“Why, why, why?” Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan screamed and cried after a muscular thug hit her in the knee with a metal bar. “Why, why?” I cried when CBS News executives told me I had to cover the sordid soap opera starring Olympic archrivals Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. I was co-hosting the CBS Evening News for six months. Would Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather ever be sent to chase two women who spun, jumped and floated to the delight of the audience? Absolutely not. Why would CBS ask me to do that?

CBS had bought the rights to televise the 1994 Olympics for a reported $300 million, and since figure skating was typically the most-watched sport, the suits were salivating over a potential primetime ratings bonanza. CBS had a vested interest in covering and extolling the rivalry between the competitors.

In this age of food mania, the media happily fed the fairy tale. Nancy Kerrigan was the beautiful Snow White in Vera Wang tutus. Tonya Harding was an ugly duckling from the wrong side of the tracks. She had led a hard life, claiming that both her estranged husband and her mother, a night-shift waitress, had physically abused her. Yet she had remarkable athletic talent and was a feisty, driven badass, driven by guts, not grace. As Tonya’s story unfolded, authorities discovered evidence that her ex-husband had orchestrated the attack on Nancy.

What emerged from the Tonya-Nancy saga was a drama that played out like a TV movie full of Shakespearean themes:

Love: They both loved skating and lived for it.
Hate: Tonya hated Nancy.
Lust: For fame and fortune.
Deception: Of fair competition; of the spirit of the Olympic Games.

Report from the wedding of her first daughter Tricia Nixon in the Rose Garden on the South Portico lawn of the White House, June 12, 1971.Thanks to Connie Chung.

I did my utmost to protect the skaters, but the pressure was enormous.

The CBS executives said to me, “You’ve got to do this for the network.” I had no choice.

Soon I was on a plane to Portland, Oregon, to harass Tonya. I wasn’t alone. Media from around the world had descended on the Clackamas Town Center, a shopping mall near the Portland suburb of Happy Valley. Packed into the mall’s public skating rink were cameras and crews from as far away as Japan and Australia, including reporters from British tabloids, the National Enquirerand even the venerable New York Times.

I stared at a steep, eight-foot wall, at a large ice rink below me, holding my microphone at the ready to exchange a few words with the “bad girl” of skating as she tore laps around the rink.

“Tonya, Tonya!” I beckoned her to come over to my camera. But what was going through my mind was: would Walter Cronkite yell in his deep, serious voice, “Tonya, Tonya. Come here, Tonya!”? No way. Oh, how I wanted to run away and defy my bosses.

I thought my days of covering unworthy stories were over. But knowing I had to deliver, I convinced Tonya to do an interview for my magazine program, Eye to eye. The curse, again, was that the interview resulted in record high ratings. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.

How ashamed I was when I walked with Tonya to the Olympic Games in Norway, not only because of the CBS Evening News van Lillehammer, but also to get another interview with Tonya. She agreed to a one-on-one before the Olympics. Tonya handled the questions like a seasoned politician, refusing to discuss the cowardly act against Nancy. Then, fed up with my repeated attempts to get her to talk about the attack, she suddenly yanked off her microphone and walked away, like a cranky Capitol Hill insider. I was criticized for pushing her, as any good reporter would have done. Only later did she plead guilty to complicity in the cover-up.