Why, why, why?” screamed and cried figure skater Nancy Kerrigan after a burly thug hit her in the knee with a metal pole. “Why, why?” I exclaimed when CBS News executives told me I had to report on the sordid soap opera involving Olympic arch-rivals Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. I was co-anchor of the CBS Evening News for six months. Would Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather ever have been sent to chase two women who twirled, jumped and slid for the audience’s delight? Absolutely not. So why would CBS ask me to do that?
CBS had acquired the rights to televise the 1994 Olympics for a reported $300 million, and since figure skating was usually the most watched sport, the suits were salivating at the prospect of a potential prime-time ratings boom. CBS had a vested interest in covering and hyping up the rivalry between the competitors.
In this era of binge eating, the media loved to fuel the fairy tale. Nancy Kerrigan was the beautiful Snow White in Vera Wang’s tutus. Tonya Harding was an ugly duckling from the wrong neighborhood. She had led a hard life and claimed that both her estranged husband and her mother, a night-shift waitress, had physically abused her. Yet she had remarkable athletic talent and was a fiery, determined, tough woman driven by courage, not grace. When Tonya’s story came to light, authorities discovered evidence that her ex-husband had planned the attack on Nancy.
The Tonya-Nancy saga became a drama that played out like a made-for-television film full of Shakespearean themes:
Love: They both loved and lived skating.
Hate: Tonya hated Nancy.
Desire: For fame and fortune.
Betrayal: About fair competition; about the spirit of the Olympic Games.
Coverage of the wedding of First Daughter Tricia Nixon in the Rose Garden on the South Portico lawn of the White House. June 12, 1971.Courtesy of Connie Chung.
I tried with all my might to cover the skaters, but the pressure was enormous.
The CBS executives told me, “You have to do this for the network.” I had no choice.
Soon I was on a plane to Portland, Oregon, to pet Tonya. I was not alone. Media from all over the world had flocked to the Clackamas Town Center, a shopping mall near Happy Valley, a suburb of Portland. The mall’s public ice rink was crowded with cameras and crews from as far away as Japan and Australia, including reporters from British tabloids, the National Investigatorand even the venerable New York Times.
Staring down a steep, 8-foot wall at the vast ice rink below, I dangled my microphone to exchange a few words with the “bad girl” of figure skating as she made her laps around the rink.
“Tonya, Tonya!” I waved her over to my camera. But the question swirled in my head: Would Walter Cronkite shout in his deep, serious voice, “Tonya, Tonya. Come here, Tonya!”? No way. Oh, how I wanted to go and defy my bosses.
I thought my days of reporting unworthy stories were over, but knowing I had to deliver, I persuaded Tonya to do an interview for my magazine program. Eye to eye. The curse was, once again, that the interview achieved record ratings. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
How embarrassing it was for me to wade with Tonya to the Olympic Games in Norway, not only to be co-host of the CBS Evening News from Lillehammer, but also to get yet another interview with Tonya. She agreed to a one-on-one interview before the Olympic competition. Tonya answered the questions like a seasoned politician and refused to talk about the heinous act against Nancy. Then she got fed up with my repeated attempts to get her to talk about the attack and suddenly snatched her microphone away and walked out, just like a cranky Capitol Hill insider. I was criticized for pressuring her, which any good reporter would have done. Only later did she plead guilty to being involved in the cover-up.
