Skating With The Devil

Skating With The Devil

Okay, the Winter Olympics are coming up. I love the Winter Olympics. Put it this way – it’s fast, there’s not a lot to follow (even less if you toss events like skiing with guns, although even that’s pretty cool) and it always comes during the time of year when Hollywood studios throw out the dreck that they just wrote off as dead on arrival three months prior so I have time to pay attention .

And, yes, I even watch figure skating. I love the challenge of distinguishing an axel from a lutz, or a spiral from a …… yeah, right. More like I play the “is he actually straight?” game (so do a lot of you I’m sure.) And I like seeing how much the women hike up the skirts and shred the tops to test the limts of the dress code (and boy do they test it!)

Thanks to those devine copycats at FOX, I can comment on the subject here thanks to their launch of “Skating With Celebrities” – ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” but with E-listers instead of D-listers and skates instead of dress shoes (or that crap that Master P wore to shamelessly promote himself.)

The FOX show disturbs me. Why? I don’t necessarily care that the viewers can’t vote. I don’t even care that one of the judges, John Nicks, is or has served as coach of three of the “professional” skaters and one of the choreographers. What I do care about is some obvious pandering from upstairs with the continued inclusion of Nancy Kerrigan.

In three episodes, Kerrigan has proven herself the way she did during the peak of her amateur career – as completely overrated. She was never that good. She never won an Olympic gold medal or a national championship. She was a terrible jumper and about the only combination she could ever do for preparing a milkshake. To tell you the truth, I don’t understand how she sustained a career for reasons other than being relatively tall for a figure skater and the luck of having male judges with hard-ons for long black hair (or the right American backers to bribe judges with the bucks. Oh, like that doesn’t happen?) I hate to say it but I don’t think that 9 out of 10 Americans would ever know, or continue to know, who she is if she didn’t scream her most famous phrase “whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” after trailer-trash skater Tonya Harding had somebody whack her with that baton in Detroit years back.

Yet there she is with execrable “Full House” “comedian” (oy!) and Alanis’ Morrissette’s beloved ex-boyfriend Dave Coulier doing as little as she did during her competitive days and somehow (cough) still pulling top four finishes every week!

Then again, this is just typical Nancy Kerrigan. She was a spoiled brat at Lillehammer who whined incessantly that Oksana Baiul robbed her of the gold medal (she didn’t), bailed on her country by skipping the closing ceremonies for a parade at Disney World and saved the agent fees by, well, shtupping her agent, Jerry Solomon, who was almost twice her age and married (and who ended up marrying Nancy so the publicity fallout wouldn’t be too terrible.)

Thus, instead of kicking her ass goodbye in week 1 (when they should have), FOX is going through the “national pride” strategy of dumping the black guy first (Todd Bridges) followed by those pesky Canadians (Kurt Browning last week; I’d give at least a 95 percent chance of Lloyd Eisler in this one.)

It’s repulsive. If suckers like FOX didn’t fall for the act, Nancy’s career these days would be collecting the 12 bucks at the drive-thru window for the burgers and fries orders. Instead, she gets the sweetheart treatment and the excuse to prostitute herself to the syndicated tabloid shows.

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