Harding's Hassles: `I'd Just Like To Be A Normal Person' -- Tonya Harding, Once The U.S. National Champion, Now Skates At Shopping Malls, Does Community Service And Wonders Why People Can't Forget Her Sordid Past.
PORTLAND - The old rink never was right, Al Harding says. The ice never was quite flat at the Ice Capades Chalet Rink. The nearer the edge, the higher the ice rose. The closer to the edge, the more uneven and unfair the skating was.
"They started completely over," the father of skater Tonya Harding was saying one day this week. "Gutted this whole thing and started fresh."
You can do that with ice rinks. They can be made to look completely different - better, fresher, prettier.
You can clear away a past with paint and plaster, change a name and a reputation over a few months.
The Ice Capades Chalet Rink now is The Dorothy Hamill Skating Center. New name. A fresh start.
Out on the ice, Al Harding's 23-year-old daughter, Tonya, vaults from the ice into a shaky triple jump, stumbling as she lands.
"See that, Dad?" she asks. "A little bit better, right?"
The father smiles and the daughter skates on. The career of history's most notorious figure skater has resumed inside the Clackamas Town Center Mall, in the same location where she trained before her two U.S. Championship wins, before her two disappointing Olympic showings.
This is where the world media camped daily after the U.S. Championships in January, after Nancy Kerrigan was bashed on the knee with a metal club and Harding, her husband and three accomplices quickly were implicated. Now her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, is serving six months in a prison boot camp for
engineering the attack, and the trio of thugs that carried out the deed got prison terms of 18 months.
Jumps, spins and denials
Through a plea-bargain agreement last March, Harding admitted only to hindering the investigation into the attack and was fined and sentenced to community service - serving meals to the elderly and disabled. Later, she was banned for life from competing in any event sponsored by the U.S. Figure Skating Association. To this day, she denies what FBI transcripts, police reports and Gillooly and bodyguard Shawn Eckardt's testimony strongly suggest - that she was involved from the start.
"I wasn't part of what happened," she said after practice last week. "I just wish people would understand that and realize that.
"I would like to go on with my life. I really would."
But Tonya Harding still loves attention. The rink is set at the bottom of a sprawling, open shopping mall, and patrons often hang over the railings for a bird's-eye view of the skaters below. Harding could skate in the early hours when the mall is not open, or at another, more remote rink. Instead she is here at midday.
"I mean, I like being a celebrity," she said. "I like being a role model for children."
This was after Gillooly sold their wedding-night video to Penthouse, which since has marketed it worldwide and turned it into a rather graphic photo spread.
A role model for children??
"I just wish all the B.S. would go away," she said. "I'd just like to be a normal person."
$50,000 in the hole
A normal person, though, probably would stay out of the public eye and certainly out of a public skating rink after all that has happened. But Harding's troubles have put her in a $50,000 hole, says her attorney, Robert Weaver. That is the amount she pledged to the Oregon Special Olympics as part of her plea-bargain.
So, she skates again. With no other marketable skill, she almost has to.
Three times a week, sometimes less, she practices for one hour. She has a doubles partner now, Patrick Page, a 36-year-old, part-time skating instructor with a full-time floor-covering business. "I'm just kind of along for the ride," he said. "We're kind of at the test stage."
At the suggestion of Weaver and co-attorney Dennis Rawlinson, Harding has signed on with a new agent and re-created her fan club into a business operation. The agent, Merrill Eichenberger, is a lifelong Oregonian whose background is in motivational videos and infomercials. Snow-haired and 48, he is on the brink of a big deal and some little ones, he said, that will jump start his client's new beginning.
There might be a huge announcement about a big skating event in Vegas soon, he said. A series of learn-to-skate videos will be released next month. "Tonya's Golden Blades," the new fan club, has plans for a 1995 calendar, said the new president, Vonnie Reifenrath.
The Japanese and several European countries, Eichenberger said, might want Harding to perform in some exhibitions early next year. She's co-writing a book. And, "She's been offered a movie role with one of the major producers in Hollywood," he said.
"But I don't want to misinform anyone," Eichenberger added. "I don't want to blow sunshine up anyone's skirt, if you know what I mean."
Well, not exactly. What he probably means is that although Harding is back on the ice and fulfilling the requirements of her probation, her future is uncertain. This talk of videos, books, exhibitions and movie roles is getting old - even for Tonya.
"I just skate for fun, basically," she said. "If I get a show or something, then I'll prepare for it."
Harding is bound to a three-state area by the terms of her parole, so even an event in Las Vegas would require the state's permission. And despite Eichenberger's happy-faced scenario of suitors galore, Harding's camp seems to be making most of the overtures.
There also is this obstacle: Several of the ice shows are USFSA-sanctioned events, making the banned Harding ineligible. As for any others, the question must be asked: Will the presence of Harding in your ice show sell tickets or induce refund requests? Will the crowd be hostile or forgiving?
"Now, whenever they talk about me, they always bring up the incident," Harding said. "And it's like, `Why do you have to do that?' It's just reminding people what went on in the past. Why can't people just go on?"
The existence or illusion of grace long has been a staple within the figure-skating community. Even before the knee bashing in Detroit, Harding already was something of an outlaw. She smoked. She dropped out of high school. She wore tacky skating outfits and talked trash. Her mother was married eight times. Her father often was unemployed. She had a tempestuous marriage to Gillooly, firing a gun in his direction during one quarrel.
Even before The Incident, Harding knew Portland's police force by name. Years before the Kerrigan bashing, skaters told of a mother who beat Tonya Harding with a hairbrush when she screwed up a jump or directed words like "scum" toward her repeatedly. "She was a mother from hell," Antje Spethmann, who took lessons as a child with Harding, told Portland's Oregonian earlier this year.
It made her tough. Harding was fearless in trying and practicing difficult maneuvers, crashing and crashing until she got it right. It was her athleticism, not her grace, that made her special, allowing her to land that triple axel to beat Kristi Yamaguchi in the '91 nationals.
Harding's closed circle
These days, Tonya is without a coach. On this day, her support group consists of her father, Eichenberger, Reifenrath and several fan club members.
Only her father has known her for more than a year.
Reifenrath has known Harding since last January, when she joined the old club, begun the previous year by a woman named Elaine Stamms. Stamms read an article about Harding's dire finances two summers ago and began the club to raise money for her. Its membership swelled to 2,000 worldwide during her troubles, although many of the new members were in it just for the "Tonya Is Innocent" T-shirts.
The club disbanded with a dinner in August. But not before Stamms and club officials argued with Harding over the disbursement of the dwindling treasury. "It was not," Stamms says now, "the happy ending I wanted or expected."
Instead, it launched a new beginning. Besides collecting money from new members - there are more than 100 - Reifenrath serves as Harding's assistant. She carries out instructions. She wears a beeper. She spends most of her day with the skater.
"The difference between this club and the old one," she said, "is that Tonya has total input."
Really, the club is a microcosm of Harding's life now.
Except for her court-mandated efforts on behalf of the "Meals on Wheels" program, Tonya is calling her own shots. An old boyfriend, Doug Lemon, now is her new boyfriend. Her father, with whom she has remained close, is around her constantly.
"My whole life is coming together," she said. "My family life, my personal life. My skating is good. I enjoy doing my community-service work for senior-citizen homes."
Now, if she could remake that image just a bit, add some paint to her new plaster.