She never did seem quite cut out for the role of America’s Sweetheart that every woman’s skating champion since Peggy Fleming has had to fill. Harding–who compares herself to basketball star Charles Barkley–was more in the mold of a bratty, tomboyish kid sister, the kind who might borrow the family car to go drag-racing. Racing was in fact one of her office pursuits, along with hunting, pool and, apparently, smoking. By contrast Kerrigan, at 24 a year older than Harding, already has a charity (blindness–her mother is blind) and has taken up golf.

At bottom, championship skating is as remorselessly competitive as any sport in which the winners usually wind up several million dollars richer than the runners-up. But Harding never paid even lip service to its ethereal, spiritual dimensions. At 5 feet 1 (three inches shorter than Kerrigan), she cuts a powerful figure on the ice but not a particularly elegant one; her distinction is in jumps, especially the dramatic three-and-a-half revolution triple axel. When Harding won her first national championship in 1991, no other American woman and only one other woman in the world had completed a triple axel in competition. Her stepfather, James Golden, is right when he observes that if Tonya’s ability had been coupled with the charisma of Kerrigan, “she’d have been on top a long time ago–and stayed there.”

She comes by her lack of charisma honestly; she may be a brat, but not a spoiled brat. Kerrigan had an underprivileged childhood by the genteel standards of the skating world–her father was a welder–but she was Gloria Vanderbilt next to Harding, the daughter of a night waitress and her fifth husband, an occasional laborer and truckdriver. Growing up in and around Portland, Harding never lived in one house very long, and spent part of one gloomy year in a 17-foot trailer. Her father, Al, taught her to hunt and fish and fix up old cars and split wood for the stove–a skill she credits with developing the upperbody strength that is the secret to her successful jumping. Her mother, La Vona, hand-sewed the costumes she wore in her early competitions, inspiring in Tonya what acquaintances describe as a passionate, lifelong distaste for poverty. The love of skating she developed herself, the first time she saw ice in a shopping-mall rink. She learned to shoot with a cut-down .22 before she could read, but she learned to skate before she could shoot.

A different person could have fashioned from this autobiography an inspirational story of transcending poverty, but somehow Tonya’s personality keeps getting in the way. “She was very selfish, very surly,” says Golden, who married La Vona when Harding was 17. Golden suspects Harding made up or embroidered some of the lurid stories she tells about her past, such as a sexual attack by a half brother at the age of 15. (La Vona, who recently filed to make Golden ex-husband number six, couldn’t be reached for comment.) “She is extremely talented, complex and sweet,” says sports agent Michael Rosenberg, who ended three frustrating years of attempting to peddle Harding’s distinctive personality to advertisers last fall. “Also temperamental and at times difficult.” Diane Rawlinson, her first coach, went unpaid for weeks at a time ,when Al Harding was out of work, and bought Tonya skates out of her own pocket, but in 1989 Harding left, telling an interviewer, “I wasn’t happy skating for Diane.” She hired Dody Teachman, fired her, hired her back and eventually reunited with Rawlinson. “She can be kind of difficult to get along with,” says Teachman.

Yet her relations with her coaches have been models of decorum and consistency compared with her marriage to Gillooly. They met and began dating when she was only 15 and married five years later. “Manipulative” is the word many people use to describe Gillooly, who had filled orders for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission but left to manage Harding’s career. A year later Harding had filed for divorce and sought protection from a judge, writing: “He wrenched my arm and wrist and he pulled my hair and shoved me.” They got back together, apparently fought some more–Stephanie Webber, a close friend of Harding’s since she was 13, says she’s seen “fists thrown” between the couple–and divorced last. August.“He told me to watch my back,” Harding wrote in a petition for a restraining order a month before the divorce. “…he follows me and has broken into my house and into my truck and I am afraid for my safety.” A few months later a shot was fired during an argument outside their apartment. Police took Harding and Gillooly into custody and confiscated a handgun and shotgun: no charges were filed. But the couple continued their on-again, off-again relationship, and Harding still refers to Gillooll as her husband.

One footnote to this history dates from the 1991 separation, when Harding and Gillooly argued over the ownership of a boat. Police say Harding told them Gillooly had threatened her: “I think we should break your legs and end your career.”

Her career, meanwhile, has never quite lived up to the promise of that electrifying triple axel in 1991. She placed second in the world championships later that year, but dropped to third place in the 1992 Nationals and fell far short of her lifelong goal of a gold medal in the Olympics that year, placing fourth. She was plagued by a series of misadventures: at Skate America in October she interrupted her routine, pointing to a loose skate blade that could have sent her sprawling ont eh ice. A broken strap on her dress at last year’s Nationals interrupted her program, stopping her midrink. She finished fourth again. Her asthma, a problem since childhood, began acting up, possibly exacerbated by the cigarettes she denies smoking (photographs indicate otherwise). She did not even qualify automatically for the 1994 Nationals, and was scheduled to skate in a qualifying tournament in Portland last November. But a mysterious death threat kept her from competing, although not from appearing in a mall the next day to sign autographs for her fans. The USFSA obligingly gave her a bye to the Nationals, but last week one of the accused conspirators in the plot to injure Kerrigan allegedly told authorities the death threat was a fabrication.

And she was having money problems–a familiar theme in her life. Although she receives a stipend from the USFSA, she claimed recently that she was living on less than $10,000 a year, adding, “I haven’t bought new clothes for two years.” Her landlord evicted her last year over $1,095 in unpaid rent. Afforded a golden opportunity to say something inspirational on returning home to Portland as champion last week, she ringingly declared, “What I’m really thinking about are dollar signs.”

Yet to all those who have doubted her, to all who wonder if her moment for skating greatness has passed, she has on answer: It’s someone else’s fault. To explain a fourth-place finish in a Japanese competition in November she said, “I kind of got gypped.” In Detroit, talking about how asthma had reduced her lung capacity to 46 percent of normal, she said, “I just wish one of these days I could be like everyone else and see what happens.” So much adversity overcome, so much hard work and talent int he service of her dream–could she have thrown it all away out of jealousy, ambition and greed? Everyone hopes not, although the remark by Teachman, her former coach–“I would like to believe Tonya is not involved in this”–is something less than categorical denial of the possibility. To her believers, though–like Elaine Stamm, president of the Tonya Harding Fan Club, with 400 members in more than 20 states–Tonya Harding’s struggle is till the stuff of dreams. Stamm mentions a Vietnam veteran who has been inspired by Harding’s ability to overcome adversity. “Tonya changed his life,” she says. maybe someone ought to tell him about Helen Keller.

..MR.-

23

5'1"

105

Fourth at 1992 Olympics. Fourth again at the 1993 Nationals. First in the 1994 Nationals. The first American woman to land a triple axel.

In March 1990, she married Jeff Gillooly. They divorced last August, but they still live together.

Precarious; she has no commercial endorsements.

Drag-racing, auto repair and hunting.

24

5'4"

115

Won the bronze at the 1992 Olympics. She took fifth at the 1993 World Championships and skated to first in the 1993 Nationals.

Single.

Coming from a blue-collar background, she has grown into a valuable endorsement property.

She does charity work for the blind, Rollerblades and has recently taken up golf.

You can’t tell the winners without a scorecard. On a skating scale of 6.0, here are the results from last week:

The comeback kid on skates. provided she is fit for Nor-way. Campbell’s soup and Seiko look very smart.

$300 million for the Winter Games now a bargain. You blew pro football but now have the best story imaginable,

Not a chance in Norway. Maybe you can cohost talk show with G. Gordon Liddy.

Fast work on ugly case. But wait till public sees the jail time for an assault.

Comprehensive coverage filled with false reports about imminent arrests. ..MR0-