“She has her own set of rules,” said one Portland skating coach. “When she’s on the ice, she’s the best in the arena and she figures she doesn’t have to follow the typical rules, like giving the right of way to other coaches if you’re not having a lesson, or waiting your turn to play your program music.”
Tonya dropped out of high school, the better to concentrate on her skating. She got a job at a fast-food potato stand in the shopping mall where she practiced. But she never held a real job for long. As she said several years later, skating was her job. It was what she did for twenty years. And she expected a paycheck for all that work—a big paycheck.
When Harding was fifteen years old she had a tumultuous year. She went to the national championships for the first time and finished a strong sixth. Her parents’ marriage crumbled for good. She was in an auto accident and badly hurt her back; for a time it looked as if she might never be able to skate again. Slowly but surely, she got back on the ice.
Tonya Harding would blossom into a world-class skater, but she skated with more power than grace. Her body was small and compact, full of fast-twitch fibers. She couldn’t create an elegant line with long limbs, but she could carry her speed through her routines and jumps like nobody’s business.
John McBride, who owns the Valley Ice Arena in Beaverton, Oregon, has watched Harding for fifteen years. He’s seen her land quadruple loops in practice—a jump less than a handful of men even attempt. If Harding lined up in a sprint with a professional hockey team, McBride said, the fastest hockey centers would finish twenty yards in her wake.
“This girl is a Larry Bird or a Wayne Gretzky, a Babe Ruth,” McBride insisted. “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.”
2
Love and Happiness
Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly found each other in 1986. Harding noticed the slender, dark-haired man watching her practice at the Clackamas Town Center. Curious, Harding skated up to the stranger and boldly introduced herself.
Gillooly, just as boldly, asked her out.
Harding was a fifteen-year-old who soon would drop out of high school in her sophomore year. Gillooly, eighteen, was an unexceptional student who had graduated that year from David Douglas High School. She was a figure skater on the rise. He worked at a downtown Portland department store.
Gillooly’s early life is almost a blank page. Because he was not an athlete or a musician, his only appearances in his high school yearbooks were class portraits. Gillooly did have an aptitude for business, friends said.
“He was more a talker, and I mean that in a good way, not a bad one,” Gillooly’s older brother, Joel, would remember. “But he was more developed in social skills than in athletic skills.”
When he met Harding, Gillooly was working at a tailoring shop at the downtown Meier & Frank department store. A few years later, he would go to work filling orders at an Oregon Liquor Control Commission warehouse, a mind-numbing job that paid the bills for almost three years. In a Multnomah County courtroom in 1994, Gillooly described his real job as managing his wife’s career, although that often amounted to selling T-shirts to raise money.
On the evening of what was supposed to be their first date, a violent incident occurred. Harding was at home alone, curling her hair and doing the things a teen-age girl does to prepare for a first date. Chris Davison, Tonya’s twenty-six-year-old half-brother, came home drunk. He asked Harding for a hug and, when she briefly put her arms around him, he fondled her breast. Harding broke away, but Davison followed, asking her to kiss him. Tonya slapped him and, when that didn’t stop him, burned Davison with a curling iron. She then locked herself in a bathroom, emerged, broke away from Davison and called 911.
Davison threatened to kill her if she told anyone he had attacked her. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, and she fought him off with a hockey stick. Finally, the police arrived and arrested Davison.
The Clackamas County sheriff’s deputies found Harding in tears. When she stopped crying, Harding rejected the deputies’ offer to call in medical personnel to check her.
Harding later told her friends that Davison had raped her. He pleaded guilty to resisting arrest in the assault. Two years later, Davison would be killed in a hit-and-run accident. He died when he was struck by a car while walking across a Portland street. An autopsy revealed that he was legally drunk at the time. Detectives never identified the driver, and eventually the investigation was suspended.
(After the Kerrigan attack, there were so many media inquiries about the accident that the police issued a statement: “There is no evidence or reason to believe that Harding or any relatives are associated with, had any involvement or knowledge regarding this accident.”)
“He did have a problem with drinking,” LaVona told Sports Illustrated in 1992. “I wouldn’t put it past Chris to try and get a kiss. Tonya has a vivid imagination. She has a tendency to tell tall tales.” Neither Harding’s mother or father had believed her when she told them Davison had attacked her.
—
Harding’s relationship with her mother was steadily falling apart. The marriage of Al and LaVona had broken up after fifteen years. Al had left in search of work and LaVona soon would marry James Golden. Even when Tonya was successful, such as her sixth-place finish in her first national championship, LaVona would criticize and condemn. Tonya took it without tears as a child, but she rebelled as a teen-ager.
Jeff Gillooly would bring a new kind of support to Harding’s life. Harding would later describe Jeff as the rock that held her steady and made her life good. She even skated better and, with Jeff at her side, she began climbing through the ranks of national skaters.
There was a trade-off, however, at least as far as her friends were concerned. When Tonya was with Jeff, she ignored her old friends. The year before she met Gillooly, Harding had grown close to the Webber family. David Webber was the manager of a fast-food restaurant where Harding bought coffee. The skater took to calling David “Dad” and Ruth Webber “Mom.” She became best friends with their daughter, Stephanie, and her brothers, Mark and Brent.
As Harding and her own mother grew further apart, she grew closer to the Webbers—but then Gillooly entered her life. In 1988, Jeff and Tonya moved in together. Two years later, on March 18, 1990, they invited a few friends and family members to a chapel in Vancouver, Washington, and were married. Stephanie Webber, who had disapproved of Jeff from the start, was nevertheless the maid of honor. The newlyweds spent their wedding night at a Portland hotel.
Stephanie wasn’t the only one who questioned Harding’s choice. Neither Al nor LaVona had liked Jeff. Friends of Tonya’s thought he tried to control her life and that he would ruin her career.
“I don’t know him that well,” David Webber later said. “I talked with him several times, and he seemed like a quiet person. But the key thing to know is that we never saw much of Tonya when they were together. We saw a lot of her when they were apart.”
And, before the marriage was even two years old, there was violence.
—
On June 18, 1991, Harding filed for divorce from Gillooly in Polk County, south of Portland. The next day, a circuit court judge in Clackamas County issued a restraining order against Gillooly, prohibiting him from entering Harding’s home or any ice rink where she was training or performing.
“He wrenched my arm and wrist and he pulled my hair and shoved me,” Harding said in her petition for the restraining order. “I recently found out he bought a shotgun and I am scared for my safety.”
The next month, the divorce case was moved to Clackamas County, where Harding and Gillooly were living. Harding wanted the court to award her sole ownership of the couple’s prized Bluewater boat. On July 14, Portland police were called when a fight broke out between Harding and Gillooly over the boat at a marina on the Willamette River.
> According to Harding, Gillooly’s brother John had followed her to the marina, where he contacted Jeff. When Jeff showed up, he waved an ax handle and shouted at Harding. Tonya called the police, but before they arrived, Jeff said, “I think we should break your legs and end your career.” His brother hopped over a boat trailer and threatened the terrified skater with a club.
But in a special report filed in addition to the incident report, Portland police described a different scene. Gillooly told police that the boat had been parked on a trailer at his mother’s house. When he went outside that July morning, the boat and trailer were gone. Gillooly suspected Harding and headed to the marina where they had bought the boat because he thought Tonya might try to sell it there.
When Gillooly found Harding and the boat in the marina parking lot, an argument broke out. One of the first officers on the scene described Harding’s reaction to police. “Hi, I’m Tonya Harding, the world-class skater. I’m too busy to be having problems like this, and I’ve got a restraining order against Jeff.”
In mid-August, a Clackamas County judge ordered Gillooly and Harding to stay away from each other, and a month later another judge ordered the boat held in storage so neither Harding or Gillooly could use it.
But Harding’s troubles weren’t over. On September 3, she called the police when a boyfriend named Shane Mallory entered her apartment and found her with another man. Harding told police Mallory refused to leave, and he wrestled the telephone from her—cutting her finger in the scuffle—when she tried to call for help. Mallory told police he thought he and Harding still had a relationship but that “he would have no problem staying away from Ms. Harding.”
Harding soon met another man, a young Canadian, who visited her in October. Her friends and family liked the man, and she seemed calmer around him. But within days, Tonya was telling friends she was back with Jeff. On November 13, Harding asked that the divorce from Gillooly be put on hold so they could work out their differences. They were apparently successful. In February 1992, when she signed the petition to withdraw the divorce, Tonya signed her name “Harding Gillooly.”
“I’m a complete person again,” Harding told Sports Illustrated. “I know it seemed like I was happy, but something was missing, and now I know what it was. Jeff and I love each other more than ever. We’re going to get a counselor and work it out. I know he’s changed. I see it in his eyes, and I believe in him. I’m going to be married once in my whole life, and that’s the way I’m going to look at it. I don’t want to lose him. I really don’t.”
—
But if Tonya and Jeff had a hard time staying apart, they had a harder time staying together. The trajectory of Tonya and Jeff’s romance can be traced in police files. During 1993, their names appeared with numbing regularity, usually with Harding listed as the victim, Gillooly as the suspect.
They had a terrible argument in March. Harding told police Gillooly had grabbed her hair and slammed her head into the bathroom floor next to the toilet. She tried to escape; he chased her in his pickup. She hid between houses to escape. Friends picked her up in the middle of the night and took her home. She was shaken, chunks of her hair were missing or loosened, her hand was red and swollen. She said Gillooly had slammed her fingers in the car door.
She told her friends she was through with her husband, and they believed her. How could anyone take that kind of abuse?
A few days later the police recorded Gillooly’s side of the story. “He said he would never hurt his wife,” the report says. “He did not hit her or pound her head into the floor.” He said that he merely took her by the shoulders to try to calm her down and that he was concerned about her safety, so he followed her in the truck to try to talk her into coming home. It was because he cared about her.
During the next few months, Harding kept calling the cops. She got another restraining order and filed for divorce. In the summer of 1993, Harding complained that Gillooly was following her on the highway. She said he had stolen a leather jacket from her house. She said she had received second-hand death threats from him.
He denied all.
Also that summer, her white 1977 Ford pickup—outfitted with a CD player—was stolen. Tonya was furious. She suspected Gillooly. She told Chris Hayes and Dan Doherty, two men she worked out with at a gym near the rink, that she wanted Gillooly taken care of. They weren’t sure what she meant. Harding had approached one of them a few days before about being her bodyguard to protect her from her husband, but now she wanted them to knock Gillooly out of the picture altogether—to kill him.
They were astounded. She said that most people wanted $100,000 for this kind of job because of who she was, famous and all. They laughed it off but had no doubt she was serious. She asked if they wanted to go out with her, take a dip in a hot tub. They declined.
A few days later she amended her offer, said one of the men. She wanted to know if someone would just beat up Gillooly for her—“slap him around a little,” he said. The man was offended. He stopped working out with her.
In September, the license plate from Harding’s truck was sent to Portland radio station KKRZ-FM. The return address read: “Robin Hood and His Merry Men, Sherwood Forest, Nottingham, England.”
—
Harding did not hesitate to date other men during her separations from Gillooly. But her husband was always there, one way or another.
In the spring of 1993 she dated Tom Arant of Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland. He said it was a short, intense romance, which was unusual for him. He liked to take things slower. But Harding was different; she had a history of brief, dramatic relationships with men and with her friends. She talked a lot about Gillooly, he said, about how she disliked him. About how mean he was to her. And she smoked cigarettes a lot, too, blaming it on stress over her problems with Gillooly. “But she couldn’t stop talking to him,” Arant said. “If I don’t like someone, I don’t talk to him. But she had to talk with him at least three or four times a week.”
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, she went back to Gillooly.
Wendy Goold has known Harding since before she won her first national championship in 1991. She is not a skater, but they became friends. Like many friends, they resemble each other. They are both petite blondes, with pony-tails and ready smiles. Goold worries about Harding, worries about her a lot.
They lived together twice in 1993, when Harding was separated from her husband. Goold had even introduced Harding to Arant, a good-looking man who she thought would be a good, stable influence. In the spring of 1993, they had all lived together with another friend in a house near Boring, Oregon.
But Harding left the group to go back to Gillooly, then left him once again and returned to Goold. The two friends decided to move into a two-bedroom apartment in Clackamas as roommates.
Goold, who works in an accountant, said she tried to be a good influence, to show Harding that, despite her rough upbringing and her problems with Gillooly, there were alternatives: Kind men, good jobs, a nice life. Stability. But it didn’t work. Harding never seemed to appreciate the alternatives.
“I think somewhere in there she’s a really good person,” Goold said. “I’ve seen her at her best.”
But she didn’t understand Harding’s attraction to Gillooly. It baffled her. At least once, Goold said, she and Harding were out at McMenamins pub in Milwaukie. Gillooly came in and took away Harding’s drink, french fries and cigarettes. “He was very controlling,” Goold remembered.
When Harding decided in the summer of 1993 to go back to Gillooly, Goold was disgusted. She would move out of their apartment right after Labor Day.
Although the divorce was already in the works and would be declared final in August, Harding told friends she wanted to “have the divorce annulled,” and she and Gillooly continued to call each other husband and wife.
A month later, in early October, Harding also moved out. She left at three o’clock in the morning, putting her things into Gillooly’s pickup. It did
not go smoothly.
The neighbors heard a loud argument, then a gunshot. Some saw a man pick a woman up off the ground and force her into the cab of the truck. They thought she had been shot.
Police stopped the truck as it was driving away. Inside were Harding, Gillooly, a handgun and a shotgun. A police officer handcuffed the once and future national champion figure skater to the front of his patrol car. He read her the Miranda rights. He talked with Gillooly in the back of his car, then with Harding. They said that the gun had gone off accidentally when Gillooly was carrying it, but their stories didn’t match. Finally, the couple admitted that Harding fired the gun, but they didn’t want that known. Harding was worried about the publicity.
Gillooly conceded that they had been fighting, about a woman he had been seeing. But he didn’t want to press charges.
Nobody but Harding knows why she stuck so long with Gillooly. “The question I always had when I was having problems with Tonya was how much of it was Tonya and how much was Jeff,” said Michael Rosenberg, her former sports agent who dissolved their relationship in the fall of 1993. “Because when Jeff was not around, everything seemed to go much smoother,” he added.
“I think she loves him and holds on to him and she hates him and is afraid of him.”
3
Fire and Ice
The big, difficult jumps must come early in the program, when the skater still has energy. Then it is a matter of hanging on, lasting. In 1991, on a cold February afternoon in Minneapolis, Tonya Harding glided to center ice to begin her long program. She wore a long-sleeved dress the color of Crest toothpaste. She was the decided underdog.
Fire on Ice Page 2