Thin Ice

by Frank Coffey

  “Tonya’s come a long way. She’s been very successful in her skating,” her coach, Diane Rawlinson, said in an interview aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes shortly after the attack on Kerrigan. The interview was taped in 1986 by a Yale University student named Sandra Lukow, a former skater, as part of a class project. Harding was only sixteen at the time, a high school dropout from a broken and dysfunctional family who dreamed of chucking the shackles of a trailer-park upbringing in exchange for fame and fortune as the best figure skater in the world.

  “I think everyone would agree,” Rawlinson added, “that if Tonya had not had her skating, she probably would be a runaway right now and be doing a lot of things that we would not like to think of her into.”

  On November 12, 1970, Tonya Harding became the fifth child born to LaVona Harding. She was raised, however, as an only child. One of her siblings had died as an infant; the others were nearly grown by the time Tonya poked her head into the world. LaVona worked as a waitress in and around Portland; her fifth husband, Al Harding, Tonya’s father, was a truck driver and day laborer who toiled for as little as $5 an hour. Back problems frequently prevented him from toiling at all.

  The family moved frequently when Harding was a child–so often that Tonya has, on more than one occasion, been quoted as saying “I never lived in one place long enough to remember my address.” All her addresses were in the Portland area. The family moved from one apartment or trailer to the next, packing up whenever their landlord decided it was time to raise the rent. Money was always tight, and so sometimes the Hardings would bunk in with relatives. Once, for a year or so, they lived in a mobile home parked in the driveway behind Tonya’s grandmother’s house. Like an army brat, Tonya changed schools virtually every year, which meant that every year she had to make new friends. Most of the time, she just didn’t bother. She preferred solitude.

  Her relationship with her mother was strained from as far back as Tonya can remember, but she adored her father. In a 1992 profile that appeared in Sports Illustrated, Harding acknowledged that the best times of her youth were spent with her dad. Al Harding had difficulty paying the rent each month, but he never seemed to have any trouble showering his daughter with affection.

  Al Harding loved the outdoors, and he tried to share that with Tonya. She was just three years old the first time Al took her on a deer hunting trip. He told her it was important to keep quiet, and so each time a twig cracked under his boot, Tonya would press a finger to her lips and say, “Shhhh.”

  The following year Al and LaVona dragged Tonya along on an elk hunting trip. Mother and father left their little girl in the family truck on the side of a hill while they went off in search of game.

  “She was a pretty good trooper,” Al Harding told Sports Illustrated’s E.M. Swift. “Most kids would scream and cry when they saw mom and dad go walking down the mountain.”

  Much of this is the stuff of legend–Harding has often been accused of embellishing the hardships of her youth–but much of it also is true. Al Harding bought his little girl her first rifle when she was five years old; he cut down the stock so she could handle it comfortably. They practiced behind the house, taking shots at empty cans and tree stumps, whatever was around. She received her first deer rifle before her 10th birthday, bagged her first buck at thirteen.

  “I was a better shot than he was,” Harding once said of her father, and if nothing else the statement was a reflection of the competitive fire that drives her to this day.

  According to the Sports Illustrated profile, Al Harding also taught Tonya how to fish. He would take her to the Columbia River to cast for sturgeon. While he fished, Tonya would walk the shoreline, searching for the heavy, tenounce sinkers other fisherman had failed to retrieve. The sinkers cost more than a dollar brand new, and Al would give her 25 cents for each one she found.

  Sometimes the sinkers would be wrapped around brush and weeds, still attached to lines. Al enjoyed telling the story of hearing Tonya scream one morning after she had disappeared from his view. He was frightened, of course; he feared the worst–that his daughter had fallen in the river. When he ran to her, though, he discovered tiny Tonya reeling in a 41-inch sturgeon. She had stumbled upon a sinker on a snag, and as she unraveled the mess, she found, to her great surprise, that the fish was still hooked.

  “The kid even beat you fishing when she didn’t have a pole,” Al Harding said.

  It’s an amusing anecdote, to be sure, the notion of a seven-year-old trying to haul in a fish her equal in size and her superior in strength. It speaks volumes about Tonya’s desire to win, to be the best, maybe even to gain approval. Clearly it was important for Tonya to measure up in the eyes of her father. They were, for a time, best friends, sharing laughter and tears as if they were brother and sister, not father and daughter.

  Tonya even helped Al work on the family car, a hobby that seemed harmless enough at the time but which would, as she tried to break into the stuffy and elitist world of professional figure skating, contribute to her reputation as a girl who simply didn’t fit in.

  But Tonya didn’t care. She enjoyed tinkering with cars. It made her feel smart, useful, unique. She helped her dad change the oil, adjust the valves. These were lessons that stay with her even now: How many figure skaters–how many people, period–know how to replace a transmission or rebuild an engine? How many can replace the brakes on their own cars?

  Tonya Harding can. And does.

  “I was happy with my dad,” Harding told Sports Illustrated. “We did everything together. But I wasn’t very happy as a child. I was lonely. I never went to Knott’s Berry Farm or any place like that when I was young. Skating was the only thing I did that really gave me confidence.”

  Considering her background, it is astonishing that Harding ever found her way to a skating rink in the first place. Figure skaters are ballerinas, often born into privilege and steered in the right direction almost from the moment they draw their first breath. Quite often, mom was a skater, at least recreationally. Maybe dad was, too. At the very least they share a knowledge of and a love for the sport, and that affection is handed down to the next generation.

  Such was not the case with Tonya Harding.

  LaVona knew nothing of Axels and toe loops and Salchows. She worked hard for whatever money she had–and there wasn’t much–and she had few outside interests. Al liked the outdoors; he liked the winter, but he never equated snow and ice with figure skating, not in his wildest dreams.

  Neither did Tonya. She fell into the sport almost by chance. Once exposed, though, she was infatuated, and her naturally aggressive, competitive personality took over.

  “Tonya eats, lives, breathes, sleeps because she wants skating,” LaVona once said. “And if that can’t be done, if someone tells her she can’t do it, she’ll do it. The better and better she’ll do it. With Tonya, if there’s no ‘You can’t do it’ type of thing, then she just won’t do it.”

  Tonya Harding was introduced to skating when she was just three-and-a-half years old. She was shopping with her parents one afternoon at the Lloyd Center, in downtown Portland, when she spotted a group of kids skating on an indoor rink. Immediately, she felt compelled to join in.

  “My dad said OK and my mother said no,” Harding told Sports Illustrated. “So I cried, and finally she agreed. The first thing I did was make a pile of shavings on the ice and start to eat them. My mother told me I had to skate like the others or we’d have to leave. So I skated.”

  For Christmas that year Tonya’s parents gave her a pair of second-hand skates, and within a few weeks she was enrolled in group lessons. Unlike most of the other children, Tonya displayed something unique: raw talent. She was a bundle of energy, skating and falling and picking herself up again and skating some more, charting frantic little circles around the rink. She had no clue as to what she was doing, no idea what she was supposed to be doing, but she tried her best.

  Think about it, though. What is it that would make a child of three
-and-a-half so determined? At that age children are supposed to be carefree, innocent. Nothing bothers them, nothing really upsets them. Nothing really inspires them, either. Not for long. This child was unusual, though. She had to be dragged off the ice after each visit, reassured that there would be other chances, other days to skate. She was too young to be hooked, but she was hooked nonetheless.

  Four

  Later on, there would be debate about the decaying of Tonya Harding’s relationship with her mother and criticism of Tonya as ungrateful. There would be accusations that she is prone to fits of temper and selfishness; that she can be sweet and caring one moment, petty and vindictive the next. It has, in fact, been suggested that Tonya’s anger toward her mother, and a subsequent cutting of family ties, was merely the first of many “betrayals” in the young skater’s life.

  Tonya and her supporters, however, would argue that LaVona was abusive and demanding and sometimes cruel, and that Tonya simply did what anyone would do in that situation: fight back.

  Before their relationship frayed, though, there was a period of time when LaVona tried to play the role of skating mom, awkward as it was for her.

  “She can’t come up to their standards,” LaVona would later say of her daughter in Sandra Lukow’s videotape. “No matter how hard she tries. And, of course, that just–that really gets to me. No matter how we try, I mean, it’s always wrong … which is perfectly normal. I can’t do good enough in anything. I can’t feed her right, I don’t get her to bed right, I don’t do anything right. This is fine. I could care less. I do the best I can and that’s all anybody can do.”

  They are generally referred to as “skating families,” and not without good reason. One does not become a world-class figure skater without considerable assistance and support–and, yes, love–from one’s family. Someone has to pay the enormous bills, and there are other considerations. If the little boy or girl (and usually they are girls) has to be at the public rink before daybreak to work on compulsory figures, someone has to do the driving. Someone has to bring the hot chocolate. Someone has to help with the homework. Someone has to choose the costumes and drive the young skater to competitions.

  It is a strange and narrow world, as far removed from the spotlight of the Olympic Games as Portland is from Beverly Hills. Kids try to cram in a couple hours of skating before school. Then they join their friends and try, for a little while anyway, to be regular kids. But they can’t, because regular kids–15- and 16-year-old kids–typically play soccer or basketball or softball. They watch TV and hang out at the mall and buy CDs.

  They don’t go to bed at 7:30. They don’t do their homework every night before dinner. They don’t have house rules prohibiting phone calls after eight o’clock in the evening, the way young skaters do.

  To say Tonya Harding did not fit neatly into this type of rigidly structured environment would be an understatement. In many skating families, dad works and mom stays home with the kids. Dad writes the checks, mom delivers them. In the Harding household dad was often unemployed and mom worked crazy hours, trying to pick up enough in tips to pay the electric bill. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of fighting, a lot of tension.

  There was not a lot of pampering.

  They made it work for a while, though. Harding’s dogged determination and drive–and obvious natural athletic ability–caught the attention of one of the instructors in the group skating program, who suggested to LaVona that Tonya begin taking lessons from Diane Rawlinson (then known as Diane Schatz) in nearby Jantzen Beach. When the Hardings drove out to visit Rawlinson, her first inclination was to reject Tonya, who by this time was four years old. Nothing personal, she said. She just wasn’t accustomed to coaching students as young as Harding was.

  “At first I said ‘definitely not,’ ” Rawlinson recalled. “Every day for a week they had Tonya in a very, very frilly frock at the rink and she was skating circles around me while I was working with other competitive skaters. And I noticed that she did have a lot of drive, and she seemed to be very coordinated for a four-year-old, and I decided that I’d like to give it a try.”

  Tonya had similar memories of their introduction.

  “My mom told me to go out and pester her for a while,” Tonya told Sports Illustrated. “So I skated around her in circles and drove her nuts until Diane agreed to a six-month trial.”

  Some trial. While their relationship has had its rough moments, and its interruptions, the partnership between Tonya Harding and Diane Rawlinson has lasted more than 16 years.

  “I could never pay Diane back for everything she’s done for me,” Harding has been quoted as saying. “Without her I would not be where I am.”

  Al and LaVona recognized their daughter’s talent and love for the sport, and so they did what they could, including driving around Portland in Al’s truck, scooping up empty cans and bottles they could turn in for nickel deposits. They would use the money to pay Rawlinson whatever they could, usually $25 a week in the beginning. As Tonya became more proficient, though, the costs mounted, until they reached the point where it simply wasn’t possible for the Hardings to pay Rawlinson what she was worth.

  All parties, however, agreed that Harding’s talent was such that it had to be nurtured. She was tiny, yes, but she was powerful and gifted, and it would be wrong to turn their backs on that gift. So when Al found himself out of work, Rawlinson would donate her coaching time; she waived virtually all of her fees and even bought Tonya new equipment.

  “Diane was really good to her,” Al Harding told Sports Illustrated. “It costs $400 to $500 for a new pair of skates. We never had that kind of money. Tonya had to do more with less coaching than any of the girls she skates against.”

  According to Rawlinson, she also had to do more with less in other areas. There were problems in the Harding household, problems that were visible to anyone who spent much time with the family. In addition to being impressed by Tonya’s natural talent, Rawlinson was impressed by her ability to overcome emotional trauma. At the same time, she knew that Tonya’s troubled relationship with her mother would eventually present a major obstacle to her dream of winning an Olympic medal and securing the fame and fortune that comes with such success. For example, according to interviews in Lukow’s videotape, LaVona’s outbursts and harsh treatment of her daughter began costing the family potential sponsorship money when Tonya was still in kindergarten.

  Rawlinson told the story of a local attorney who was revolted by what he saw one day at the Jantzen Beach rink.

  “Tonya was in the corner doing jumping jacks. She was five-and-a-half years old. He fell in love with her and he sponsored her for a year. And the reason they stopped sponsoring her was because they were very upset with her mother’s actions at competition time. A few times they saw Tonya’s mother in the bathroom beating her with a hairbrush … using bad language in the lobby in front of other people … and they just felt that it upset them to see the situation at hand.”

  Antje Spethmann, who took lessons with Harding, supported Rawlinson’s accusations of abuse.

  “It’s impossible to forget Tonya,” Spethmann told the Portland Oregonian. “Even then, everyone saw her promise. She was great, a natural. The only problem was that horrible mother of hers. [She was] abusive and negative. She talked like a trucker and called Tonya things like ‘scum,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘stupid.’ This was to a little girl.

  “She didn’t care that other kids and their mothers were there and saw what she was doing,” Spethmann added. “She’d yell at Tonya to say that she was making all these sacrifices and spending all this money so she could learn to skate and Tonya better be grateful. She wouldn’t let Tonya come off the ice when she had to go to the bathroom. And all the time she’d be yelling that Tonya sucked. I’m telling you, she was a mother from hell.”

  Another skating mother, Pat Hammill, whose daughter skated with Tonya as a child, reported that she’d seen LaVona slap a preteen Tonya hard enough to knock her off a chair. />
  It was Rawlinson’s hope that Harding could survive, perhaps even thrive, in spite of her home environment. In time, Rawlinson knew, Harding would progress to the point where she would qualify for national age-group competitions. Once at that level, she might become eligible for support from the USFSA.

  Obviously it was a calculated risk. Certainly the possibility existed that Tonya, a temperamental, driven child, might just decide one day to give up skating altogether. But that possibility only made Rawlinson more committed. When she imagined Tonya without skating, it frightened and saddened her. Too, there was the idea that she might have in her stable one of the most gifted young women ever to lace on a pair of skates. If she saw dollar signs, well, fine. She also saw what every teacher dreams of seeing in a pupil: brilliance. It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about skating.

  “This girl is a Larry Bird or Wayne Gretzky,” Larry McBride, owner of the Valley Ice Arena in Beaverton, Oregon, told the Portland Oregonian. “She’s the best there has ever been athletically. There is not another figure skater who has ever laced up skates who could hold her skates. She has more talent than God has ever given anybody.” Former Olympic figure skater Fritzi Burger, a two-time silver medalist, adds, “The skaters I talk to, we all think she’s a better skater than Kerrigan. She jumps so well, she’s more fluid, she has more speed.”

  Harding is a powerful skater, blessed with tremendous leaping ability. As the story goes, she landed her first triple loop at the tender age of nine, after another skater bet her that she couldn’t do it.

  Most skating prodigies eventually find that fear is their worst enemy: fear of falling, fear of injury, fear of embarrassment. Tonya is an exception to the rule. If she was at times quiet and withdrawn off the ice; if she had problems at home that made her question herself and seek approval from others, she seemed to be extraordinarily brave and confident on the ice. What others perceived as frightening, she merely saw as challenging.