The year 1994 doesn't seem all that long ago, at least that is until you start to recall the details. Take for example the sports landscape. Michael Jordan had retired--for the first time--and was still pursuing a baseball career. Roger Maris remamined the single-season home-run king--and would be for another four years. Bill Parcells was licking his wounds after going 5-11 in his first season with the New England Patriots.And Tiger Woods would become the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Amateur Championship.
The biggest sports story of that year, however, involved none of those sports that dominate the headlines these days. Fourteen years ago this month, I was in Detroit for the U.S. Figure Skating championships, where the team would be selected for the '94 Lillehammer Olympics. I had just come from breakfast with some fellow Bostonians, Nancy Kerrigan's parents, and was settling into the press room in the bowels of Cobo Hall when the most remarkable rumor swept the room: Kerrigan, American's reigning figure skating queen, had been knee-capped with a baseball bat. Given the bizarre events that have unfolded in the sports world of late--Marion Jones headed to jail, Barry Bonds under indictment, Roger Clemens to face Congress--it's hard to convey just how unfathomable the assault seemed back then. Kerrigan's wounded question--"Why me? Why, why, why?--captured the bewilderment all of us felt. At least momentarily. In truth, it was only a few minutes before you began to hear the name Tonya Harding, the bad seed of figure skating, on every reporter's lips.
It was never proved that Harding, a former national champion whose career was fading, had any direct role in the attack. But her former husband and a couple of her cronies were later convicted of various roles in the assault. My life was consumed by Tonya and Nancy. Newsweek did four covers--count 'em four--on the bizarre events. The layering of a tabloid rivalry over the "pristine" Olympics made the figure skating competition in Norway one of the most viewed TV sports events in history. And the sport, which had never been more than a quadrennial fascination in this country, took off. The airwaves were filled with figure skating competitions, real and contrived, as people who didn't know an axel from a lutz discovered that the sport was, besides pretty to watch, one of the great ongoing soap operas.
Figs fatigue had already begun to set in by the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. And it was there that the sport imploded. One of the most stunnning competitions in the history of Olympic figure skating, Sarah Hughes' golden upset of teammate Michelle Kwan and Russia's Irina Slutskaya, was overshadowed by a cheating scandal in the judging of the pairs event. Nobody who truly understood the sport ever figured the judging was completely on the up-and-up, kind of like our view of boxing. Indeed, if you go back and watch the ladies competition in 1994, you may find Oksana Baiul to be the far more engaging skater, but you're still hard-pressed to explain how her technically limited routine earned her the gold over Kerrigan. Except that the Soviet bloc, which no longer existed in the real world, still ruled figure skating.
Anyway, as we've discovered in a host of painful ways in a host of places, reform doesn't necessarily make things better. In figure skating they threw out the old familiar scoring system--with its easily understood notion of the perfect 6.0--and replaced it with a complex formula that nobody beyond the insiders understood. And worse, the judges were shielded from fans' wrath by anonymity. With a points system with values assigned to every step, twirl and jump, the skaters were almost for forced into lockstep and, while the faces might be different, the routines seemed numbingly the same. And rather swiftly, the sport faded from any prominent place in the American consciousness, almost completely off TV and relegated to the agate type on sports pages. The Champions on Ice tour that once filled and thrilled arenas across the country is on hiatus. And ABC, after years of coverage, dumped the national championships. NBC swooped in and picked them up under a profit-sharing agreement that means the Olympic network paid nothing for the rights.
Still, NBC is giving the 2008 national championships from St. Paul the prime-time treatment this weekend and, asbsent meaningful football, it might be worth a look--especially, as always, our ladies. About the only name you might recognize is Kimmie Meissner, who is the reigning national champ and has a world championship gold on her resume. She is also the ancient warrior at 18 years of age. And itt is the new kids on the block of ice--my pal John Powers at the Boston Globe dubbed this competition "the attack of the giant 4-footers"--that has attracted most of the attention. Last year three American kids---Caroline Zhang, now 14, Mirai Nagasu now 15, and Ashley Wagner, now 16--gave the U.S. its first-ever sweep of the medals at the world juniors. Throw in 15-year-old Rachael Flatt and America has an exciting roster of young skaters pointed toward the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
I know we've all sworn off the figs and I'm pretty sure nobody is going to get whacked with a baseball bat this time around. Still, with no football option worth mentioning, the Saturday night ladies final could be worth a peek.
