Tonya Harding is skating over remorse
Tonya Harding is having a moment.
The onetime skating star is the focus of the big-screen film “I, Tonya.”
You might have seen Harding at the Golden Globes Sunday night. The cameras caught her teary-eyed as Oprah accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award.
There was something disconcerting watching Oprah drop her powerhouse speech about ending harassment and assault while a convicted felon sat a few feet away.
Harding is also the subject of the two-hour special “Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story” (tonight at 9 on ABC), which covers her career, her tumultuous personal life and her feelings about the 1994 assault on Stoneham Olympic silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan.
Harding, you might recall, accepted a plea deal in that attack for hindering the prosecution of her ex-husband and his flunkies, having knowledge of the assault after it occurred.
She was sentenced to three years probation and a $160,000 fine.
Harding now tells ABC she “knew something was up” several weeks before the attack.
“I did, however, overhear them talking about stuff, where, ‘Well, maybe we should take somebody out so we can make sure she gets on the team.’ And I remember telling them, I go, ‘What the hell are you talking about? I can skate.’”
Actually, Harding did more than that.
She obtained Kerrigan’s practice location and training schedule for her coconspirators. The FBI found the note, in Harding’s handwriting, in the trash.
The New York Times yesterday ran an interview on Harding: “Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now.”
That might be the funniest headline the Times has ever run.
We’re supposed to feel sorry for Harding because she grew up poor and had an abusive mother.
Excuse my French: Bullpucky.
Lots of us had horrible parents. Lots of us grew up in poverty.
That’s not a pass for criminal assault.
Hollywood loves a second act, a story about redemption.
But Harding, as she demonstrated so often when it came down to crunch time in her competitions, hasn’t done the work.
She skated over the remorse, the personal accountability. A convincing story helps, too.
Kerrigan, meanwhile, found the mental and physical mettle to come back from that attack and skate the program of her life. She was edged out of a gold medal by a tenth of a point.
She married and is raising three children and appeared last season on “Dancing With the Stars.”
She could live to be 120, find a cure for cancer, unite North and South Korea and still the first line in her obit across the world will include Harding’s name.
Imagine being forever linked with the person who helped assault you.
That should be a crime in itself.
But let’s give Tonya Harding her moment.
To borrow another catchphrase big in the news: Time’s up.