Fire on Ice

by Oregonian Staff

  Copyright © 1994 by The Oregonian

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1994.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haight, Abby, J.E. Vader—authors.

  Title: Fire on ice : the exclusive inside story of Tonya Harding / Abby Haight and J.E. Vader and the staff of the Oregonian

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Times Books, 1994

  Identifiers: LCCN 94169625 (print) | ISBN 978081292457(print) | ISBN 9780525575313 (ebook) |

  Subjects: | Harding, Tonya. Figure skaters—United States—Biography.

  Women figure skaters—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC GV850.H35 H35 1994 (print)| DDC 796.91/4/092 B

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/94169625

  ISBN 9780812924572

  Ebook ISBN 9780525575313

  Cover design: Alane Gianetti

  Cover photograph: David Madison/ Contributor/ Getty Images

  v4.1

  a

  “If you really have a dream, you should follow it. That’s what I’m doing. But I want people to remember that I’m a normal person like they are, except that I’ve always had a dream and I made that dream.”

  –TONYA HARDING, December 1991

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 True Grit

  2 Love and Happiness

  3 Fire on Ice

  4 The Harder They Fall

  5 The Hard Luck Club

  6 Rough Skating

  7 A Plot Is Hatched

  Photo Insert

  8 Triumph Without Victory

  9 The Conspiracy Unravels

  10 All Fall Down

  Appendix

  Statements by Harding and Others

  Interview with Harding’s Bodyguard

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Prologue

  It should have been a triumphant return for Tonya Harding. On Monday evening, January 10, 1994, Harding’s reign as the queen of U.S. figure skating was only forty-eight hours old. The dynamic twenty-three-year-old blonde from rural Clackamas County in Oregon had finally proven her doubters wrong and won the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, the highest accolade in the sport besides Olympic gold. Harding’s victory two days before at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit was special because it met another huge goal, a berth on the U.S. Olympic team that would compete in a month in Lillehammer, Norway.

  Since she first laced up skates as a three-year-old, Tonya Harding had wanted to skate in the Olympic Games. When she was young, she had a child’s dream of beauty and glory. As she aged, the dream took on a harder edge of the reality around her. An Olympic medal meant the kind of money that would wipe out a lifetime of want. When Harding looked at the Olympic rings, she saw dollar signs, she told reporters.

  Harding didn’t get to celebrate much in Detroit. Everyone was more concerned about the bizarre attack January 6 on Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, which had forced her to drop out of the competition. The favorite to win her second title, Kerrigan was the reigning American skating queen. In the post-competition press conference, reporters wanted Harding to talk about what it felt like to win without Kerrigan. Harding wanted to talk only about her skating. Even with the gold medal around her neck, it was obvious that Harding was still in Kerrigan’s shadow.

  As they walked up the ramp at Portland International Airport, Harding and Jeff Gillooly, her on-again, off-again husband, were worried about the more than four hours they had spent over the last two days talking to investigators in Detroit, including an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agent had wanted to know about the attack on Kerrigan. He had talked of trivial things for a while, then abruptly asked Gillooly if he knew someone named Derrick. Gillooly was startled. He said he didn’t.

  A big homecoming celebration had been planned for Harding when she arrived at Portland. Members of the Tonya Harding Fan Club had made sure the local media knew Harding’s flight and time of arrival, and the information was broadcast on television newscasts and published in The Oregonian. More than forty members of the Portland Rosarians, a civic group, were at the airport with a proclamation from the City of Portland. Dozens of fans waited with balloons, flowers and posters that read, “Go for the gold, Tonya!”

  Their wait was long and disappointing. At the last minute, Harding had changed her flight plans.

  Now it was almost 9 p.m., and a couple dozen loyal fans were back at the airport. So were local reporters.

  Harding and Gillooly entered the gate lobby, and a large man in a trench coat immediately stepped up behind Harding and placed a protective hand on the small of her back. The man was Shawn Eric Eckardt, a longtime friend of Gillooly’s who had been hired as Harding’s bodyguard. Eckardt’s three-hundred-pound frame dwarfed the five-foot-one Harding as he guided her through well-wishers.

  As he usually did when he and his wife were in public, Gillooly stepped back into the crowd. Television newscasts later showed the short, mustachioed Gillooly walking grimly a few feet away from Harding. Gillooly didn’t stick out in a crowd, but on this night, his frowning, worried face set him apart from the happy fans.

  Eckardt shepherded Harding through a small gantlet of well-wishers and reporters. Harding’s training partner, seventeen-year-old Angela Meduna, had brought her friend a stuffed animal. Several people wore the lemon-yellow “Team Tonya” T-shirts that Harding herself had designed before the national championships.

  The skater laughed only once, when a television cameraman, jogging backward to keep Harding in focus, crashed into a post and almost fell down.

  Harding had agreed to a short press conference, and her most zealous fan, a Vietnam veteran named Joe Haran, had arranged for a small airport meeting room where the press could set up their tripods and lights. Harding, looking small in her black coat and black turtleneck shirt, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, sat down in front of the bright lights and cameras and waited impatiently for the first question. Ordinarily, her return to Portland after a competition would go mostly unnoticed by the Portland media. But the Kerrigan attack made that impossible. The television stations sent out their top reporters, and radio stations that had never previously mentioned Harding had their microphones ready.

  Harding was tired. She had never liked talking to reporters. She was sure they would want to go over the same things she’d been talking about for days—the fear she said she felt about Kerrigan’s attack, how the championship wasn’t complete without her rival, how she thought she had skated great. Then a reporter asked if the FBI had asked her if she had been part of the attack on Kerrigan.

  “I’m really disappointed that you guys would even ask me that,” she said. “You guys know me better than that. I had my hopes for a long time of competing against Nancy and proving I’m as good as her and better.” In fact, Harding said, she was looking forward to skating against Kerrigan at the Olympic Games so she could “kick her butt.”

  After a few minutes, Gillooly and Harding signaled that the questions were over. Harding’s father, Al, had been told to wait at the main entrance of the airport, then drive his daughter to Gillooly’s mother’s house.
Eckardt had rehearsed the plan with Al Harding several times, and when the bodyguard whisked Tonya out the doors, Al was waiting. But instead of driving off immediately with her, Al waited. “Go! Go! Go!” Eckardt screamed, until Al revved the car and sped away.

  Eckardt and Gillooly followed in the bodyguard’s car. It was the first time they could speak privately. Gillooly told his friend about the FBI questioning. As the pair drove toward their rendezvous with Harding at Gillooly’s mother’s house, they realized the plan they had created was falling apart. They would have to cover it up.

  1

  True Grit

  She chose her sport at age three, taking group lessons at Silverskate, a suburban ice skating rink long since closed. Skating and the fearless little girl were a perfect fit. Within a month, Tonya Harding was able to bunny hop, glide, and skate backward—skills other kids took a year to master. Within twelve months, Harding had won her first competition, at Sun Valley, Idaho.

  The story that Harding and her mother always tell is that when she was three she saw skaters at the Lloyd Center shopping mall rink. Little Tonya was entranced and begged her mother to allow her to skate. She refused to take no for an answer, she wanted to skate so much. Her mother finally relented, and after she explained that Tonya wasn’t just supposed to sit on the ice and eat the shavings, off she went. And once she was moving, the future champ just didn’t want to stop.

  But David Kellogg, Harding’s cousin, has a different story. He said that LaVona Harding was driven to turn her daughter into a skater from the start. From before the start.

  “I remember her mom telling her she was going be a skater even before she was born. She said if this was a girl, she was to be a skater.”

  Tonya was a skater, and she was good. She also had a strong incentive to get good very quickly.

  “It’s impossible to forget Tonya,” recalled Antje Spethmann, who took lessons with Harding. “Even then everyone saw her promise. She was great, a natural. The only problem was that horrible mother of hers.”

  Spethmann said LaVona Harding “was abusive and negative. She talked like a trucker and called Tonya things like ‘scum,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘stupid.’ This was to a little girl.”

  When Harding made a mistake on ice, her mother beat her, Spethmann said. “She didn’t care that other kids and their mothers were there and saw what she was doing. She’d yell at Tonya, say 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.”

  The mother, now LaVona Golden, denied the accusations. She said she wasn’t against giving a child a swat now and again, but she didn’t beat and didn’t spank. Her problems were just normal mother-rebellious daughter problems.

  It was not an easy life. LaVona sewed costumes and waited tables at night to pay for her daughter’s skating. Money was scarce; homes were just temporary things. Al Harding, Tonya’s father, was unemployed for long stretches, and the blue-collar family bounced to eight different addresses. One thing remained constant for skating’s most unlikely family: Mother and daughter at war.

  And yet Tonya never cried or asked to quit. The kid was tough. The kid was an athlete.

  “Most girls needed to be talked into doing some of the hard things,” said Spethmann. “Not Tonya. She’d try anything. She was fearless. Some of the older kids in class would dare her to attempt a double lutz, and she’d try it. The falls never bothered her.”

  —

  When the scandal surrounding the Nancy Kerrigan attack broke, there was a hunger to know more about Harding’s life, her upbringing. LaVona Golden was much discussed, much interviewed. She showed up at the Clackamas Town Center rink to watch her daughter practice in the mornings and to talk to reporters. She wore drop earrings for an interview with Connie Chung on CBS’s prime-time newsmagazine program, “Eye to Eye.” And she denied all these stories about abuse, about pressure.

  Golden became disgusted with the media. They went overboard, she said, in reporting her seven marriages. And they didn’t even call her by her right name, she complained.

  “They call me LaVona. That is my legal name, but I didn’t even know it was my name until I got married and met my real parents for the first time,” she told freelancer Risa Krive. “The name I have always gone by is Sandy. The papers don’t even know that.

  “They say I’ve been married at least ten times—that was the last I heard, three days ago. By now I should have at least twelve husbands!” And she laughed.

  On January 16, “60 Minutes” broadcast a student film made in 1986, when Harding was sixteen years old, and Golden was particularly upset. The film showed Harding’s side of a phone conversation with LaVona. After hanging up, Harding says, “What a bitch!” and tells how her mother berated her for falling on a jump.

  Golden says she didn’t watch the broadcast. “I told my lawyer to watch the program because I had no intention of watching it. I knew it was not real. It was all fake.”

  She also said that Harding didn’t have it quite as tough as has been reported. “She didn’t really have a bad life—she had what a person would classify as normal.” Everything except the skating was normal—that required special sacrifices.

  Little Tonya got out of nonessential classes in school so she could practice skating, her mother said, and that probably had made other children jealous. And they had to move a lot, so that Tonya could find year-round schooling. The desire and drive to skate all came from Tonya, not her mother, insisted Golden.

  “I tried to bribe her out of skating by getting her a horse,” Golden recalled. “It took a while, but I found out that skating is a very expensive sport—when we started I didn’t realize that. It was very expensive at the beginning—I made all her costumes. But then there were events and competitions that she had to go to out of state, and we had to get there, stay somewhere, and eat—it was terribly expensive. I tried to get her interested in something else, so I got her a pony. She wanted the pony and the skating—so I got rid of the pony.”

  Harding is fond of saying that she wasn’t raised with a silver spoon in her mouth, but Golden says her own girlhood was different from her famous daughter’s.

  “I had everything handed to me on a silver platter,” she said. “I had a baby grand piano, a swimming pool, eleven guest rooms to take my friends home from boarding school.” The problem was that the woman who raised her was abusive, LaVona said, as was Golden’s first husband. It was all very difficult, Golden complained, “going from wealthy to nothing.”

  Not that Tonya’s life was so bad, her mother emphasizes. Tonya and her other children—much older than Tonya—“always had the best of what I could give them.” Golden said she had made sure they had a nice home, nice furniture. Their food, she said, was mostly what they hunted or fished for themselves.

  “I made all the children’s clothes or bought them from Goodwill, the Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul. In fact, Tonya’s first pair of skates came from Goodwill. I never bought anything unless it was almost new.”

  —

  Tonya Harding was only three when she decided she wanted to be an Olympic figure skating champion. During the next two decades, Diane Rawlinson made that dream possible.

  The relationship almost didn’t happen. When LaVona Harding brought her four-year-old daughter to the Jantzen Beach Arena, where Rawlinson coached several national-class skaters, the former Ice Capades soloist said no, thanks.

  “I told them I didn’t work with beginners. She should take beginning lessons, and maybe I would work with her in a few years,” Rawlinson said.

  But Harding’s stubborn streak was broad even then.

  For a week the child walked on skates—she hadn’t learned to glide—around Rawlinson and her elite skaters, and the coach finally gave in. “We were her target and she was going
to circle us. I finally decided the only way I could have control over the situation was to be her coach. I said I’d do it on a week-to-week basis.”

  But a weekly promise became a commitment of years.

  Rawlinson saw a child with promise, a rare determination and a crying need for stability. She responded by guiding Tonya on ice and trying to offer support to her off the ice. Harding had great athletic talent. She learned slowly but correctly, the way Rawlinson taught her, so that she could land successful triple jumps at nine—an age when most girls could manage only singles.

  Rawlinson brought friends to watch Tonya. One couple saw the little girl doing jumping jacks in the corner of the rink and were entranced. They helped pay for her ice time and coaching.

  Rawlinson likes her skaters to be well-rounded, to study their homework, have friends, develop a life outside the rink. Harding did just the opposite. Rawlinson sometimes threw up her hands in frustration—“Coaching Tonya can be an adventure,” she said once—but she also saw in Tonya some of her own childhood in Seattle.

  “Skating was my whole self-image. When I stepped on the ice, I could be whoever I wanted to be and that’s who I wanted to be,” Rawlinson said. “Tonya’s skating has really been her foundation in life. It’s the only thing that has remained a constant.”

  Rawlinson learned how hard it was to break from that life when a traffic accident in the early 1970s forced her to stop skating. It was two years before she accepted the loss. “I couldn’t feel special without my skating. I think I finally grew up.”

  She saw Harding embrace the skater’s life and didn’t hesitate to pay for the boots, buy the plane ticket or give of her coaching knowledge to make sure the young skater had every on-ice opportunity she could find.

  Even though she cared deeply about Harding, she had less control off the ice.

  —

  Tonya was always close to her father, Al. Her stepbrothers and stepsister were much older, not playmates at all, and her father was the bright spot in a lonely childhood. He taught her how to split wood and handle a gun. She killed her first deer at age thirteen, and she was as handy with a wrench as most teen-age girls are with a telephone. But though she could change a set of brake shoes, she never learned how to deal with people. She set her eyes on the prize and blasted ahead. Those in the way had better clear a path.