Nancy said, “You were a singer? You sang?”
“All the time—oh, yeah, all the time,” she said. “I had just tons of trophies. I don’t have them anymore. My dad threw them all out.”
Elaine said, “Why did he do that?”
“Well,” the woman said, shrugging and tapping, “we just don’t get along.”
TANYA UTBERG,
the Clackamas County Fair and rodeo queen, said to me recently, “I think Clackamas County is a very warmy place,” which makes it sound soothing and regular, but often it seems to be a more haphazard and disjointed place than that. The day I talked to the Rodeo Queen, I drove out to the neighborhood where Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly used to live, and where Tonya still lives. Her house is in a part of Clackamas County called Beavercreek. Beavercreek isn’t shown on any street map—it’s just an area, not far from a small city called Happy Valley, which is where Tonya’s mother is currently living. Tonya’s road in Beavercreek is a skinny rib that runs along a foothill, past a spread of newish one-story houses. Tonya’s house, an A-frame chalet, is at the end of a long driveway and is not visible from the road. At the end of her driveway were a white farm gate, a big homemade heart-shaped sign left by some fans, and several No Trespassing notices. A few miles farther along the road, not far from the Savage Mini-Mall, I stopped at a new housing development, and the real estate broker gave me a tour of one of the houses. When it is finished, the development will be called Sunset Springs Estates. The broker didn’t know what had been on the property before it was subdivided, but a few scraggly fruit trees out back provided a hint. In bright weather, the Sunset Springs houses will have a distant view of the wolf-fang shape of Mount Hood and a close view of a new development called McBride Estates, and of a woeful old farm undoubtedly in line to have the earth turned up under it so someone can sow some more houses. The broker said, “Sunset Springs Estates are going to be real lovely places when they’re done.” Then he gazed out the window and said, “It is sort of funny around here. Everything is such a big mix-match. You have one kind of thing right next to another kind of thing, like lots of money beside poor. That’s what I call a real mix-match. Things don’t always fit together as well as they should.”
TUESDAY AND THURSDAY
are cheapskate nights at the skating rink—for four dollars, you can rent skates and skate for two hours. A big banner advertising Cheapskate Nights hangs above the ice, next to one, paid for by the fan club, that says home of
TONYA HARDING—U.S. FIGURE SKATING CHAMPION
. Saturday evening isn’t for cheapskates, but it’s the busiest night. On the Saturday after the fan club meeting, the ice was packed. You can watch the rink from the mall’s upper level, standing between a kiosk with a public-service poster that says
SUPPORT THE U.S. OLYMPIC TEAM: GO SHOPPING
and a small business called All About Names, which is set up on a rolling cart. For a couple of dollars, you can get printed on a number of different items, such as beer steins and key chains, or on a piece of fancy paper, a little legend about almost any name. I asked the woman working at the cart to do the name Tonya on pink paper with a drawing of a fairy castle, and she said, “Tonya? Ton-ya?
Tonya?
I’ve never heard of that before. What a nice, interesting name.” That morning’s
Oregonian
had had a story about Nancy Kerrigan on the front page for the seventeenth day in a row. The woman at the cart punched some buttons on a computer, and after a moment the paper came out. It said that “Tonya” was Latin for “priceless,” and that a Tonya was “a liberated spirit” who “has never settled down to any one thing . . . is attractive, lively, and tasteful . . . sets high expectations and fulfills them.” Down below, kids were whizzing around showing off, or inching along the edge of the ice, clinging to one another in wobbly packs. A lot of the girls looked like Tonya, with long multilevel blond hair and a puff of bangs, eyes rimmed in black liner, and stocky bodies in inexpensive-looking clothes. In the center of the ice, a few skinny girls in Lycra skating dresses were practicing spins. Until recently, Tonya sometimes practiced during open-skate hour, picking her way through the crowd. Now she skates only very late at night, but for a long time she usually practiced in the mornings, when the ice was empty but the bleachers were filled with people eating tacos and gyros and Dilly Deli sandwiches and looking on.
Around here, kids go to the movies, or they drive up and down Eighty-second Avenue, or they hang out at the mall. If they work at it, they can get into trouble. A juvenile court counselor named Steve Houseworth told me that in the last two years, kids in the county, like kids in counties all over the country, have become increasingly hedonistic, defiant, and angry, and that juvenile arrests have boomed. “Our big problem is with antisocial preplanned deviant behavior,” he said. “We’ve got an explosion of anger, intimidation, and aggression issues. I think we’ll see more of it, too, because the county is growing real hard and real fast.” The county, he went on, is trying out a privately run anger-management program called Temper Talk, which offers counseling to juveniles charged with Assault 3 or Assault 4—causing harm to a person without intent or with intent, respectively.
The program director for Temper Talk, Derek Bliss, told me, “Kids here are looking for power and they want control. They’re angry about dominance. They want to show the image and reputation of dominance.” I asked him whether he recognized the likes of Shawn and Jeff and of Shane Stant, the twenty-two-year-old man who had been paid to attack Nancy Kerrigan. “Definitely,” he said. “These are the kind of guys who lose their temper but don’t know how to
use
their temper. Shane, the one who confessed to actually doing the assault—he’s a very big boy. He’s not behind physically for his age-group, but he’s clearly behind empathetically. I’d bet there was a humongous amount of inconsiderate behavior in their lives before this assault.”
On Saturday night, I talked with two young guys, D. J. Dollar Bill and D. J. Fast Eddie, who were standing on a platform beside the skate rental booth, playing tapes over the loudspeakers and calling out for the kids to reverse directions, and then to speed up, and then to get ready to line up for games. Dollar Bill said he was a delivery driver for an auto supply company. Fast Eddie said he worked in the produce section of a grocery store. Fast Eddie also said he could not comment on Tonya. “What I’m about is right here,” he said, motioning to the ice, “and here is fun.” He put on a Snoop Doggy Dogg song and then said, “We’re going to play some great games later. We just finished a big one. It’s the favorite around here. We break up into teams and compete in four events—the ringtoss, ice basketball, ice golf, and a finale, which is a snowball race with a snowball on your head. We call it ‘The Olympic Ménage à Trois.’ ”
CELEBRATION NEW SONG FOUR-SQUARE CHURCH
, a Pentecostal congregation, meets every Sunday in a room at the Holiday Inn in Gresham, a town just north of the Clackamas County line. The pastor of the church, Eugene Saunders, hadn’t been seen in three weeks—that is, since shortly after the night that he was doing homework with Shawn Eckardt, the heavyset baby-faced bodyguard and self-described foreign espionage operative, who was a classmate of Gene’s in a legal-assistant training program at Pioneer Pacific College. That night, Shawn had bragged to Gene that he was involved in setting up an attack on a figure skater, and played a garbled tape of a planning session for him. It was that conversation—which Gene repeated first to a Pioneer Pacific teacher, a private investigator (who repeated it to the Portland
Oregonian
), and then to the authorities—that broke the case open. The publicity that followed was so overwhelming and relentless that Gene decided to go underground.
On Sunday, I went to church, and Reverend Saunders reappeared. In the newspaper box outside the Holiday Inn, the headlines were still all about Tonya. Inside, nineteen people were gathered in a meeting room, among them a weary-looking older couple with a strange, thin, shrill-voiced boy; a young woman with two restless redhaired children; a man with stringy blond hair that hung to his shoulder blades, sitting with a pretty woman who wore her hair in cornrows, and was the only black person I saw the whole time I was in Clackamas County; a ruddy-faced man with pinkish eyelids and full lips, wearing a worn-out chambray work shirt and holding in his lap a Bible and a Bible study guide; a man, maybe around seventy, with greased-back black hair and thick glasses, wearing a plastic windbreaker and a short striped necktie. In the front of the small room, a big, bearded man holding a zebra-striped electric guitar began strumming and singing in a tender voice. Everyone rose, scraping back tan metal folding chairs. Someone turned on an overhead projector, and a handwritten lyric sheet flashed in a crooked rectangle across the wall and ceiling, and then the congregation sang. The room was new and drab; the floor felt hollow. Outside, it was pouring. The motel was so new that there was no lawn yet, or even mulch—only mud and construction equipment, and fresh sidewalks, which looked silvery in the rain. After one of the songs, the man with the greased-back hair stepped forward and began a rhythmic declaration from the back of his throat. He was speaking in tongues, and he went on for several minutes, shouting and sweating and slapping his thighs. Finally, he paused, wiped his brow, and then translated what he had to say—that Jesus was coming, that Jesus was watching, that anyone who followed Jesus and resisted Satan would never go astray.
When he finished, Gene Saunders came to the front of the room. He is a handsome, fleshy young man with small, crowded features; he was wearing a dress shirt and suspenders, and holding an open can of Mountain Dew. He said, “I know you’ve been wondering a lot of things—some of you have known where I’ve been, but mostly you’ve known that I just needed to take a break from the publicity. We got calls from around the world. We got calls from Japan about this. I want to tell you folks a few things. First of all, you know that I am not Shawn’s pastor. I think some of you read something saying that he was with us—that I was his pastor—and you were thinking, Hey, we don’t know this guy. Well, we were classmates in school. I’m not his pastor.” He chuckled. “I suppose he could use one now.” People nodded, and bumped one another with their elbows. “Also, I want you to know I never changed my story. I always said I couldn’t understand the tape. It was a garbled tape. It started getting into press reports that I could understand the tape, and then at the grand jury hearing I testified that I couldn’t, and everyone is asking me why I changed my story. I didn’t. It was misrepresented that way.”
Someone called out, “That was Satan working! That’s how the enemy works—confusing us with things we didn’t say!” Gene nodded, and sipped from the can. He strolled around the front of the room. “It’s been tough for me, because I’ve had to neglect you and the church business during all of this, and I’ve had to make choices. I shouldn’t say this in front of our treasurer, but I was offered fifty thousand dollars to tell my story to a television show, and I turned it down.” From the back of the room, someone said, “Reverend, we could sure have used that money!” and everyone laughed. Gene said, “Well, I turned everything down. We’ll just have to keep fund-raising for ourselves. But, you know, that was real temptation.”
“Why did they do it, Reverend?”
He looked down, kicking lightly at the carpeting. “Bitterness, I think. Bitterness that things weren’t going their way.”
The ruddy-faced man flipped his study guide open to Luke 14. “All the answers are right here,” he whispered to me. He ran a fingernail across the page, to where it said, “Wanting a new car or hoping to be successful in your career is not wrong in itself—it is wrong only when you want these things just to impress others.” He closed the book and then closed his eyes.
Gene finished speaking and shook everyone’s hand, and said he would be back every Sunday unless things got too distracting again.
THE THREE SISTERS
I
N BULGARIA, SOME TENNIS BALLS ARE LIKE
dumplings. Manuela, Katerina, and Magdalena Maleeva, Bulgarian sisters who are three of the best tennis players in the world and definitely the three best tennis players in Bulgaria, know all about putting topspin on a dumpling. They also know how to park themselves at the baseline and bang back every dumpling that comes over the net. The flabby, bounceless tennis balls in Bulgaria come from Poland, where they are manufactured to international standards and then, apparently, overcooked. This might discourage some players, but the Maleevas are not easily discouraged. In fact, they may be the least discourageable people in Bulgaria. No world-class tennis players have ever before emerged from that country. One year, the three Maleeva sisters made up the entire Bulgarian Federation Cup tennis team. Youlia Berberian, their mother and also their coach, was the team captain. There are no Maleev brothers, so there’s never been much of a men’s team.
Each of the sisters excelled in Bulgaria, and then each, in turn, joined the WTA Tour, which has about 360 players and runs sixty tournaments in twenty countries. Manuela played on the tour for twelve years (she retired this winter), and was ranked among the top ten in the world for ten years, won nineteen tournaments, and earned $3.5 million in prize money. Katerina joined the tour in 1985 and has also done nicely. Last week, she and Georgi Stoimenov, who now coaches her, were married. Earlier, I had asked Youlia Berberian if Katerina was going to have a fancy wedding. I got the feeling that Youlia considered this a stupid question. She didn’t say anything for a moment, while eyeing me with exasperation. Then she shrugged and said, “She’s a very rich and famous girl, you know. People in Bulgaria will be
expecting
a fancy wedding.”
The three Maleevas and their mother were in Paris in late May for the French Open, which is held on the orange clay courts of Stade Roland Garros. Their goals were (a) to win the tournament and (b) to buy dresses to wear to Katerina’s wedding. Regarding (b), Youlia was the most highly motivated, because she lives in Bulgaria, where the shopping is hell. Manuela got married six years ago and lives in Switzerland, where the shopping is not hell, but she thought she’d find something nicer in Paris. Magdalena, who is nineteen and is called Maggie, lives at home in shopping-hell Bulgaria with her parents, but she didn’t seem overly concerned about her wedding outfit. During the time I spent with the Maleevas, Maggie wore either tennis clothes or one outfit of street clothes: a pair of tight burgundy-colored jeans, a long-sleeved burgundy T-shirt, and a pewter peace symbol on a short chain around her neck. Also, she had just dyed her hair a color between burgundy and a young Chardonnay. People tend to think that Maggie will turn out to be the best tennis player of the three sisters, because she has the diligence and finesse that made Manuela and Katerina successful, but she is more athletic and aggressive and plays a more varied game. So far, Maggie has been ranked as high as tenth in the world, and has earned close to a million dollars in prize money. She and I were talking one afternoon in Paris and I asked her what she was going to do with all the money she is winning, and as an afterthought I added that I doubted she would spend it shopping for clothes. She was wearing her burgundy outfit at the time. She said, “Oh, no, no, I
love
shopping. You can spend lots of money shopping.” I asked her what she’d bought lately, and she grinned and said, “Well, I just got a really, really great pair of combat boots.”
THEY DON’T LOOK
anything alike. Manuela, who is twenty-seven, is pale and slender. Her face is tiny and refined and tragic-looking. Because she is fair and narrow, she looks taller than she is—about five feet eight—and slightly translucent. Her voice is high, sleepy, and shy. Her manner is dignified and tender. On the court, during matches, she used to project an air of enormous sorrow, even when she was up five games and was slugging a winner down the line. People in Japan used to camp out in the lobby of her hotel just to catch a glimpse of her. She has a huge fan club in Japan—she’s probably the only Bulgarian who can make that claim. Some of this Japanese adoration ebbed after she got married. The 1994 French Open was the first in twelve years that she had watched rather than played in. She says she decided to retire because she had come to hate her suitcase. At the tournament, she wore little white shorts, a lacy white blouse, black Ray-Bans, black mules, and pink lipstick, which made her look like a French television star.
Katerina, who is twenty-five, is meatier-looking than Manuela. She has a square, contemplative face and silky dark hair, which during her career she has worn short and bouncy or long and braided or swept across her forehead and held in a clip; each variation completely transforms her. She has dark eyes and a golden tinge to her complexion. Her gaze is level and so stern that it struck me as something she could use as a weapon on the court. Like all the Maleevas, she speaks English fluently, but her locutions are formal and ornate: “To this, I will have to again say no.” “To that, the answer is personal which is how I will be keeping it.”
The first time I saw Maggie was in a rainstorm in Lucerne, at the site of the Eurocard Open, a clay tournament that is a French Open warm-up, and I was immediately struck by the interesting color of her hair. She is no bigger than Katerina, but she has a lumbering, pigeon-toed walk that makes her look as if she were a huge person, or as if she had just come a long distance on horseback. On the court, she usually wears a very short white tennis skirt and tight white Lycra bike shorts, which stick out below the skirt. She has hazel eyes and a long chin and a wide mouth. She seems to find herself a curiosity. Describing her nontennis interests, she says, “I’m famous for liking hard rock music. I’m known for liking a band called Nine Inch Nails.”
All three of the Maleeva sisters were taught to play by Youlia, so their games have certain similarities—trim ground strokes, neat footwork. Otherwise, because of their different bodies and temperaments and talents, each has her own style. Manuela, for instance, learned to play in the era of Chris Evert, when nearly all women players were baseliners, with methodical, unvarying ground strokes and two-handed backhands and the patience to wait for their opponents’ mistakes. Katerina is also a baseliner, but her strokes are especially flat and her swing is taut and compact, and she is very fast on her feet. By the time Maggie, who is eight years younger than Manuela, started playing, baselining was no longer enough to win points, so she learned to move around the court more, to switch between one- and two-handed backhands, to use more topspin, and to dominate points. The three always hated to play one another in tournaments. Nevertheless, there have been fifteen occasions when one Maleeva played another on the tour: Manuela has beaten Katerina eight times, Katerina has beaten Manuela once, Manuela has beaten Maggie twice, Katerina has beaten Maggie four times. In 1993, all three reached the fourth round of the French Open and the U.S. Open—a first in the annals of sibling athletics. That year, the three Maleevas were ranked within four places of one another among the top twenty women in the world.
In some instances, the sisters have teamed up to use their tennis success commercially; all three are represented by the same agent at Advantage International, and all three have had deals with Babolat tennis strings and Isostar high-performance drinks. Katerina and Maggie were also celebrity spokespersons for Balkan, the official airline of Bulgaria.
Occasionally, the number of Maleevas and their longevity and their persistence near the top of the tennis world has unnerved other players. Theories about them abound. One rumor has it that the girls were under strict orders from Youlia never to have a younger sister beat an older one. Ruxandra Dragomir, a Romanian player, who drew Maggie in the first round of the French Open, told me after their match that she thought Maggie had had a bit of an unfair advantage over her. I asked her what it was, and she shrugged and said, “Well, you know, the sisters. She has all those sisters all over the place.” Pam Shriver, in a book she wrote several years ago, said that the Maleevas always moped when they played, whether they won or lost, and that Manuela and Katerina (Maggie was not yet on the tour) were known among the other players as Boo and Hoo. There have been other pairs of siblings in tennis, such as Chris and Jeanne Evert, John and Patrick McEnroe, and Luke and Murphy Jensen, but before the Maleevas there had never been a family in which
all
the children were tennis players, there had never been three same-sex tennis-playing siblings, there had never been three tennis-playing Bulgarians, there had never been three tennis-playing Bulgarian sisters, and there had never been three tennis-playing siblings—Bulgarian or female or not—ranked so close together and so high up in the sport. It occurred to me when I met the Maleevas that I had never before met people with so many signifying adjectives you could attach to their names.
I WANTED TO
have a dinner with all three of the Maleeva sisters. “Let me know if you can do that,” Youlia said to me. “I personally would like to accomplish that sometime. If you get that done, that will be an almost incredible thing.” At the moment, Manuela was on her way to Paris from Switzerland with her husband, François Fragnière; Maggie had just arrived from Lucerne, where she had played in the Eurocard Open; Katerina was flying to Paris from Bulgaria, where she had been resting after playing in a tournament in Hamburg; and George Maleev, their father, who is an electronics professor, was at his job in Sofia, teaching school. Nobody knew anybody else’s schedule. “You know the way we are,” Youlia said. “We can try to have dinner the night after the first round, but I can’t guarantee who will be here. The minute—God forbid, God forbid, I won’t even say it, God forbid—someone loses, we are gone as fast as we can. We
go.
”
Youlia and I were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Sofitel, in Paris, where many of the players in the Open were staying; a corner of the lobby had been cordoned off as a players’ lounge. Youlia was sitting on a black leather couch, eating fancy cookies from a platter on the coffee table. She was wearing a big green T-shirt, paisley leggings, Christian Dior eyeglasses with complicated frames, and tennis shoes. Her feet are very small, and she has lean calves and little ankles. She is forty-nine years old. As a young woman, she was a nine-time Bulgarian women’s singles tennis champion. From the knees down, that is still what she looks like. From the knees up, she looks a little more like somebody’s mother. Her hair is chestnutcolored and fluffy. She has beautiful pinkish skin; an aquiline nose; a rubbery, downturned mouth; and huge dimples, which crease her face even when she isn’t smiling. Her voice is a porous, trilling soprano; it is round and light and girlish, which Youlia is not. After you meet Youlia, the phrase that leaps to your mind is “human dynamo.” She is someone who seems very good at getting things done. She says that she is a very tough coach, and that her philosophy is “Winning is everything.” I did not directly observe Youlia working with her daughters, but I believe I experienced some of her technique. That afternoon, for instance, I asked her how she happened to start playing tennis as a young woman in Bulgaria.
“Are you familiar with the Ottoman Empire?” she said.
I told her I was hoping that her answer would be somewhat more contemporary.
“I need to explain this to you,” she said firmly. She settled back on the couch. “When you understand the Ottoman Empire, and the situation between the Turks and the Armenians, then we will get to the tennis.” She began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of western Asia Minor, the Battle of Manzikert, and an account of Suleiman II; I found myself listening and taking notes in spite of myself. Players and their entourages were wandering in and out of the lounge. Someone came in and made an announcement about transportation to Roland Garros. Youlia ignored all this and went on. She was somewhere around the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz when Maggie, who had been jogging with Katerina’s fiancé, came in.
“Mom, did my box from Reebok come yet?” Maggie asked. Youlia looked up and nodded. “Anything interesting?” Maggie asked. “I mean, what am I wearing tomorrow?” She poked around on the cookie platter. Youlia answered her in Bulgarian, which sounded like air rushing past an open window. Then she waved Maggie away and got back to the Ottoman Empire.
At some point, she segued into her own history, including her Armenian heritage, which enabled her parents to emigrate to the United States in 1965 as part of Bulgaria’s recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Her parents have lived in the United States ever since. In 1965, Youlia was already a star tennis player in Bulgaria and was engaged to George, who was not allowed to emigrate, because he is not Armenian. She went to the United States briefly, then returned to Bulgaria and married George, and continued competing. Because the tennis courts were a nice place to bring babies, after Manuela and Katerina were born she just took them along to the courts.
In 1979, when Manuela was twelve and was just a few months away from being the national women’s champion in Bulgaria, Youlia decided to apply for visas to take her to an American tournament. “I heard about this famous Orange Bowl in Miami, so I went for a visa, for which I had to faint and cry and beg and weep and
plead,
which is what I had to do for the next seven years,” she told me. “My God, I can’t tell you how much I hate the Communists for that humiliation—my God! But we got the visas and went to this famous Orange Bowl and Manuela played, and in the semifinals she had to play Chris Evert’s sister, there, in Florida, which was their
kingdom,
and Manuela was such a brave girl, God, she was so brave”—now Youlia was in tears—“playing in her homemade dress, and she only had three racquets, while the other kids had ten and their shiny bright clothes, and the chair umpire made this bad call and she was
robbed,
and she was such a brave little girl. She took it very hard. She cried and cried. She cried at every point. This is when it is hard to be a mother and a coach. But I was so, so strong. I was such a strong person then. I would sit on the side of the court and talk to Manuela the whole time during the match. I would say, ‘Manuela, why are you crying? Hit the ball down the line, please. Stop crying, thank you. Use some topspin on your backhand now. Please stop crying.
Thank you.
’ ”