Tonya Harding Fights Back

When asked about this, Harding seems determined not to understand the question: "You say Tonya Harding and you go anywhere in the world and they will know who I am."

Since she started punching people professionally, Harding and her manager say there is a New Tonya: a wised-up woman who does not drink, smoke or mess around with men who deserve to be bonked with a hubcap. This Tonya lives alone in a house (rented under an assumed name) in the rural hills of southwest Washington. She hunts, in season, for elk and deer with a bow and arrow. She does not want the public to know what kind of four-wheel-drive rig she drives, having had her tires slashed in the past.

"I always wanted someone to love me for me, not for who I was," she says. "That was so naive. Nowadays, I could care less about anybody but me. I am not about to care for someone else. It sounds cruel and selfish, but I've been there and done that."

The new Tonya emerged two years ago from the tawdry commercial exploitation of the old. On Fox's "Celebrity Boxing," Harding beat up Paula Jones, famous for suing Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. Like Harding, Jones had been called "trailer trash."

"It was a street-fighting freak show," says Brown, Harding's current manager.

But the ratings were good -- and so was the money, at least compared with what Harding had been making giving skating lessons at a mall in Portland. So she went pro in February of last year.

To learn how to box, she found Brown, a longtime promoter based in Portland. Besides working at training camps for Bowe and Spinks, he is a former amateur boxer who helped organize Olympic training camps in Oregon. Brown, 44, is also a mortician.

"Being a mortician, I know how to be able to deal intimately with human beings," he says. "With Tonya, the whole thing is to keep her balanced. If you rock the boat, then you can lose her."

He hopes to fuse Tonya's off-the-charts notoriety and her innate athletic ability with real skills as a boxer so she can build herself a future.

"My job is to make sure Tonya has a couple million in the bank, and her health and welfare are secured," Brown says.

Even though she earns more than most female boxers, that still may take a while. Brown says she earns between $10,000 and $15,000 per fight.

Her boxing skills have sharpened from workouts in the ring and her upper body has become powerful from time in the weight room. With a jacket on she looks chubby, but when she takes it off, she looks intimidating, with linebacker shoulders and stevedore arms on a 5-foot-1 frame. Brown and Harding agree that she is about halfway home in learning the skills she needs to have a successful boxing career.

Still, Harding doesn't particularly like the sport. She would rather skate.

"In skating, you land on your butt," she says. "In boxing you get punched in the face. I don't like being hit in the face."

She is resentful of the money that professional skaters now earn.

"All the skaters nowadays are making hundreds of thousands because of me and Nancy," she said. "Skating was never a big deal before us. But me, I didn't make anything. I lost everything."

She knows all about the life that Nancy Kerrigan, 34, has in Connecticut: Kerrigan is married to her agent, raising a 7-year-old son, involved in charities, skating specials, singing and television appearances.

Does Tonya envy Nancy?

"No, why would I?" she says coldly.

What Harding wants is to make tons of money boxing and then retire to live alone with her Persian cat, Smalls.

"It would be having enough money to go hunting and fishing and go to the big four-wheel-drive mud bogs," she says. "And every once in a while put on a really pretty dress and go to dinner at a place like Applebee's or something."