Posted on 03/13/2002 7:27:03 AM PST by Xenalyte
I won't watch this but I'd pay to see you beat the poop out of both of them at the same time.....
Agreed, just look at Tonya's arms vs. Paula's. Tonya has to keep buff cuz someone is always looking to fight her in real life. Ok, make that the other way around, Tonya is always looking for a fight.... (Is Be Prepared her motto?)
I was thinking the same thing! LOL
I am really turning into a DOM.(dirty old man)
03/13/02
MICHAEL WILSON T
he American Society of Plastic Surgeons suggests that a rhinoplasty patient should "avoid hitting or rubbing" the nose for at least eight weeks after the procedure. Extra-cautious doctors say six months.
It's been nearly four years since Paula Jones walked out of a Park Avenue surgeon's office with a top-shelf nose job. By all estimates, she should be ready for any reasonable trauma.
Reasonable trauma: A deployed airbag, say. Running into the door. A playful tussle, maybe a light mugging.
Not Tonya.
Not our Tonya.
Even Jones' surgeon, Manhattan's highly renowned Thomas Loeb, confessed that when he heard about his former patient's bout with Tonya Harding on "Celebrity Boxing," airing tonight on Fox, he felt a stab of fear.
"I think Paula Jones looks beautiful," Loeb said. "She has a beautiful result. I'd hate for it to get damaged. I'd hope that anything that got broken, I could fix again."
You might as well start scrubbing in, doc. No way Tonya sends that beak home in one piece.
News of the fight met predictable public outrage. Tonya has that effect on people. The mention of her name will convert a drooling street-corner drunk into a Calvinist preacher: Tsk, tsk Tonya.
All over town: "Tonya, Tonya, Tonya."
"There she goes again."
"That's Tonya for you."
Pause.
"She's going to kick Paula's butt."
"Paula may as well have painted a target on that nose."
"Paula's going down."
She's Portland's little sister, always getting in trouble, breaking stuff in the house, borrowing your leather jacket without asking. Disrupting. Embarrassing.
But when the bully down the street starts picking on her, whose side are you going to take?
When we last left Tonya, she'd been evicted after allegedly falling behind in the rent. She said she and her 200-pound dog were going to live in her car.
Tonya, Tonya, Tonya. Suddenly, here we are, Fight Night.
How did Tonya put the deal together so fast? And what kind of boxer is she, anyway? How does figure-skating magnificence translate to boxing?
Tonya, the tale of two sports. Tonya, Renaissance Woman. Tonya, the hot hot hot interview.
Where is she? "I can't tell you anything," said Josh, one of the press boys at Fox, a self-described "publicist."
"I've got nothing for you," Josh repeated the next day, and, with a sigh, the next.
Linda Lewis, her friend and godmother and manager, referred questions to another manager, in California.
That manager said, "Call Josh."
Tonya, Tonya, Tonya.
Women hitting each other in the face has inspired popular breathlessness from the start, in 1722, when Elizabeth Wilkinson took out an ad in the London personals, announcing she'd "had some words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me upon the stage, and box me for three guineas."
Hyfield ran her own ad -- "She may expect a good thumping!" -- and the first known female boxing match, as described in Bob Mee's book "Bare Fists," was on.
Tonight's fight springs out of pop culture with unprintable jokes and a built-in vocabulary, a gritty little dialect of cool words: Hubcap. Kneecap. Pipe-hitting goons. Wedding night video. Bill's birthmark. Nude spread. Nose job.
But even further, the fight has inspired cultural pontification from international pundits hungry for trends, for what it all means:
"By the time the Fox television network announced it was scheduling a prime-time boxing match between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones, it was undeniable a cultural line had been crossed," moaned Canadian newsman Robert Russo. "America has indeed returned to normal."
Time columnist Jack White analyzed the fight on a Sunday news show: "My gauge is that anytime you have a country that is focusing on a possible prizefight between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones, we're returning to some kind of funky normalcy."
Our Tonya, suddenly a barometer of a nation's healing.
Tonya, getting funky.
Tonya, in absentia. Fight-night forecasts went both ways from those in the know, those who remember Tonya standing by when they needed her most.
"We're sitting here, and my windows got blown out," said Sewickly's Addition owner Dennis Kay, thinking back on a vandal's attack while he was hanging out in his cozy gin mill with Tonya. "And she went down to the Walgreens at 3 in the morning and got some tape and heavy cardboard and got it secured."
Another time, a guy asked for an autograph for his sick daughter. Tonya sat down and wrote the girl a letter. "It's a side of Tonya people don't know," Kay said.
They became fast friends. "I'll be curious what she makes for this. I hope she makes some bank."
He hasn't seen her since January or so, after the eviction, when she came by to ask a favor. Back in the day, Wheaties made several prototype boxes with Tonya on the front. Things went bad before the cereal box saw mass production. Tonya kept some of the testers. She dropped three at Sewickly's for safekeeping.
Kay said she's in shape. She'd play video poker and smoke cigarettes, but didn't drink anything stronger than soda. "She's still buffed out. One night, on the concrete floor just in tennis shoes, she did a two-and-a-half turn for me. She's always letting me feel her muscles."
One minute you're playing video poker in a Milwaukie bar called the Lost and Found. Suddenly you feel dizzy, and next thing you know, you're getting mouth-to-mouth from a woman, and realize, hey, it's Tonya Harding.
That's just what happened to Ralona Weaver's 81-year-old grandmother, Alice Olson, in 1996. "She was a tough old bird," Weaver said, referring to her grandmother.
Tonya became a regular at the video poker machines at Weaver's bar, the Spare Room in Northeast Portland. Weaver doesn't think Tonya's ready to fight. "She's skinnier than a pole. I think the other chick -- I think Paula Jones will kick her (bottom)."
Indeed, Paula has almost an inch on Tonya, and an inch-longer reach, according to Josh and the boys at Fox, who would not disclose weights. In photos last week in Los Angeles, Tonya's biceps swelled outside her tank top promoting an online poker site.
She doesn't look skinny. But what do we know?
Only one person, after all, really knows how you look, whether you're eating right, whether you're making a mess of your young life.
"Ornery, is what she looks like," said Sandy Golden, Tonya's mother. "She's getting healthier. She was hurt there for a while. She lost a lot of weight. She scared me for a while."
Last week, smiling and gracious after a dancing lesson at the Spare Room, Golden seemed alternately defensive of Tonya's image and bemused by this latest incarnation of celebrity.
"She surprised me," Golden said of the fight. "She called and said, 'I'm doing something for charity.'
" 'Oh really? Where are you skating?'
"She said, 'I'm not skating.' "
Mom worried about the fight. "All kinds of things ran through my mind. You know. A mother's intuition."
Still, she's sure her daughter will whip Paula Jones. Whoever that is -- she's never heard of Paula Jones. "I don't pay attention to any of that garbage, and that's just what it is."
If the fight is for charity, that may be news to Josh and the boys. But regardless -- Tonya has skated for charity many times: "She does a lot of things people don't realize," Golden said. "She loves to help people. People are down on her when the whole thing wasn't her fault to begin with. It wasn't."
Perhaps worried that "Celebrity Boxing" was too highbrow, Fox added a boxing game to its Web site, where you can throw punches at the celebrities.
You can hit Tonya in the face. Cartoon blood flies. She punches back, but her heart's not in it.
More challenging would be the game where you play Tonya. You run around, saving old ladies, patching broken windows, detailing cars, negotiating a contract with Josh. Maybe then, finally, all the head-shaking, tsk-tsking would end. If everyone could, for a moment, be Tonya.
The fight actually took place Thursday, behind locked doors. Hours later, even Tonya's mother didn't know who had won. She'll find out tonight like everybody else.
"I don't pry into her business," she said, and then fell in behind every woman, everywhere, who has ever birthed a daughter, rich or poor, anonymous or infamous, and proud:
"She's a big girl. She can take care of herself."
You can reach Michael Wilson at 503-294-7663 or by e-mail at michaelwilson@news.oregonian.com.
If they're not doing it naked, who cares?
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