Trouble Follows Harding Around : Profile: Figure skater has been surrounded by turmoil in personal life.

For those in figure skating who were not aware before that Tonya Harding was not a stereotypical ice princess, it quickly became apparent to them on the night she won her first U.S. championship in 1991. In the middle of a formal gala whose host was one of the sport’s most influential promoters, she ducked out to play pool with her friends.

In a sport in which women competitors are called ladies, and are expected to behave as such on and off the ice, Harding, reflecting her blue-collar upbringing in Portland, Ore., was rough around every edge except those on her blades.

But as much as figure skating officials would have liked to ignore her, it was impossible because of her rare jumping ability. When she became the first American woman to performa triple axel, a difficult 3 1/2-revolution jump, during an electrifying freestyle program that evoked a 45-second standing ovation at Minneapolis’ Target Center in the 1991 national championships, judges had no choice but to award her the title.

Uneasy lay the crown.

Over the next three years, Harding tried in vain to hide from the spotlight that she had so long craved as it revealed a troubled childhood, tempestuous personal relationships, an on-again, off-again marriage, an undisciplined lifestyle that made it difficult for her to work with her coaches and agent and two brushes with the police.

None of that, however, prepared those who know her for the events of this week, in which her bodyguard and another individual have been charged with conspiracy in last week’s attack on Harding’s rival, Nancy Kerrigan, after a practice at the U.S. championships in Detroit. One Boston television station went so far as to report Thursday that Harding would also be charged as a conspirator. Prosecutors have denied that and say she will not be.

But Harding’s bodyguard, Shawn Eric Eckardt, 26, and Derrick Brian Smith, 29, were arrested in Portland and charged with conspiracy. And one official said more arrests were expected.

Also, Eckardt implicated Harding’s former husband, Jeff Gillooly as a conspirator, police sources told the Oregonian in Portland.

Without Kerrigan in the competition because of knee injuries she suffered in the assault, Harding won her second national title. Arrest warrants were issued Thursday in Portland, but Gillooly was not named. Prosecutors said Harding will not be charged.

“I presume she is innocent,” said her former agent, Michael Rosenberg of Palm Desert, who had numerous run-ins with Harding before ending their association last summer. “Tonya is a very complex person, but I do not consider her to be an evil person.

“It is entirely consistent of her character to beat someone and gloat about it. It is not consistent of her character to sabotage a competitor. She never wants the people she beats to have excuses.”

Harding, 23, has said in previous interviews that she never lived in one place long enough as a child to remember her address, moving with her parents from one apartment to another or in with relatives whenever the rent was raised. For a while, they lived in a mobile home in her grandmother’s driveway. She said that she changed schools virtually every year before she dropped out in the 10th grade, and had few friends.

In four previous marriages, her mother, LaVona, had four children, one who died as an infant. The others were much older than Tonya and she was not close to them, she said, because they resented the attention she received from her parents as the baby in the family.

When she was 15, police arrested her 26-year-old stepbrother after receiving a 911 call in which she accused him of attempting to sexually assault her. He was released after one night in jail and not charged. Harding said that he had often threatened her before his death four years ago in a hit-and-run accident. She did not attend the funeral.

She became infatuated with figure skating when, at 3 1/2, she saw skaters on the rink inside a downtown Portland mall. Although her mother objected to paying admission to the rink, Harding begged until her father relented.

She liked it so much that her parents gave her a pair of used skates for Christmas and enrolled her in group lessons. She advanced quickly and the teachers recommended private sessions with Diane Rawlinson in nearby Jantzen Beach.

Private lessons were too expensive for LaVona, a waitress, and her husband, Al, a truck driver and $5-an-hour day laborer who often was unemployed because of back problems. But they did what they could. LaVona sometimes drove Tonya around Portland in their truck in search of empty bottles they could turn in for nickel deposits. It is a slow way to earn the estimated $30,000 to $35,000 per year required to develop a world-class figure skater.

So, recognizing Harding’s natural athletic ability, Rawlinson came to the rescue, waiving many of her fees and paying expenses out of her pocket until her prize pupil reached a level that allowed her to receive money from the U.S. Figure Skating Assn.

Rawlinson watched Harding climb the USFSA ladder for 14 years before deciding she could no longer tolerate the girl’s stubborn resistance to hard training, which, combined with the practices she missed because of her asthma, gave them too little time together on the ice.

In March of 1990, not long after her split with Rawlinson, Harding married her longtime boyfriend, Gillooly. When she won her first national championship the next winter in Minneapolis, upsetting heavily favored Kristi Yamaguchi, Harding said she had never been happier.

A half-finished portrait emerged in the media of a ragamuffin people’s champion, a young woman who relaxed off the ice by racing dragsters, repairing cars in her back yard and hunting deer. If, as is often said because of her appearance, Kerrigan is figure skating’s Katharine Hepburn, Harding is the sport’s Roseanne Arnold. Simultaneously thin- and thick-skinned, vulgar, spit-in-your-face competitive. And, as it turned out, unpredictable.

Two months later, after finishing second to Yamaguchi in her first world championships, she announced that she was leaving her new coach, Dody Teachman, and would coach herself with the assistance of her husband, a non-skater who, at the time, worked in distribution for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. She would skate; he would videotape her.

Then, after reconciling with Teachman in the summer of 1990, Harding filed for divorce from Gillooly, citing irreconcilable differences. Two days later, she was granted a restraining order against him, claiming that he had physically abused her.

The turmoil in her personal life appeared to be taking a toll. Although she and Gillooly got back together, she barely earned a berth on the 1992 Winter Olympic team with a shaky third-place finish in the national championships. After arriving a week later than expected in Albertville, France, for the Olympics, she finished fourth behind the two other Americans, gold-medalist Yamaguchi and bronze-medalist Kerrigan.

She decided that the problem was her coaching and fired Teachman, returning to Rawlinson. But she never seemed too far out of trouble--after an incident at a stoplight in Portland, another motorist accused Harding of chasing her with a baseball bat--and her skating career floundered. She finished fourth in the 1993 national championships, failing to earn a berth on the U.S. team for the world championships, and people in the sport whispered that her best skating was behind her.

Last summer, Harding again filed for a divorce, which became final Aug. 28. In October, police in Milwaukie, Ore., a Portland suburb, responded to reports of a shot being fired in the parking lot of an apartment complex and seized a handgun from Harding. She and Gillooly, who were together at the time, said the gun had gone off accidentally.

So what kind of mood was Harding in a couple of weeks later, when she arrived in Dallas for her first competition of this season, Skate America?

A defiant one.

Asked about her divorce, she denied it was official and said she and her husband were living together. “I am married,” she said.

Asked about a published report that she was spotted smoking in a pool hall, probably not a terrific idea for an asthmatic athlete, she said, “I am not a smoker. That’s all I have to say.”

Asked about her goal in Dallas, she said, “A lot of people think I’m a has-been. I’m going to show them that I’m not.”

Harding finished third at Skate America, interrupting her freestyle program because a blade on her skate had come loose. Something always seems to be happening to her, such as at another competition in December in Portland, where she withdrew because of a death threat.

It was for that reason that she hired a bodyguard.

Harding has denied she had anything to do with it. She said that she looks forward to skating against a sound Kerrigan in the Winter Olympics in Norway.

“It won’t be a true crown until I face Nancy, and that won’t be until the Olympics,” she said of her most recent national championship. “And, let me tell you, I’m going to whip her butt.”

* THE CASE: Arrest warrants were issued in the attack on Olympic figure skating star Nancy Kerrigan and two men were taken into custody. A1

* COPING: Nancy Kerrigan and her family seem to be handling a confusing situation well. C6