NBC's "Nancy & Tonya" To Air Sunday Night (Feb. 23rd)

[JamesG]

Nancy Kerrigan to Open Up About Tonya Harding in New NBC Documentary
July 27, 2013
by Sadie Gennis


NBC is developing a documentary about Tonya Harding's notorious attack on Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 Winter Olympics, the network announced Saturday at the Television Critics Association fall TV previews.

Mary Carillo will interview both skaters as they re-tell the dramatic story and share details on their lives, including what they've learned and how they've changed since Harding had Kerrigan clubbed in the knee the night before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.



Because of the incident, known as "The Whack Heard Round the World," Harding was stripped of her 1994 U.S. Championships title and banned for life from participating in United States Figure Skating Association-run events as either a skater or a coach.

She was also not welcome on the professional circuit.







The news comes three days after ESPN announced a similar project — a 30 for 30 documentary about the Kerrigan-Harding incident, dubbed Tonya and Nancy. However, ESPN's documentary will not feature an interview with Kerrigan.

Instead, it will feature an interview with Harding and several others who will look back on the six weeks between Kerrigan's injury and the winter games.



NBC's documentary will air in primetime during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

ESPN's project will premiere in November.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Nancy-Ke...N-1068354.aspx

[catlover79]

I remember that whole soap opera very well. I was in 8th grade, and that was the only reason I watched the Olympics.

[biffbronson]

I think I'm gonna feel weak in the knees when I watch this...!

[JamesG]

NBC Revisits Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding Scandal in "Fascinating Character Study"
Feb 21, 2014
by Joyce Eng


On Feb. 23, 1994, all eyes were on Lillehammer.

Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding were set to face off in the ladies' figure skating Olympic short skate, just six weeks after Kerrigan was clubbed in the knee at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in an attack orchestrated by Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly.

The tape-delayed broadcast drew more than 70 million viewers and a 48.5 household rating — still the seventh highest-rated TV program in history.





Twenty years to the day on Sunday, the two will be back on an Olympic broadcast in NBC's one-hour documentary Nancy & Tonya (7/6c) to discuss the soap opera-like scandal that riveted America — and in Kerrigan's case, for the first time.

"Everyone's talked about this except Nancy. Tonya can't stop talking about it! But Nancy wanted to do this. She was ready," Mary Carillo, who produced and narrates the documentary, tells TVGuide.com.

"I think 10-years might still be too close, but 20 is a long time. Looking back is going to be a distant experience anyway. What did this do to them? I think that comes over very strongly."





Carillo interviews both Kerrigan and Harding in the documentary, a project she and her producing partner Margaret Grossi had been wanting to do for years. But like most outlets that craved the sit-down — most recently, ESPN's 30 for 30 doc about the the scandal The Price of Gold — Carillo could never get Kerrigan on board no matter how hard she bugged the skater's husband and agent Jerry Solomon.

"I've known Jerry since he represented tennis players. I would see him at tennis tournaments and I would say to him, 'Look, I want to do this thing for the 20th anniversary,'" Carillo says.

"He would say, 'No, she would never want to be part of that. It's not something she wants to talk about.' For years, he'd tell me that. But I kept at him. He must've seen me coming and been like, 'Oh, God! We're at a tennis tournament. Why is she talking about this?' But we all knew it was a good story."





Solomon started to give in after he attended a screening of Carillo and Grossi's HBO documentary Fire & Ice in 2011 about another famous rivalry, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe.

A year later, Carillo and Grossi met with Kerrigan to pitch the project and eventually convinced her. "Nancy was still on the fence. I said, 'An anniversary is coming up. We're doing this with or without you. Why don't you tell your story once?'" she says.

"We were lucky that she said yes."





The goal of the documentary was to do a character study, Carillo says. Much of Kerrigan and Harding's rivalry and media narrative have been framed by polar-opposite personas. Brunette vs. blonde. Elegance vs. athleticism. High-class ice princess vs. white trash wild card. Even the way they've each lived the past 20 years is vastly different — Kerrigan shunning the spotlight to raise her three kids and Harding doing everything possible to stay in it (see: her and Gillooly's sex tape, boxing career, book, TV show appearances).

Kerrigan's reluctance to speak about the incident, coupled with her notorious "Why? Why?" cries after the attack, only perpetuated the spoiled ice princess image.

It was made worse when Kerrigan, who won the silver behind Oksana Baiul, was caught on-camera before the medal ceremony remarking that Baiul, who was getting her makeup redone, would cry again on the podium, and later at a Disney World parade ostensibly calling it "corny" and "dumb." But that perception of her is flawed.





"People talk about class warfare and all that stuff and how Nancy was an ice princess. She wasn't an ice princess," Carillo says.

"She was a shy tomboy from a hard-working blue-collar family. The ice princess thing to me is such a phony story line. Through the years, it's stayed that way. Tonya is the hard-scrabbled anti-hero. That is wrong. I'm very happy for people to see this to dispel that notion entirely, when they see how Nancy was raised and where she came from."



She continues: "Nancy was terrific. She was very open and talked in-depth about everything. She was what we thought she'd be. She's a very authentic, hard-working woman. And Tonya is a survivor. She gets boxed into the corner and she's like, 'OK, now what do I do? How do I get out?' It's very interesting to see them juxtaposed then and now."





It's Kerrigan's nose-to-the-grindstone upbringing, Carillo believes, that helped her recover from the assault to win the silver medal and persevere through the insane media frenzy that followed. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, the press and public devoured every new twist to the sordid saga that seemed more surreal than the previous one.

Gillooly and two of his associates, Shane Stant — who attacked Kerrigan — and Shawn Eckhardt, were arrested and later imprisoned for the scheme, which included aborted plans to attack Kerrigan at her home rink, except Stant and Eckhardt couldn't find it. Harding, who won nationals in Kerrigan's absence, admitted to obstructing the investigation, claiming she only learned of the plot after the attack, and then threatened to sue the United States Figure Skating Association for $25 million if they dropped her from the Olympic team.

(Harding finished eighth in Lillehammer and was later stripped of her national title and banned for life by the USFSA.)





The insatiable appetite reached a fever pitch when the two frostily shared their first practice session in Lillehammer, never making eye contact with each other.

"Scott Hamilton describes in the show how he looked up in the stands and he said, 'I saw the New York Times, the National Equirer, the Washington Post, People magazine, and they were all equal. I knew then that figure skating had changed a little bit, but the media had changed forever,'" Carillo says.

"He's right. This was the beginning of reality TV. This was before O.J. Simpson. People couldn't get enough. This also created that environment where if you wanted an exclusive, you had to pay for it. 'What was Tonya like in school?' What people considered news changed. This was before tweeting. If it had happened now, it would've been over quicker because people move on faster now. Back then, it was drawn-out and then evolved into mockery. I can't even imagine going through that."





Because of the media spectacle, Carillo doesn't blame Kerrigan, 44, for staying silent all these years.

"She hated that people couldn't say 'Nancy Kerrigan' without saying 'Tonya Harding.' They had both become punchlines when they were each brilliant skaters — Tonya was the second woman to land a triple Axel — and they ought to have been remembered just for that," she says. "Nancy's not a publicity hound. But Tonya says it on the show: She uses her name and her reputation. She says, 'I needed money.' She makes no apologies for that. God bless her."





Harding and Kerrigan have not spoken to each other since 1998, when they both appeared on the Fox apology special Breaking the Ice, where Harding attempted to make amends to a purse-lipped Kerrigan.

"What Tonya says in that is, 'I'm sorry for being around the wrong people at the wrong place at the wrong time.' She didn't say, 'I'm sorry for what I did,'" Carillo says. "You can see Nancy giving her kind of a fishy look. Now you have Tonya saying, 'I have apologized so many times' and you have Nancy saying, 'I don't think she ever actually apologized.'"





Nor will she likely ever do so. Now married with a son, Harding, 43, remains adamant in the documentary that she had nothing to do with the attack despite former coaches, friends and Gillooly himself (who now goes by Jeff Stone) saying otherwise over the years.

"I'm not sure how you can think any other way," Carillo says with a laugh.

"But that's her story and she's sticking to it. It's been 20 years. She's un-budge-able from my experience with her. ... Her resistance to changing her story is absolutely metallic no matter anybody says or what the FBI tried to prove. From the people we've spoken to, she had a chance to win, to be one of the greats. She was a terrific skater. She didn't need to resort to this."





Apology or not, Kerrigan had long ago moved on, and Carillo predicts, probably won't address the scandal again — or at least for a while.

"She has a very normal home life, as everyone will see. Nancy will be a revelation to a lot of people. You'll see the flesh and blood of Nancy. It's a fascinating character study," Carillo says.

"She never wanted to dwell on this and she sums up the whole thing in one word: sad. That's the word she uses. The whole thing is sad. I do think there is something compelling about the whole thing still, and there always will be," she continues. "We likely won't ever see anything of this magnitude again. This transcended sports."





Nancy & Tonya premieres Sunday at 7/6c on NBC prior to the Winter Olympics closing ceremony.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Nancy-Ke...o-1078026.aspx

[JamesG]

Nancy Kerrigan Looks Back on "Sad" Tonya Harding Scandal, Defends Herself: "I Wasn't Whining"
Feb 23, 2014
by Joyce Eng


Nancy Kerrigan opened up for the first time about the Whack Heard 'Round the World Sunday on NBC's documentary Nancy & Tonya. And befitting someone who has avoided the spotlight the past 20 years, she doesn't waste many words describing the scandal that ushered in the age of salacious celebrity headlines.

"It's sad," Kerrigan said. "The bizarre craziness that all transpired — it's all sad."





Kerrigan was infamously clubbed in the knee at the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in an attack hatched by Tonya Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and clumsily executed by Shane Stant, who jumped through a Plexi-glass door to flee.

Though many people, including Harding's former coach, entertained the possibility that Harding was somehow linked to it, Kerrigan revealed that she initially never thought her archrival could be part of the attack.





"I had people asking me, 'Do you think she had anything to do with it?'" she said. "My reaction was, 'That's ridiculous.' To me, this had to have been some random act."

Even after Gillooly, Stant and another associate, Shawn Eckhardt, were arrested, Kerrigan said she still gave the benefit of the doubt to Harding, who pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution, claiming she learned of the scheme after the assault.

"I can remember saying even to the FBI, 'Well, maybe Tonya really didn't know. Maybe they did it for her.' And they're like, 'Nancy, we can't prove it, but we think she was the mastermind of the whole thing.'"





Harding — whose establishing shot was a surreal scene of her singing karaoke to 'Through the Eyes of Love' in an empty bar — staunchly insisted, as she always had, that she was not involved.

She also said that the two used to be friends and that she has apologized numerous times to Kerrigan, including for the final time face-to-face in 1998 on a staged apology show.

Kerrigan, however, stated they were not friends and that Harding has never admitted any wrongdoing. "I have apologized so many times that it's not worth — I'm sorry, she is not worth my time anymore," Harding said.





While Harding's defiant demeanor is nothing new, Kerrigan, who said she has always been "painfully" shy, defended herself for the first time against the criticism and inaccurate labels that have been placed on her.

In the ensuing media frenzy and scrutiny, the press and public turned on Kerrigan, mocking her anguished "Why? Why?" cry as the wail of an ungrateful, privileged ice princess, when in fact she grew up in a working-class, blue-collar family with a father who worked two jobs.

"Some people said it was whiny. 'Oh, the ice princess is whining.' Whining?! I wasn't whining. I had just been hit with a metal baton by a big, strong person," she said. "If you've never been attacked, you have no idea what you would do."





Two other incidents caused Kerrigan to fall out of sympathy after she recovered to win the silver medal at the Lillehammer Olympics six weeks later. She was branded a sore loser when she was caught snipping that gold medalist Oksana Baiul, whom Kerrigan was told was getting a makeup touch-up for the medal ceremony, would just cry again, and she was later filmed calling a Disney World parade she was in "corny."

"I wasn't finding fault in any way," Kerrigan said of the Baiul comment. "I'm like, 'Yeah, let's go! Let's get that cry on. C'mon, people are leaving. They're going to miss it.' There was literally no harm in my intentions behind that."

The Disney World remarks, she explained, were about wearing her medal in the parade, as she had been taught by her childhood coach not to do so in public. "It was always not OK to do something like that. That's bragging," she said. "Someone took that as I was talking negatively about Mickey Mouse, which didn't make any sense."





Kerrigan, now a full-time mom of three, said she doesn't dwell on the past, but wistfully expressed sadness at the detour her life took. "I would have chosen a different path if I could," she said. "I would've liked to have just done what I worked so hard for and not have to be linked like that. I could be linked as 'we're teammates' as opposed to this horrific act."

For her part, Harding, who has a 3-year-old son and does landscaping with her husband, wants to move on from the scandal after spending years capitalizing on her name.

"You guys, this '20-year thing' ... whatever. It's like, I'm done," she said. "Nobody wants to hear this crap anymore. And you know what? I don't give a damn."

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Nancy-Ke...C-1078064.aspx

[MacLeaper]

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm......

[irehtman]

I prefer the Dan Jansen remembrance from 20 years ago, instead. That was much better than that Nancy-Tonya incident from 20 years ago, no offense.