If you don’t remember SNL skewering Tonya Harding don’t feel too bad, it was there and gone for a lot of people. Second, don’t feel bad for Tonya Harding. What was a rapidly dwindling career eventually became a mediocre one that’s now a biopic that people can see in the theater. In fact you don’t even need to feel bad for Nancy Kerrigan any longer since she got up, dusted herself off, so to speak, and went on to achieve her own glory. So as bad as it got, and it got pretty bad, the whole Tony Harding and Nancy Kerrigan debacle was over and done with relatively quickly despite the fact that people were still joking about it years later.
In a sense the incident at the Cobo Arena instigated by Harding’s husband Jeff Gillooly and Shawn Eckhardt made a fool out of both Harding and Kerrigan. It might not seem that way because Kerrigan went on towards a successful career and earned a few new sponsors, but after the ride was over a few comments spoken at the wrong time and in the wrong place managed to earn her a great deal of grief and the eventual withdrawal of her sponsors. Harding on the other hand went on to do other things with her life that didn’t involve skating and while not high profile allowed her to live a very comfortable existence.
In fact Harding, who was still kind of a joke for a long time, went on to do such things as become a regular on World’s Dumbest, a fairly popular show that starred a large number of older sitcom stars, comedians, and other personalities that would sit and discuss film clips of people behaving in stupid ways. However the cast thought of one another one very common thread among them was that Tonya was a bit of a ditz. Whether or not that’s true is still in question but her reactions on the show were a bit odd at times, leaving people to wonder if it was really an act or if she was in fact that foolish at times.
Tonya Harding has been ripped apart a few times when speaking of her social and private life, and still she’s not bothered as much by it as others would be. She’s soaked up a lot of the publicity and seemed to take in stride, no matter that she was considered at one time to be one of the reviled women in all of America.
In regards to what happened to Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya has denied knowing about anything about the attack, but she was guilty of hindering the prosecution. One could say that this incident was the beginning of the end of her skating career. After all she kind of fell off the map after that and wasn’t heard from for a little while. When she did come back her fame was far less than it had ever been and she was considered to be a very bad person by many.
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