have married Jeff if I hadn’t gone.”

  Maybe, maybe not. If Tonya Harding has at times seemed dependent on the kindness and support of others; if she has at times seemed easily influenced by those who should hold no influence over her whatsoever; if she has at times seemed willing to join in lockstep with the parade, there have been other times when she has marched to her own private beat, utterly blind to consequences and public opinion and protocol.

  There was the night in Minneapolis, for example—the night she won the nationals in 1991. That night, after the competition and during a formal gala hosted by one of figure skating’s most influential and powerful promoters, Tonya slipped out a back door and went off in search of a good game of nine ball with a few friends.

  That’s right—America’s reigning ice princess was looking for a pool hall.

  Six

  Shortly after her separation from Gillooly, Tonya Harding went public with the ugly details of their troubled union. Only two days after filing for divorce, she petitioned for, and received, a restraining order barring Gillooly from coming in contact with her. He could not come to their apartment. He could not visit any of the skating rinks where she trained.

  The marriage, as far as Tonya was concerned, was over. She claimed that Gillooly had been physically and emotionally abusive, and that she feared for her safety.

  “He wrenched my arm and wrist and he pulled my hair and shoved me,” Harding told a judge. That same year, in another police report, Harding claimed that Gillooly threatened to “break your legs and end your career” during an argument over possession of the couple’s power boat.

  That wa
s supposed to be the end of the chapter. The marriage had been a mistake, just as everyone had tried to tell her, and now she had to admit they were right. Fine. She would move on. She would survive, just as she always had. If nothing else, Tonya Harding was a survivor. And after all, she still had skating. As long as there was ice and music and a chance to perform, she would be all right.

  “My skating is my life,” Harding said in a 1994 interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I go out there and it’s an out for me. I love skating. I have always loved it.”

  The divorce was to be finalized in November. In the meantime, Tonya moved in with Stephanie Webber. For a while she acted like a typical young adult, out on her own for the first time in her life. No parents. No husband.

  No fighting.

  By all accounts, Tonya seemed happy. She gave Stephanie pool lessons. She went drag racing at the Portland International Speedway, thereby supplying more ammunition to those who would peg her as figure skating’s renegade. The drag racing didn’t last long, mainly because Harding’s insurance company expressed great disapproval of it as a hobby.

  According to an anecdote included in the 1992 Sports Illustrated profile, she also tried her hand at roller-blading—competitive roller-blading. In a televised celebrity event in Orlando, Florida, against a field that included speed-skating Olympians Elizabeth Manley and Bonnie Blair, Harding finished second, even though she had roller-bladed only a handful of times prior to the competition.

  “She got back and said, ‘I wasn’t going to let all those girls get in front of me,’ ” Teachman said. “She should be on the front line of a football team.”

  That statement pointed to the apparent inconsistencies in Harding’s personality. She could be driven, fiercely competitive, but she could also be lazy and unprofessional. For example, less than a year after observing that her skater had the heart of a football player, Teachman would say to The San Francisco Examiner, “If Tonya were to practice as hard as the rest of the girls, nobody could beat her. She would be unsurpassable.”