OJ likes: “I’m not black; I am JO”
All right.
—The OJ StoryJay Z, 4:44
We weren’t going into Up and Down.
It was early one morning at the start of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. Working at the Olympics requires 16 to 18 hour days, much of which is spent on buses that transport you from event to event. other, often around an entire nation whose contours and rituals you are unaware of. Yet Spain seemed accessible, its people warm and helpful. And everyone, it seemed, stood outside, Up and Down — Up and down – because my watch indicated local time: around 3 a.m. The club had just opened. It was SOP: Barcelona slept from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., had dinner at 10 p.m., and didn’t start partying until late at night.
It seemed that we would not join them, “us” being four sports journalists. We were willing, but not able, according to the doorman, who was nice enough about it but made it clear that we would have to wait, not having enough leverage to get past the ropes.
At this time, a town car stopped near the entrance. A man emerged from the back seat. He knew a member of our group, who covered the NFL at the time. A few seconds later, we all entered the club, along with several other members of this man’s coterie.
OJ Simpson could be charming, in any language.
But he could also be, and was, violent. And it was almost certainly a killer.
GO FURTHER
OJ Simpson dies at 76, family announces
Simpson’s death Wednesday, at age 76, from cancer, likely affected people under 40 very differently from people over 50. As with significant events like the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing, you had to be there to understand the impact of Simpson’s 11-month double. -trial for murder in 1994 and 1995.
No one as famous as Simpson, the 1968 Heisman Trophy winner at USC, the first NFL player to rush for 2,000 yards in a seasonAnd the first African-American athlete to achieve iconic pitcher status (for Hertz), had already been accused of murder. And no famous person has ever been charged with a crime as grisly as the one Simpson was accused of – the brutal stabbing death of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson outside her Brentwood home , California, and Ron Goldman, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, who had gone to Nicole’s house to return a pair of glasses that her mother had left there while the family ate dinner.
The multi-day saga that unfolded after the murders, culminating in Simpson sitting in the back seat of a white Ford Bronco driven by his longtime friend, Al Cowlings, while Simpson held a gun to his head, while a phalanx of police pursued the Bronco. for more than two hours on the freeways of Los Angeles, captivated a nation whose sports fans were ready to witness a crucial Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets. During the chase they got both, with tracking and play on a split screen.
This was just the start of things.
The Simpson trial was the ultimate, perfect manifestation of the modern American zeitgeist, touching on most of its fundamental pillars: celebrity, sports, race, wealth – and television. Remove any of these elements, and the trial would have been important, even memorable, for many. But it would not have caused the emotional and lasting blow that it did. Without fame, this would have been long forgotten by most, as the 1954 murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. Without race, its impact would have been roughly equivalent at the Enron trial of Jeff Skillings and “Kenny Boy” Lay in 2006.
Without television, it would be the Manson trials – a nightmare if you chose to find out the gory details, but nothing that was force-fed to you daily by the American media colossus. And Simpson’s past as a famous athlete surely led to strange behavior of spectators as his pursuit continued through the streets of Los Angeles
With Simpson, all of these things fed off each other, like a chemical reaction, and the country couldn’t stop watching.
The physical evidence linking him to the crimes was overwhelming. But Simpson’s wealth gave him the opportunity to buy reasonable doubt – a defense team led by the late Johnnie Cochran that relentlessly attacked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office’s seemingly airtight case, finding fertile ground in the department’s flawed evidence-gathering methods – and, more efficiently. , and cynically, by looking into the racist past of one of the detectives in charge of the case, Mark Fuhrman. In this, Simpson was unique: a black man who was rich and famous enough to get out of troublean option that most people who looked like him did not have in the American criminal justice system.
And when, improbably, Simpson was acquitted by a majority black jury after just four hours of deliberation, the nation divided along racial lines.
On the day of the verdict, I was covering the then-Washington Redskins and was alone in the team’s practice facility in Virginia, in the media room. As the verdict was about to be announced, in walked Heath Shuler, whom Washington had selected with great fanfare with the third overall pick in the 1994 draft. The franchise hoped that Heath, an amiable young man from Bryson City, SC. North, would be the franchise quarterback of the future.
I don’t remember if it was before or after the verdict was announced. But I remember Heath saying, as naively as possible, “I don’t think he did it.” »
To which I replied, “Heath – even black people think he did it.” »
GO FURTHER
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And yet a mostly black jury, none of whom had the slightest connection to the life of Orenthal James Simpson – who, let’s be honest, probably wouldn’t have anything to do with black people like them – acquitted him within hours . . Not because they thought he was innocent. But because they believed the LAPD was guilty – of lying, of racism, of despicable acts committed against members of the black community in Los Angeles, for decades. This is why Ezra Edelman’s incredible documentary, “Olympics: Made in America” is must-see TV. You can’t understand why these black people came to this verdict if you don’t understand the history of many black people in Los Angeles with the LAPD in the second half of the 20th century.
Here, television, always television! — amplified and distorted. We saw HBCU students and black people in barbershops rejoicing when Simpson was acquitted, while white people in bars sat in stunned silence and white women burst into tears in the street. Back then, everyone watched CNN or network news, and most of us saw the same images. And so it became Black People Happy, White People Enraged, and it stayed there, like race always stays there, just beneath the surface – even though most black people weren’t necessarily happy for OJ. know OJ For at least some, what they were happy about was that, for once, an apparently guilty black man had gotten away with it, in the same way that so many apparently guilty white men had gotten away with it in over the years because of their wealth or privilege.
Of course, this was not acceptable to Nicole Brown Simpson’s family, nor to Ron Goldman’s family, and it never will be, and it never should be. These children have lost their mother; these parents lost their son; others lost good friends. And they have to live with this terrible reality every day of their lives. But that is the power of race and racism. Racism explodes in all directions and never brings anything other than pain and confusion.
There were terrible race riots across the United States after Jack Johnson, the first black man to win the world heavyweight championship, knocked out James J. Jeffries in 1910. (This fight was origin of the phrase “Great White Hope,” There was a burning desire, ever since the famous author Jack London, that a white man would take the title from Johnson.) The New York Times wrote: “If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will. wrongly interpret his victory as justifying demands that go well beyond simple physical equality with their white neighbors.
But there was no television or radio to report the murders of black people. during the white-led riots that broke out in more than 50 American cities after Johnson won the fight.
Some white people reading this may still not understand this dichotomy. So again.
OJ Simpson has essentially withdrawn from all contact with the black community, other than his immediate family. He had little contact with black people in Los Angeles, where he lived when he was arrested, nor with black people where he grew up, in a poor neighborhood in San Francisco. He never spoke about any racial issue; he never lent his celebrity to a cause that concerned black people. The LAPD gave him some deference after he became the prime suspect in a gruesome double murder of two white people that almost no person of color has ever received.
When he was finally arrested at his home after the Bronco chase, he infamously said as the Los Angeles detectives’ car took him away: “What are all these (N-words) doing in Brentwood? ?
He didn’t say it ironically.
But when this jury deliberated, it apparently didn’t care about any of that. They probably didn’t like that OJ turned his back on black people. Or that he had beaten Nicole Brown Simpson several times over the years. But perhaps it provided a vehicle through which they could say what they thought needed to be said. And they spoke.
So many people became famous because of the Simpson trial. They are still famous today. Little – not all – lamented that their fame was born because two innocent people were murdered in cold blood and because race still has this nation in a grip and we don’t seem to have the collective will to break it. And that after his release, OJ Simpson lived out most of his remaining time without much discomfort. After we all got caught up in the whirlwind of an American event that perfectly captured and captivated so many, we retreated to our neutral corners, believing what we still believe, and nothing much changed.
No justice. No peace.
(Top photo of OJ Simpson, center, smiling next to Johnnie Cochran as Brian “Kato” Kaelin testifies in March 1995: Vince Bucci / AFP via Getty Images)