Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  That’s no excuse.

  The critics initially panned us. I’m okay with that especially because of what happened on the second Saturday night of the Games. My father called me in Albertville the following day to mention that I’d been on Saturday Night Live. I wasn’t, of course, but I was in a way. You know you’re a pretty big deal when you are featured in the cold open of SNL. That introduction of five or so minutes is often water-cooler talk on Monday mornings. Apparently Scott and I were so memorable that the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, as the cast was once known, decided to spoof us to nail home the point that we weren’t ready for prime time, either. Dana Carvey played Scott and the late Phil Hartman played me. When I later saw it, I was thrilled. Both comics nailed the performance. My inserting personal stories to give viewers someone to root for came under fire hilariously.

  Jason Priestly played an inept skater who wound up flopping all over the ice. Julia Sweeney was amazing as Tracy Wilson. I laughed until my eyes teared up. I still have a video of that piece and frequently use it to close speeches I give.

  Scott loved it, too. Somehow the folks at NBC were in touch with our people at CBS. They sent us a copy of it. Pat O’Brien, who was just starting to earn the notoriety that would make him a household name, was hosting the late-night recap show in Albertville. Scott was his guest on the Sunday following SNL. He showed it with Scott sitting right there. Scott was roaring with laughter and Pat commented that my partner seemed more excited about being sent up that way than he had been when he won gold in Sarajevo. Scott agreed. That is the power of television, I guess.

  That power is not to be taken lightly, though it too often is. I’m told that the SNL cast reprised the bit with different players for each of the next Olympics Scott and I covered. There was something about the freshness of the first one that couldn’t be recaptured in subsequent versions. See? Everyone’s a critic.

  What no one could criticize, along with Paul Wylie’s stellar performance, was Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold-winning efforts. Even though she didn’t skate a clean program—she lost points for touching down on a shaky triple toe loop—she had a comfortable enough lead after the short program to hang on for the win. At four eleven, Kristi presented a small figure out on the ice, but she had a huge heart. Born to a mother who was put in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans and to a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, she was the first American woman of Asian descent to medal at the games. Kristi dreamed of being a figure skater from a very young age.

  Like many little girls at the time, she was inspired by seeing Dorothy Hamill win gold in the 1976 Olympics. One of the oft-told stories had her carrying around a Dorothy Hamill doll incessantly when she was a child. Dorothy was in Albertville and met briefly with Kristi before her winning performance, urging her to go out and have fun. Winning is certainly one way to do that. I don’t mean to diminish her accomplishment in any way, but I don’t think that anyone in the skating world considers that Olympic Ladies final to be a classic. It seemed as if one by one each of the medal contenders fell, ruining their chances for the top spot. As Scott pointed out, Kristi skated a conservative program that night in France, but it proved enough. What the final may have lacked in outstanding performances, it didn’t lack for drama. I can still hear the crowd voicing its empathetic disappointment as clean programs fell by the wayside. Idori Ito of Japan finished second and Nancy Kerrigan won the bronze, slipping one spot from her position going into the final. Tonya Harding finished just off the medal podium in fourth.

  SEEING THOSE THIRD- AND FOURTH-PLACE finishes by Nancy and Tonya, I don’t believe that any of us who sat in the bleachers at Le Halle Glace Olympique could have guessed how things would play out in two short years. The International Olympic Committee decided that rather than have the winter and summer games held in the same year, they would be held separately every two years. The good news for 1992 Winter Olympians was that they would only have to wait until 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway, to bring their dreams to life.

  In the run-up to the Olympics, Tracy Wilson and I were present at the World Championships in Lausanne, Switzerland. Scott hadn’t been feeling well, so he didn’t make the trip. Shortly after we arrived, we received a phone call. Scott had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. I felt a sickening drop in my stomach. Tracy and I went about business, but we were both in a daze. Our partner was hurting and many miles away physically, but very much on our minds and in our hearts.

  Of course, I knew logically that life isn’t fair and that cancer, as awful as it is, neither plays favorites nor targets anyone. Still, Scott had dealt with a lot as a kid and now here he was, still a young man, dealing with another tough situation. I knew that if anyone had the spirit and will to battle back, it was Scott. He would work with Tracy and me again in 1994, and I find it interesting and instructive to note the contrast between his personal struggle and what transpired on and off the ice before and during the Olympic skating.

  I know that I’ve said that one of my goals as a broadcaster was to give viewers a reason to root for someone. The Kerrigan-Harding debacle suffered then and continues to now from too much oversimplification. I hope Scott will forgive me this costume-themed metaphor, but too many people were too easily placing white hats and black hats on the heads of the main participants and assorted others.

  On January 6, 1994, shortly after finishing a practice at Cobo Arena in Detroit, the site of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Kerrigan was assaulted on the leg with a police baton. Her unknown assailant escaped. Very quickly, suspicion fell on Tonya Harding, her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and Shawn Eckhardt and Shane Stant.Eckhardt acted unofficially as Harding’s bodyguard. On February 1, 1994, accepting a plea deal, Gillooly acknowledged that he conspired with Eckhardt and others to have Kerrigan injured. As a part of his plea, he agreed to testify against Harding, implicating her in the planning.

  Kerrigan couldn’t compete in the U.S. championships that determined who would make the Olympic team. Harding won the event, but Kerrigan was voted onto the squad in recognition of the unusual circumstances that resulted in her inability to perform. The two would travel to Lillehammer. At home and around the world, a media frenzy began the moment the public learned of the attack. A video of the aftermath of the attack fired our collective imagination. This was a train wreck of Olympic proportions and rubbernecking became a national pastime here and elsewhere. From the onset the two women were hounded by fans and the media and that would continue until the Olympics and beyond. The good-versus-evil element was too juicy and too clear to be spun off the news cycle and replaced by anything else. Thuggery and figure skating? What an odd pair.

  I will say this, however: As much as the sound bite of Nancy Kerrigan postattack crying out and saying, “Why? Why? Why? Why me?” is indelibly imprinted in the minds of so many Americans, a short time later she was better able to put things in perspective for all of us.

  “That’s not the most important thing, skating. If I can’t [skate], I’ll deal with it. I’m okay. It could have been a lot worse,” Kerrigan said.

  Even later she was quoted as saying, “The most important thing is to be happy and healthy.”

  Amen to that.

  In the media blitz that followed Kerrigan being attacked inside Cobo Hall in Detroit, Nancy became even more of a media and fan darling than she had been before. What I find interesting is that if the lunacy hadn’t taken place, I would have chosen Tonya Harding as the one whose cause I would have championed. America loves an underdog. We root for those who overcome tough circumstances with grit and determination. Nancy Kerrigan was fortunate to be raised in a somewhat stable household. Long-limbed, graceful, and attractive enough to have once been named among People’s 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, she seemed to lead a charmed life. That wasn’t entirely the case, and her mother’s vision issues and other troubles weren’t part of the usual fairy-tale plot line. The fact that her father, Daniel, would eventually be killed by Nancy’s brot
her Mark in 2010 suggests that there were more dark things afoot in Nancy’s home life.

  That’s not to say she didn’t have to work hard to be among skating’s elite.

  It was more obvious that Harding’s family life was anything but stable, including frequent moves, a product of a broken home, a mother who remarried for the sixth time shortly after she split with Tonya’s father. Tonya was short and squat, a fireplug powerhouse who never seemed to be able to find favor with skating judges who acknowledged her prowess as a jumper but dinged her on presentation scores. On and off the ice, she seemed rougher around the edges, less polished and poised. She wound up in a disaster of a marriage, had to petition for protective orders against her husband Gillooly, and the on-again-off-again nature of the relationship and eventual marriage had to be as much a puzzle to the two of them as it was to outsiders.

  The blunt and inaccurate assessment that many in the media made was that this was a case of blue blood versus white trash. Distilling their histories to fit into those neat but mean-spirited categories may have made for good TV drama, but it hardly captures any of the nuances of American society or the sport of figure skating.

  I also can’t easily place a white or a black hat on any of the media outlets that covered the story. Playing up the differences between the two women, pitting them against one another, playing up the whodunit elements of the scandal, all made for great television. And it wasn’t just American media. When Scott and I showed up in Lillehammer to view a practice session, we were two of four hundred media members there. Scott summed things up neatly and angrily in stating that the worldwide media attention was turning the skating into just another tabloid event. CBS wasn’t immune to the fevered fascination. The network assigned its lead anchor, Connie Chung, to come to Lillehammer and shadow Harding.

  As Scott said to me at that practice in defense of all the other competitors, “Someone has lost sight of the fact these young men and women have worked their whole lives for this. We shouldn’t focus on this cartoon.”

  We did our best in the face of competing interests. To ignore that “cartoon” wouldn’t work at all. Acknowledging its existence and moving on was going to be a fine line to walk. I believe that’s what we managed to do. All we could control was the minutes when we were broadcasting the skating. What the network chose to do outside of that was out of our hands—as was frequently the case even when there were no real controversial circumstances to deal with. We also felt an obligation to the other athletes and their compelling stories. They didn’t deserve to be shunted aside; that would have been nearly the equivalent of taking a club to their chances to shine in the biggest competition in their careers. In our minds, Tonya and Nancy were a story. They weren’t the story.

  The medal winners would be determined by combining judges’ scores from the shorter technical program and the longer free skate. In the first of the events, the skaters were all required to complete three required elements: a triple Lutz/double toe loop combination as well as a double flip and a double axel. In between those they also did spins and spirals and other maneuvers. As Nancy warmed up before her short program, the atmosphere inside the Hamar Olympic Amphitheatre, also known as the Northern Lights Hall, turned electric. A large contingent of Americans waved flags and the loud and sustained applause Nancy received upon being introduced contributed to my opening remark. Just before the first strains of “Desperate Love” began, I said, “It’s been a long wait.” I was, of course, also referring to the time between her attack on January 4 and February 23. Oksana Baiul and Surya Bonaly, her two main competitors, had already skated and were first and second. Nancy stood at center ice frozen in time in a black and white dress, breathing deeply before she began. Scott waited some fifteen seconds or so before he first spoke, saying that, “This program is everything it needs to be. Artistic. Speed skating, but she has to get past this combination.” His comments previewed the first major element that Nancy would do, the triple Lutz into a double toe loop. When she completed it, Scott’s voice rose in excitement: “Beautifully done.”

  We let the cameras do the talking for nearly a minute until Nancy approached the double axel, which Scott succinctly described as the most difficult. Nancy landed it perfectly and went on to complete the routine with a beautiful spiral. Nancy was clearly pleased, beaming and smiling and waving to the appreciative audience as she made her way to the so-called kiss-and-cry area just off the ice. There her coach, Evy Scotvold, and his wife and choreographer Mary Scotvold, wrapped her in an embrace. Nancy’s high-wattage smile was still on full display.

  Scott and I opted to continue to let the images carry the day, with me merely making the identification of those on-screen. We then went to a brief replay of the tougher elements of the routine, which Scott called a “beautifully delivered technical program.” The director cut briefly to a shot of Tonya Harding sitting and watching the action and applauding Nancy’s efforts. With just a brief ID of her, we moved on. When we cut to Nancy’s parents, I had to do more than merely introduce them. Nancy’s mother, Brenda, was shown standing in front of a large monitor on which she viewed the proceedings. I said, “Her mother is, as I think most of you know, legally blind,” and then added, “she can sense beauty.”

  We remained silent while Nancy took a seat, chatted with her team, and awaited her scores. When they came up, Scott said with hardly a second elapsing, “I don’t know what Great Britain and the Czech Republic were looking at. There were no deductions in that program.” Those first set of scores were for technical merit, how the athlete executed all of the elements. I had to agree with Scott and trust his judgment. Nancy’s first set of marks looked like this:

  5.6

  5.9

  5.6

  5.7

  5.9

  5.9

  5.9

  5.8

  5.8

  GB

  POL

  CZE

  UKR

  CHN

  USA

  JPN

  CAN

  GER

  With the graphic showing, we offered no further comment and continued to show and listen in on Nancy and her team. The boom mic wasn’t able to pick up much of what they were saying given the crowd noise, but no one looked demonstrably upset. Her marks were strong. A few seconds later, her presentation scores came up. As before, the British and Czech judges awarded her the lowest scores among the nine of them.

  5.6

  5.9

  5.7

  5.7

  5.9

  5.9

  5.9

  5.8

  5.8

  GB

  POL

  CZE

  UKR

  CHN

  USA

  JPN

  CAN

  GER

  The judges also listed their ordinal scores. With the obvious two exceptions each of the judges had rated her first. Nancy’s marks were good enough to put her in first place. I slipped into a bit of golf lingo stating that she was “atop the leaderboard.” Nancy stayed there, and went into the long program, which would commence two days later on the twenty-fifth in first place. In the time that followed, we got caught up a bit on Oksana Baiul. We’d seen her at various competitions and she had a compelling story of her own. Her parents divorced when she was only two years old. Her father left their home in Ukraine and wasn’t a presence in her life. Her mother, Maria, raised Oksana until she died in 1991, when the young skater was only thirteen. At sixteen, Oksana was among the younger women in the competition. I always chafed at the description of various young gymnasts as “pixieish,” and will say that Oksana looked very much like what she was—a young teenager. In comparison, Nancy looked like what she was—a young woman of twenty-four.

  Just about everything you need to know about the contrast in the two can be summed up in the marks they each received in the short program.

  Required Elements or Technical Merit

  5.7

  5.8
>
  5.4

  5.7

  5.7

  5.6

  5.7

  5.6

  5.5

  Presentation

  5.9

  5.8

  5.7

  5.9

  5.9

  5.8

  5.9

  5.9

  5.9

  GB

  POL

  CZE

  UKR

  CHN

  USA

  JPN

  CAN

  GER

  Oksana’s presentation marks, sometimes referred to as artistic impression, were clearly higher than Nancy’s. That said, Nancy was rated first on seven of the nine judges’ cards. What these scores also show is the aspect of figure skating that can either fascinate and enthrall or frustrate and disillusion skaters and fans alike—the great artistry versus technical mastery divide. Divide is too strong a word. Everyone agrees that skaters need to have both of those characteristics in their routines or programs. Which matters most to you, and to the judges, will nearly always be variable. On Pat O’Brien’s late-night recap after the long program was concluded, Scott summed up this enigmatic aspect of the sport, “On a night when a decision had to be made it came down to two skaters and they both skated their hearts out. How do you compare? It just depends on how you feel at the time.”

  I want to be clear here: I’m not putting words in Scott’s mouth; this is my take on what he said. Please also keep in mind how much I loved working on these events. A competition whose results depend on how a group of nine judges is feeling at the time is always going to be fraught with controversy. Maybe that’s the appeal of it for some. It isn’t as cut and dried, you scored more points, more runs; you ran/swam/biked/skated/skied/drove or whatever faster than everyone else. Some people are sports fans because they love the black-and-white nature of the results. In the rest of their lives, the reasons behind wins and losses are often murky and complicated.