Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

THE COLD WARS

192 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES That leaves the girls with around three minutes a day for trivial endeavors like, say, sleep. But that doesn’t stop Serena from keeping her personal life popping. “Besides being a tennis player,” she says, “I’m a designer , a model, an actress and a rapper.” While Serena did appear in rapper Memphis Bleek’s Do My video featuring Jay-Z, the “I’m a rapper” line is a joke. Serena will, however, make a cameo appearance in Black Knight, a comedy starring Martin Lawrence, slated for release this fall. She also took a design job with Wilson’s Leather to create her own line of clothing, which she’ll unveil this August. With such a demanding schedule , no wonder Venus and Serena say they’re “off the market”—not dating or even thinking about it. Besides having a passion for collecting designer watches and bags—on the day of our interview, Venus shows up carrying an enviable chocolatebrown –and–tan checked Louis Vuitton purse—they are equally serious about clothes. “I’ve decided I want to design,” says Venus, who along with her sister is a design student at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. “It’s fun, and it always keeps changing. It’s kind of like tennis —you have to keep reinventing yourself and getting better in order to have something new to bring to the market.” Venus and Serena have made no apologies for being kick-butt tennis players. Or for being confident, independent thinkers. Or for making women’s tennis exciting by fusing an aggressive game with fashionably bold statement. Maybe all the joking around with each other that they do on and off the court keeps Venus and Serena from internalizing the criticism lesser mortals might succumb to. Or maybe they just like to laugh. y THE COLD WARS Inside the Secret World of Figure Skating Joan Ryan [. . .] Only the top two finishers in Detroit would go on to the Olympics the following month in Lillehammer, Norway, and everyone in the competition knew they were fighting for second place. Nancy Kerrigan had a lock on Excerpted from Joan Ryan, “The Cold Wars: Inside the Secret World of Figure Skating,” The Best American Sportswriting, 1995. Dan Jenkins, ed., Glenn Stout series ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. First published in The San Francisco Examiner Magazine. first. One skater, Nicole Bobek, went so far as to say before the competition , “I imagine if she doesn’t do well, the judges will hold her up.” Kerrigan was the one true star among the women in Detroit. She had risen like a real-life Cinderella from the working-class, hockey-playing, beer-andpretzels Kerrigan clan to American Ice Princess, a stunning young woman with $13,000 designer costumes and a smile of newly capped teeth. She was the reigning national champion. She already had an Olympic medal, a bronze in 1992. She had national endorsement contracts for Campbell’s, Reebok, Seiko, Evian. The afternoon of January 6, a day before the start of the technical, or short, program, Kerrigan owned the ice. She glided around the rink in Cobo Hall in her white lace costume with six other women in her practice session, but she might as well have been alone. She drew the eyes of everyone in the arena. When the practice session ended, Kerrigan was first off the ice, pausing to slip skate guards on her blades, then striding through the blue curtains that separated the rink from the locker room hallway. Other skaters and coaches gathered their belongings to follow her. No one had noticed a man in black slip behind the curtains before Kerrigan. Unless you’ve been orbiting the earth or adrift at sea the past three months, you know the rest. The man whacked Kerrigan just above the right knee, knocking her from the competition. With the field clear of Kerrigan—who had beaten 1991 national champion Tonya Harding in their last five meetings—Harding won her second national championship, securing a place on the Olympic team. Soon afterward , Jeff Gillooly, Harding’s ex-husband, confessed to hiring the hit man. Thus began a media feeding frenzy that made last year’s sordid accounts of Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco look like Masterpiece Theater. Gillooly accused the skater of approving the plot and paying for it with training money she received from New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Harding denied any...