Fear creeps into Nancy Kerrigan's bedroom as softly as the breeze that billows the curtains at her balcony. Sometimes, nightmares jolt her awake and she lies in bed shaking. Other nights, her hands move reflexively in sleep to her battered knee. One recent evening, after returning to her room in a Los Angeles hotel, Kerrigan was talking on the phone with her agent when she got scared because the balcony door was open. "It was closed when I left," she nervously told the agent, Jerry Solomon, who immediately left his own room to join her. It wasn't until the two had searched the closets and under the bed for unseen intruders that Kerrigan finally relaxed and went to sleep.
As she enters her final pre-Olympics training stretch after being clubbed on the knee last month, Kerrigan's mission, in part, is fighting fear. She may be well on the way to winning that battle, though it's difficult to tell, given her profusion of "handlers" -- agents, sports psychologist, coaches, bodyguards, medical team and family. They shield her as if she were a fragile flower, while simultaneously portraying her to the world as an indomitable competitor, a Rocky Balboa bounding up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ready to conquer all.
Distracted by fans? "She is a fighter," says Mary Scotvold, who, with her husband, Evy, coaches Kerrigan. "This is a highly competitive sport. You don't get that far if you're some little weak personality." Yet even as Tonya Harding trains daily before hundreds of onlookers at a Portland, Ore., ice rink, the Scotvolds have closed Kerrigan's practice sessions in South Dennis, Mass., explaining that she finds visitors distracting. And while agent Solomon insists that the 24-year-old has greatly matured from her girlish persona of the 1992 Olympics, he worries that she has paid too much attention to news accounts of the Harding controversy. "Nancy, stop watching TV," he urged her shortly after the attack. "What purpose does it serve?"
Certainly Kerrigan has her own considerable inner resources to call on, including a tenacious commitment to skating that roused her from bed at 4:30 a.m. most days as a youngster. Her recent training schedule has been relentless: three hours a day on the ice, plus an additional three hours of stationary biking, weight training and water exercises to build strength and mobility in her injured knee. Since the kneecap still has significant scar tissue (the pain has disappeared), Kerrigan also undergoes physical therapy at day's end.
Perfect script. As for her mental preparedness, Kerrigan's sports psychologist, Cindy Adams, has helped her develop a positive "script" so that she can visualize, step by step, her ideal performance, from dressing room to final curtsy. Adams also started Kerrigan listening to tapes of a New York radio comedy show before taking to the ice so that she would laugh and loosen up. The combined physical and mental training has apparently begun to pay dividends. Just two weeks after the January 6 attack, Kerrigan astonished her coaches and doctor by performing difficult triple jumps. And just the other day, she flawlessly completed her four- minute Olympic free-skating program (to a medley of Neil Diamond tunes), quipping to her coaches: "I surprised you, didn't I?"
Yet, to date, nobody would confuse Nancy Kerrigan with Peggy Fleming, the sweet but steely heroine of the 1968 Olympics, who always believed in her heart that she was the best. Kerrigan is, in the words of Evy Scotvold, "emotional," and her lapses are legendary. A heavy favorite to win the 1993 world championships in Prague, Kerrigan botched a series of jumps and came in fifth, sobbing afterward: "I just want to die."
Despite agent Solomon's insistence that she has rebounded since then, even winning the Piruetten Invitational in Norway in November, he and the others have vigorously attempted to shield Kerrigan from stress since the attack. With the exception of a few carefully planned excursions like her recent California trip to shoot a Reebok commercial, Kerrigan's life these days is largely surrounded by walls. At her rented condominium on Cape Cod, visitors are rare, the phone rings infrequently and Kerrigan seldom goes out, except to the ice rink. Even on those drives, she is always accompanied by a bodyguard -- one of her two brothers, Michael or Mark (hiring a stranger to guard her, the family felt, would add stress). Her practice times are secret, and Kerrigan avoids reporters and cameramen at the arena entrance by telephoning rink staffers ahead from her car phone so that they can open the Zamboni door in back and usher her car right into the building.
Such caution characterizes not only Kerrigan but her entire entourage, who seem bent on projecting an image of containment, dignity and control. Her mother, Brenda, a warm, verbose woman who offers coffee and squeezes a visitor's hand, repeatedly apologized during an interview at her Stoneham, Mass., home for refusing to answer numerous questions, explaining that she had been instructed by agent Solomon not to talk much. "There are things inside me that I'd love to say and scream as a mother. But I can't. They tell me not to." When Jeff Gillooly and his lawyer made their televised court appearances last week, Kerrigan's parents slipped into another room to watch TV, citing Solomon's warning not to allow a reporter to record the emotions on their faces. (Solomon says he advises the Kerrigans to be circumspect on the advice of lawyers.)
Quiet rage. Kerrigan's coaches, too, are cautious. Does Nancy ever express anger over the attack? "Quietly," explains Mary Scotvold. "She doesn't want to get in the same vernacular as [the Harding camp]."
Such protective impulses by Kerrigan's parents and advisers are understandable, though whether they will help the skater in the end is hard to predict. What is clear is that the current concept of the tenacious athlete is a lot different from the old days, when athletes were deemed "tough" because of their gritty, inbred dispositions, not because a team of advisers tutored them in mental resolve. It's hard to imagine, say, the legendary Chicago Bears fullback Bronko Nagurski consulting a sports psychologist or listening to relaxation tapes.
Still, some standards never change. If Nancy Kerrigan wins the gold in Lillehammer, she'll forever be remembered as a clutch performer. If she blows her jumps and places fifth, the commentators will say she couldn't overcome the bizarre knee-capping and subsequent media circus. For today's Olympians, as with those of the past, the ultimate proof of toughness lies not in the means but the end: standing on the highest platform when the medals are handed out.
