Friday, December 26, 2014


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