Reasons 'Why': The Price of Gold

Before she became a villain in one of sports' weirdest scandals, Tonya Harding was figure skating's ugly duckling. Raised in Oregon by a physically and emotionally abusive mother, she was a skater who came from modest means and looked like it. Acted like it, too. Competing in a sport that celebrates elegance and finesse, Harding was rough and tumble. In The Price of Gold, the latest in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, Harding is described as coming from the "gutter." She's compared to an "alley cat" and called a "trailer trash ignoramus." Eventually, even Harding gets in on it, noting that the media portrayed her as a "piece of crap" juxtaposed against skating's "princess," Nancy Kerrigan. If life were a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, Harding would have gone to the Olympics in Lillehammer, skated up to her incredible potential, won gold and transformed into a swan in front of our eyes. And maybe then Harding would have liked the sight of her own reflection. Alas, Harding's fairy tale was destined to be Grimm. So instead, the ugly duckling got together with some loons and decided to disfigure the prettiest swan on the pond.

Even in retrospect the Harding-Kerrigan melodrama is stranger than fiction, except that all the players seemed straight out of central casting. The tomboyish, insecure blonde who honed her skills at a shopping mall skating rink. The pretty, poised brunette with the endorsement deals and the (misleading) air of privilege. The scheming husband, with the dark eyes and the mustache almost long enough to twirl. The goon accomplices who looked like they could get lost in a phone booth, assuming they could figure out how to get inside one. All of them came together under the bright spotlight of the pre-Internet Era Winter Olympics. Director Nanette Burstein (American Teen) recounts the events of 1994 with impressive clarity and pace, chronicling not just what happened but the media's frenzied reaction to it, because indeed that was a distinct element of this tabloid-worthy scandal right from the start. Those too young to remember the whack heard round the world will come away with a clear understanding of how it all unfolded. But what's most impressive about The Price of Gold is that it's more than a transcript. It looks beyond the highlights and lowlights to try to understand why.

I'm not sure most of us really considered the "why" back in 1994, which is odd considering that the most indelible image of the entire affair is Kerrigan, a few seconds removed from being clubbed on the knee, lying on the concrete floor of an ice arena screaming that very question. Partly we were distracted by all the questions about what Harding knew and when she knew it. But more than that, I suspect we thought we knew the answer. Why club Kerrigan? Because Harding was insecure about her skating and wanted to eliminate the competition. Simple as that, right? Except Burstein's film makes it clear that it isn't. For starters, even at that point Harding's skating ability might have been the thing she was most confident about. But the bigger misperception is that this was only about sports — about victory, about glory, about being a champion. Harding wanted all of that, but more so she was desperate for what came with it. Validation that she wasn't a piece of trash, for one thing. Financial rewards most of all.

If that sounds shallow, consider that the United States had two viable gold medal candidates in Kerrigan and Harding (Harding had been a 1990 U.S. Champion, and she was the first woman to land a triple axel in competition), and yet the sport seemed interested in marketing only one of them. Kerrigan already had endorsement deals. Harding, on the other hand, had married into more poverty. Then in her mid-20s, this would be Harding's last chance to win the lottery via Olympic metamorphosis. Emboldened by a husband, Jeff Gillooly, who likely saw Harding has his meal ticket, eliminating the stiffest competition with a swift blow to the knee must have seemed like sound financial planning.

Nothing justifies the assault, of course. It was a crime, pathetic and despicable. But in this era of millionaires battling millionaires in professional sports, it's helpful to be reminded that at the Olympics a gold medal can mean the difference between a lot and nothing at all. Harding felt that. And Burstein allows us to feel a measure of sympathy for the poor girl surrounded by poor influences who was marginalized by her sport for not looking the part. No doubt, Harding likely played a role in her ostracism long before she ever met Gillooly, and Burstein makes that clear, too, not with bitter backstage gossip from people who never liked Harding in the first place but with Harding's own damning testimony.

David Frost said that Richard Nixon's fundamental flaw was his "dislocated relationship with truth," and the same could be said of Harding, who continues to insist that she had no prior knowledge of the attack on Kerrigan. Watching her interviews in The Price of Gold is not unlike watching Nixon sitting down with Frost and desperately clinging to a lie that only he believes. But as I watched Harding continuing to proclaim her innocence, repeatedly portraying herself as a victim and even going so far as to argue that Kerrigan is the bitch in this story ("I thought we were friends," she says of Kerrigan shunning her after the attack, "that's rude"), I was repeatedly reminded of The Office's Michael Scott. Because like the beloved bumbling boss at Dunder Mifflin, when Harding talks you can see the wheels turning and spot flashes of genuine pride over what's coming out of her mouth — stuff that sounds convincing to her ears only. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. In the end, Kerrigan's refusal to be interviewed by Burstein turns out to be both fitting (Kerrigan avoided the talking about the episode even as it was unfolding) and genius. Every minute Kerrigan isn't on screen is another for Harding to be under the microscope. And every minute on screen for Harding adds another inch to the rope she uses to hang herself. As if she wasn't dangling from the noose of public opinion already.

For her crimes of action and denial, Harding deserves all the scrutiny that can be thrown her way. "Wounded Knee" ultimately resulted in greater fame and fortune for Kerrigan than she would have enjoyed otherwise, but if she hadn't been able to win gold only months after the attack she would have been robbed of what to that point had been her life's main goal. Still, Burstein's documentary makes it clear that Harding had been a victim, too. Many times, in many ways. And in its honest examination of Harding's career, The Price of Gold deftly exposes a reality that should make us uncomfortable: figure skating is the rare sport in which we aren't compelled to root for the underdog, because that would ruin the aesthetic. Harding didn't fit the mold, and while she ultimately dug her own grave it probably wasn't the first time someone wanted her buried.

On that note, it's worth recalling that in the first volume of "30 for 30" documentaries, sprinter Marion Jones was held up as a positive example of someone who learned from her mistakes and came clean. But from where I sit, in John Singleton's film Jones followed the same playbook that Harding does here: admit to the stuff there isn't room left to deny and blame the rest on the crooked ex-husband. That's easier for Jones to get away with. She's attractive, charming and well spoken. Harding can't pull it off. She didn't fall from grace, because grace was never hers. She just fell.

The Price of Gold premieres January 16 on ESPN at 9 pm ET. Read other "30 for 30" reviews.

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Coulda Been a Contenda: No Mas

Roberto Duran stunned boxing fans when he put a beating on then welterweight champion Sugar Ray Leonard in their first meeting, "The Brawl in Montreal," June 20, 1980. But that was nothing compared to the shock he provided in their second meeting five months later. In the eighth round, after exchanging a few blows with Leonard, Duran traded hooks and jabs for a move that most in boxing had never seen before: he waved his right glove in surrender. "No mas," he said. No more. One of the most ferocious fighters the sport had ever seen — Joe Frazier said Duran reminded him of Charles Manson — up and quit. The crowd at the Superdome in New Orleans and those watching live on TVs around the world were flabbergasted. From his ringside microphone, legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell summed it up as it unfolded, calling it "the most inexplicable thing I have ever seen in the ring."

The "No Mas" fight transcended sports and instantly became part of the pop culture. (You didn't need to be able to pick Roberto Duran out of a lineup in order to understand a "no mas" joke.) The TV footage was boxing's version of the Zapruder film, with the outcome unmistakable and the cause shrouded in mystery. Why did Duran quit? Did he have stomach cramps, as he insisted after the fight but showed no signs of up until his surrender? Was he out of shape? Had he simply had enough of Leonard's showboating antics? These questions have never been satisfactorily answered. And for all of these reasons, the "No Mas" fight is perfect fodder for ESPN Films' "30 for 30" franchise. But like many boxing bouts, No Mas fails to live up to its self-created hype.

Credit where it's due: director Eric Drath has created a solid retrospective that convincingly contrasts Leonard's golden-boy charisma with Duran's dark-eyed intensity while capably guiding us through all the pre-fight hype, the in-ring battles and the post-fight fallout. He also gets Leonard to do what few elite athletes ever will: admit pain and fear. (Leonard says at one point that the punishment dished out to him in his first matchup with Duran made him feel "close to death.") These aren't small things, and No Mas is consistently entertaining as it looks back into the past. Alas, Drath missteps by trying to recreate that long-ago conflict in the here and now, structuring his documentary around a trip by Leonard to confront Duran in his native Panama that never feels like anything other than what it is: a made-for-TV gimmick constructed by the filmmaker to artificially sweeten the drama.

Not surprisingly, that subplot leads nowhere. When Leonard and Duran literally step into a ring to have their verbal showdown (a goofy concept straight out of reality TV), Leonard doesn't care enough to rough up Duran until he draws blood, and Duran simply falls back on his old excuses without even needing to fully articulate those excuses for the record. As verbal confrontations go, it's less a heavyweight bout a la 2013's unforgettable Winfrey-Armstrong and more like a slap-fight you'd find on an elementary school playground — or on Twitter. In effect, both men throw up their hands and say "no mas" to "No Mas," and we shouldn't be surprised. People nearer to the end of their public lives are just likely (and perhaps more so) to be interested in protecting their reputations as they were in their youth, even though journalists of all stripes repeatedly romanticize the notion that personal revelations are somehow progressive, with the truth always coming out in the end.

Buying into that myth in the first place is mistake enough, but Drath makes another common mistake by falling in love with his original idea, because when the Leonard-Duran conversation resulted in little more than awkward patter, Drath would have been better off cutting the subplot from his film entirely. In the least, he should have recognized that the most significant moment in that exchange seems to be one that he relegates to the closing credits, when Duran wonders aloud why Leonard wouldn't grant him a third fight just a few months after the "No Mas" bout. Leonard's stuttering response could be interpreted as revealing: "It was psychological--- it was psychological warfare," he says, insisting he was trying to get into Duran's head and sounding very much like a guy who always had Duran in his.

Of course, to confront Leonard's avoidance of an immediate rematch would mean confronting Leonard, who Drath mostly treats with kid gloves. It also would have meant being more forthright about the place of "No Mas" within Duran's entire career. Because while Duran suggested he was going to give up the sport after that 1980 fight, he didn't. Far from it. According to statistics provided at the end of the film, Duran appeared in 12 more title matches across three weight classes and won three more titles. As KO Magazine editor in chief Steve Farhood puts it, "(Duran) did enough to prove that ('No Mas') was an aberration. That wasn't the real Roberto Duran, and we think of him as one of the greatest 10 fighters in boxing history. 'No Mas' didn't take that away."

Unfortunately, No Mas almost does. Drath spends more than 70 minutes making Duran look like a one-hit wonder, a jerk who turned into a coward. Then he spends three minutes trying to give Duran the respect his career demands. That's not to say that Duran doesn't deserve scrutiny (his excuses have been inconsistent and unconvincing), or to suggest that the "No Mas" fight isn't worthy of a narrow focus (it's one of the most famous fights in boxing history, with good reason). Still, it's hard to imagine Duran's subsequent redemption being downgraded to a footnote if he had been the American fighter with the golden boy image. Boxing loves villains, and Duran made for a great one, but the value of looking back with hindsight is the chance to see him as more than his 1980 reputation, to look at these events anew within a larger context.

With fresh perspective, Drath might have unearthed an epic tale of a boxer who had little personal fortune, then became an overnight celebrity by beating Leonard, then swiftly fell in love with the spoils of star status and lost his commitment to greatness, only to become an overnight villain when he surrendered in Leonard's rematch, only to slowly but steadily rebuild his career and restore his reputation. As it happens, one of Drath's talking heads essentially tries to point the director in that direction. "As horrible as ('No Mas') was for his image at the time," Farhood says, "it gave (Duran) the opportunity for redemption. And there's no greater story in boxing than the story of redemption." Alas, at that point in Drath's documentary the closing credits are just three minutes away, leaving that greater story to be told by someone else.


I fell off pace with the "30 for 30" series in 2013, but I hope to do better moving forward. Here the ones I have reviewed.

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Under the Circumstances: 12 Years a Slave

In what is already the iconic shot of 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) digs his toes into the muddy ground his heels can't quite reach in order to avoid being choked to death by the noose around his neck. It's a gruesome yet painterly image, which makes it quintessential Steve McQueen. And as the director is wont to do, he holds this wordless shot for well over a minute so that we might feel Solomon's struggle and notice the nonchalance with which the slaves behind him return to their chores, either disinterested in his fate or painfully aware that they are powerless to intervene. In any movie about any man, this near hanging would make for a striking image, but here, of course, it takes on added meaning because of the significance of the subject matter. In this one shot, McQueen does much to sum up the entire American slave experience in which life was little more than trying to avoid slipping into death.

But after watching 12 Years a Slave for a second time, I wonder if a more significant shot might happen a little later in the sequence — after a fellow slave dares to bring water to Solomon, after the plantation overseer is seen pacing on the nearby veranda, waiting for his boss and Solomon's owner (Benedict Cumberbatch's William Ford) to return to determine Solomon's fate, and after a few slave children are spotted playing in the field behind Solomon, laughing obliviously. It's a shot of the mistress of the house (Liza J. Bennett) standing at the railing of her mansion balcony calmly observing Solomon, whose shoulders and rope-bound neck are out of focus in the foreground. In this one image, only a few seconds long, McQueen does much to sum up the institutionalized indifference that's core to not only America's shameful slave history but to any instance in which human suffering or inequality is allowed to persist in plain view.

In this sequence and others, 12 Years a Slave repeatedly observes the oh-so-thin and often arbitrary line that exists between those relegated to suffering and those allowed to avoid it, even if only momentarily. Solomon, of course, is Exhibit A: a free black man living in a home with his wife and two children one moment, who upon being kidnapped becomes a slave assigned the name "Platt" the next. But consider, too, the early scene in which a well-dressed black man walks into the store where Solomon and his wife are shopping for luggage, seemingly as free as they are until his white master enters, apologizes for the disturbance and leads the man away by the collar as if he were a loose dog. Or the scene in which another man on Solomon's boat toward slavery manages to be saved from that fate by his white owner and races off the boat without looking back. Or the scene in which Solomon, considering escape from the Epps plantation, manages to stumble upon and walk away from the hanging of another black man solely because he's wearing a pendant that marks him as Epps property. Or the scene in which Solomon avoids certain death by convincing the vicious Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) that he couldn't possibly have written a letter intended for delivery in the north, and Epps, buying Solomon's account that he has been hoodwinked by the duplicitous Armsby (Garret Dillahunt), a white man, says regretfully, "Were he not free and white, Platt. Were he not free and white."

Why are some deemed worthy of deprivation and others not? As Solomon tells Tibeats (Paul Dano), when it is suggested that the wood panels on the clapboard cabin he is constructing are uneven, "It's all a matter of perspective. From where you stand you might see different. ... I simply ask that you use all your senses before rendering judgment." As Mistress Ford gazes from her balcony at Solomon hanging from a tree, we can't be sure exactly what she's feeling, but it seems safe to assume she isn't using all of her senses. And given that Mistress Ford wouldn't have been born with an innate hatred or indifference to people with dark skin, it seems safe to assume that she learned to ignore those senses over time, ultimately seeing the world from a perspective in which the enslavement and brutalization of black people was perfectly appropriate. Solomon, on the other hand, is so aware of an alternative to this perspective that he deduces that his relatively compassionate enslaver, William Ford, must be a victim like he is, calling him a "decent man" who is a slaver only "under the circumstances." It's an assessment that echoes in memory later, after Ford cuts down Solomon from that tree and arranges his transfer to the Epps plantation to avoid the murderous wrath of Tibeats. "Whatever the circumstances, you are an exceptional nigger, Platt," Ford tells Solomon, "but I fear no good will come of it." Bottom line translation: You'll never be more than a nigger.

In that moment, as Ford shows a curious, inconsistent and yet unmistakable affection for the slave lying on his floor, still bound at the wrists and ankles, it's tempting to object to this injustice in light of Solomon's equally unmistakable exceptionality, and because of his documented freedom. (It's so obvious he doesn't deserve to be a slave! How can Ford not see it?) But that's the bait in this movie's trap. Solomon's freedom, of course, is no more justified than that of any other slave, and likewise his enslavement is no more inhuman. Indeed, this much should be obvious, and yet repeatedly Ford and Epps preach the Bible to their slaves while committing their ungodly acts. They get lost in Scripture, property laws, cultures and customs and ignore fundamental truths. And, sadly, these behaviors didn't end with the Emancipation Proclimation.

"It's all a lie," Solomon tells Epps after being double-crossed by Armsby. He might as well be talking about the pretenses we cling to anytime we ignore suffering and inequality around us, which for many of us is pretty often. There is a significant difference, it must be noted, between those who are legally and forcibly enslaved and those who held down "merely" by poverty, prejudice, inadequate education, limited opportunity and so on. Alas, there's less of a difference between those who looked suffering in the face and accepted it 170 years ago and those who do the same today, which is why I'm chilled to think that when I'm looking at Mistress Ford looking at a man hanging by his neck in plain view, I'm looking at me. All that's changed are the circumstances.

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