Just saw a good ESPN “30 For 30” segment on the Tonya Harding,
Nancy Kerrigan, knee-bashing fiasco, “The Price of Gold.”
It was an interesting study in class separation, the snotty,
arrogant and corrupt world of figure skating and how viscous the press can be. (The
US Figure Skating Association miraculously manages to make child beauty pageant judges and the IRS look lovable
by comparison)
There is no doubt in my mind that Tonya Harding and her band of
idiots planned the whacking of Nancy Kerrigan. So there is no sense wasting
time feeling sorry for her. Tonya’s sun-hot motivation was to prove she wasn’t
the low-born, trailer-trash everyone thought she was, but then she destroyed
herself by being even more of a low-born, trailer-trash than anyone thought.
But there were no good guys in this tale.
Nancy Kerrigan was a
straight up bitch. The snotty US skating world picked the seemingly classier Nancy
over Tonya and there was no way Tonya could beat them. And then the snotty,
arrogant US skating heads got out-screwed by the Russians who fixed the
Olympics for Oksana Baiul.
In fact, the only person who comes off looking good is the young
and gracious Michelle Kwan who got royally screwed out of a spot on the Olympic
team by Kerrigan and the USFSA. And Scott Hamilton, he is an all-around good
guy. Everyone else comes off as snippy and arrogant.
US figure skating combines all of the vile and sinister evils of
gymnastics and beauty pageants. The psycho stage moms, the tyrant and corrupt
judges and coaches, the back-stabbing, the superficiality.
And Nancy Kerrigan personified all of it. We did not know it at the time, but Nancy was the Kristen Stewart of ice skating.
From the time Kerrigan got whacked and screamed “Why?” in a way
that had dogs howling for miles until she was caught on air making bitchy
comments during the medal ceremony and at a Disneyland appearance, her arrogance and prickly nature became apparent. Unlike Tonya, Nancy briefly had the public’s
sympathy but then threw it away.
At first, Tonya tried to appear as sweet and innocent, but she
was just too stupid, classless and greedy to pull it off. For a while I tried
to feel sorry for Tonya who was the victim of parental and domestic abuse. But
one bald lie after another betrayed Tonya's true colors: Fluorescent pink.
Once the press and the public had Tonya pegged as the bad guy,
they were unmerciful at painting her as the evil little tacky troll she actually
turned out to be.
It was beyond hilarious how idiotic Tonya’s henchmen were. They
weren’t the gang that couldn’t shoot straight; they were the gang that couldn’t
load their gun right, dropped the gun, stepped on it and then shot themselves
in the ass.
The moron who actually clubbed Kerrigan, Shane Stant, paid for
his plane, food and hotel and in-room porn with a Visa card. The Detroit cop who arrested him could not
keep from laughing at what idiots he, Tonya and her boyfriend, the ultra
idiot, Jeff Gillooly and that fat sub-human mega-moron, Shawn Eckhardt, were.
The alleged elite press was awful too.
Connie Chung was a pit bull with a hair and makeup girl. Same
with Matt Lauer. Once they smelled blood and determined the public could not get enough of this
lurid hot mess, they were relentless in persecuting Tonya’s trailer-trash clown
show. The fact that Kerrigan was a mean ice-queen didn’t help their good-versus-evil saga, so the press ignored it until Nancy let that cat out of the bag, one prima
donna snit-fit after another.
It is genuinely hard to figure out who comes out of this fiasco
looking the worst. But I might go with the USFSA, Connie Chung, Nancy Kerrigan
and then Tonya Harding, in that order.
On Christmas Day, a baby was born on the Philadelphia subway. Out of habit. Eagles fans booed it.
- Janice Hough
