I'd only been in the hotel an hour when I found myself sitting across a dinner table from Tonya Harding.

But that's just the way things go at Television Critics Association "press tours," which every six months offer reporters access -- or sometimes just the illusion of access -- to all sorts of people most of us are used to seeing only inside that box in the living room.

Harding, of course, knows all about what it's like to have people put her in a box -- and apparently a bit about boxing, too -- and her presence at a GSN event was tied to the documentary the Channel Formerly Known as the Game Show Network made about her as part of its "Anything to Win" series.

It would be easy to make fun of Harding, whose transition from scandal-plagued Olympic figure skater to celebrity boxer hasn't been the most graceful, and when a GSN executive mentioned her name to a crowd full of TV critics, a ripple of laughter followed, subsiding abruptly after he mentioned she was in the room.

But there was nothing particularly funny about the woman at our table, who, like most of the women I know, is a little self-conscious about her weight, volunteering the information that a couple of rounds of prednisone, taken to combat a nasty bout with pneumonia, had added 35 pounds within the past year, that she's taken off 20 pounds since May and hopes to be back to her "boxing weight" soon.

She's battled exercise- and allergy-induced asthma most of her life and now knows that she probably skated competitively with much less than her full breathing capacity, but insists that she can still box.

She may still have a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the role she thinks class and money played in making her notorious, but the feistiness seems almost an act: She is in fact, exquisitely polite under questioning that under almost any other circumstance might seem rude.

And when she's not working the celebrity train of autograph shows and appearances, she says she's working on programs to increase people's access to health insurance.

It seems that Harding herself, despite significant health issues, doesn't have insurance.

Try as I might, I just can't see anything funny about that.