Columnist Dean Juipe: Harding can’t escape her past

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 1999 | 10:27 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@vegas.com or 259-4084.

Some things are just not forgivable.

Marital infidelity? Maybe that can be forgiven.

Moments of debauchery? Perfectly understandable.

Ill-timed drunkenness? Sloth? Well, things happen.

But agreeing to, if not masterminding, a plot to physically harm your athletic rival? That's going too far, even in these permissive times.

And, as such, Tonya Harding will forever be branded for her part in the knee-cracking incident in 1994 that left Nancy Kerrigan limping and undeniably disconsolate.

As sneak attacks go, this was one for the ages. It was the sports equivalent of Pearl Harbor.

Time passes, yet some wounds never heal.

Harding, 28, her life immersed in an unappealing soap opera, wants the world to forgive her but it's just not going to happen. She doesn't deserve it.

She should find a real job and go to work for a living, rather than relying on the curious to support her professional ice-skating gambit.

Banned for life from amateur events by the United States Figure Skating Association, Harding can, nonetheless, skate professionally. This week she's performing (for the first time since a 1995 between-the-periods exhibition at a minor-league hockey game) in a five-woman tournament in West Virginia that will be televised on three later dates by ESPN.

Among her competitors is former Olympian and Las Vegas resident Liz Manley. Watch out, Liz.

Harding's a mess and perhaps always will be. But her signature moment came in Detroit in '94 when her husband at the time, Jeff Gillooly, and another man ambushed Kerrigan with a 2x4 in an attempt to eliminate the country's top skater from U.S. Olympic team consideration.

Before her involvement came to light, Harding made the Olympic team and finished a mediocre eighth at Lillehammer.

Gillooly served time in prison for the offense and, when he was released, promptly changed his name to Jeff Stone.

Jeff Stones everywhere were immediately appalled.

Harding has since married and divorced a second time, with machinist Michael Smith lasting three months. Also in the interim she formed a band, the Golden Blades, that performed once (in her native Portland, Ore.) to catcalls and assorted verbal abuse; was the informal model for a "Trailer Trash Barbie" doll (complete with dangling cigarette and lipstick smears) put out by Mattel; and says she was temporarily abducted at knife point by a stranger in February of '97.

In the interest of fairness, she also assisted another woman administering CPR to an 81-year-old woman who was having a heart attack in a restaurant.

But even that good deed was insufficient to patch the rift between Harding and her mother, as they still refuse to speak, nor is it enough to compensate for Harding having allowed her husband and his goon buddy to terrorize the unsuspecting Kerrigan in Detroit. Some images die hard, and it's still easy to picture Kerrigan wailing and wondering "Why me?" as medics tended to her in the bowels of Cobo Hall.

The tape of a re-enactment of that sad act and its aftermath should be required viewing for anyone tempted to buy a ticket to see Harding skate. Forgive and forget? Not a chance.