Tonya, I Love You

Acting on pure impulse, I charged down the aisle of the metal bleachers…

Michael P. Branch

The 2021 Montana Humor Prize Winner – Nonfiction

David Fenimore is the good name of a good man who has been a good colleague and friend to me for a good long time.

Tonya Harding. That is not a good name.

Among the greatest athletes in the history of figure skating, Harding’s precipitous fall from grace began in 1994 when her chief rival, Nancy Kerrigan, was brutally attacked by assailants who used a police baton to whack her leg. Busted for plotting the attack, Tonya was stripped of her medals and banned for life from professional skating. Within three months of being rung up, skating’s former sweetheart appeared on a professional wrestling show, sold her sex tape to Penthouse for $200,000, and launched a side gig as a celebrity boxer.

Chasing the profits that might follow a comeback for his disgraced client, Harding’s agent contacted every hockey team in America to sell Tonya’s comeback performance as spectacle. The only franchise that would touch the deal was the one in my town. “Tonya II: The Comeback” would occur live during a Reno Renegades hockey game. I don’t care about hockey or figure skating, but I found the prospect of this spectacle irresistible, and so was among the first to buy tickets to the bizarre event. I was then a newcomer to Reno, a young professor at the university, and my mentor David Fenimore had warned me that I should keep my nose clean. But I didn’t see how witnessing this tawdry event could damage my professional reputation, so I planned a pre-Tonya party and invited friends to join me. I was disappointed that David Fenimore chose not to be with us for what promised to be a spectacular event.

On the night Tonya would skate her way into my heart I began celebrating at the dangerously early hour of 3:00 p.m. By the time of intermission in the evening hockey game, I was thoroughly awash in the effects of cheap bourbon.

At last the lights dimmed, the spotlight ignited center ice, and a sequined Tonya Harding glided into position and became motionless as a sculpture, bravely poised for her first public routine since scandal had brought her low. As Tonya began her performance, which appeared to me flawless, the booze roiling in my noggin convinced me that I should warmly embrace her long-odds comeback. Acting on pure impulse, I charged down the aisle of the metal bleachers, where I dodged a security barrier to reach the rink’s Plexiglas wall. There I raised my spread arms above my head, pounded my open palms on the glass wall, and shrieked “Tonya, I love you!”

Tonya’s routine concluded amid a roar of applause spiked with boos. Some people tossed roses onto the ice, while others threw crowbars and police batons. Unflappable Tonya skated her victory lap, smiling warmly. I smiled back, because I could tell she was smiling at me.

Waiting to get Tonya’s autograph meant standing in a snaking line of hundreds of people equally smitten with the resurrection of America’s fallen angel. And the event was mobbed by media crews from around the country. As we waited, one of my friends pointed at me, and said, loudly, “Do you know this guy is a professor at the university and he’s writing a book about Tonya Harding?”

This was obvious horseshit—even the true part, about me being a professor, shouldn’t have struck anyone as credible—but the press didn’t hesitate, and in seconds I was surrounded by film crews and reporters. Suddenly the lights were on me, microphones were jammed toward my face, and I was asked to offer my analysis of Tonya’s remarkable comeback.

“Tonya occupies a vital locus in an embattled liminal zone in American culture,” I began, ponderously. “Despite the dystopic inflection of the marginalizing discourse that relegates her to the subaltern, the fetishized denigration of her performativity fails to recognize the polysemous deterritorialization that renders her cultural intervention profoundly redemptive.” I paused to see which of the reporters would call bullshit on my boozy rant. To my surprise, they only nodded approvingly, though several squinted oddly.

“Tonya’s aesthetic decolonization of this historicized paradigm has been mediated by a praxis in which the signifier that is Tonya herself subverts the teleological verisimilitude whose elision has reinscribed the social construction of her identity—which is adisplaced reconfiguration of our collective identity.” I delivered this last part with so much professorial conviction that the approving nods intensified.

“In other words, there’s a little bit of Tonya in every one of us, and a little bit of every one of us in Tonya. Any questions?”

A reporter from the TV program Entertainment Tonight leaned toward me and posed the only question I was completely unprepared to answer.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

Everyone huddled tighter around me, the microphones were raised even closer to my face, and the scribbling reporters paused, hovering in anticipation of my response. In that moment the magnitude of my mistake began to curl over me in a slow-motion wave of terror and despair. I had just begun my career as an untested and untenured professor, and now, in that awful silence, I saw my professional life flash before my eyes. I have no idea how long that interminable pause lasted. The reporters waited, the crowd gathered around me waited, even I waited, all of us wondering what might happen next. And then it just happened. I did not think about doing it. I did not decide to do it. But I felt my lips begin to move…

“DAVID FENIMORE.”

Eventually I made it to the front of the line, where I did finally get Tonya’s autograph. As for my friend David Fenimore, he spent a good part of the next day on the phone, explaining to distant relatives how he had gotten so much smarter—and taller too—since he moved out West. When I told him I was putting this story into writing I asked if he wanted me to change his name. “Nah,” he replied. “I’m not so attached to it ever since you started using it.”

Michael P. Branch

about the author

Michael P. Branch is University Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. His nine books include three works of humorous creative nonfiction inspired by the Great Basin Desert: Raising Wild (2016), Rants from the Hill (2017), and How to Cuss in Western (2018). He has published more than 300 essays and reviews, which have appeared in venues including Orion, CNN, Slate, Outside, Pacific Standard, Utne Reader, National Parks, Ecotone, High Country News, Terrain.org, Places Journal, Bustle, Whole Terrain, and About Place.
His new book, On the Trail of the Jackalope, is forthcoming from Pegasus Books in spring, 2022.