In 1994, the family had rented a vacation home in Kissimmee St. Cloud, Florida so we could easily access Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld (back when that park didn’t seem like such a terrible destination). It was my second or third trip to Disney. Whatever one thinks of the company as it is now, the park has retained its charm. To a child, it really is the most magical place on earth except for, I guess, the limits of a child’s imagination. We were taking a break from the parks, swimming in the pool, and listening to the radio when the news came out that Orenthal James Simpson—"The Juice”—was a fugitive of justice, on the run from an inevitable arrest. Off to the television we went to watch the slow speed “chase” that captured the world’s attention and the magic of theme parks turned to thoughts of murder.
I was very young and suppose I only knew O. J. from The Naked Gun movies, the first of which I thought was top-notch and didn’t need the so-so sequels that followed. But suddenly the initials O. J. were on the lips of every American for good or ill—young or old, black or white, man or woman. The chase preceded my first year at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the trial was in full swing by the time I was a seventh grader. One lunch period that year, I was discussing the case with an older African American student (the place was so small, there was little that divided us, so a seventh grader talking to a freshman was not uncommon.
She asked if I thought O. J. was guilty. I had spent the entire summer watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial (I suppose a weird thing for a young boy to do, but I wasn’t exactly normal). To me, my answer seemed so self-evident. We were all so saturated with the media’s reportage, I repeated words I had heard on television: “I think he (long pause) brutally murdered both Ron and Nicole.” My “brutally” was as harsh as any of the prosecutors (and if you’ve ever seen the crime scene photos, the word is perhaps not enough to do the crime justice). But the student I gave this answer to was cautious in conversing with me from that time forward. Even in my small world (albeit in Birmingham, a town with a notorious past when it comes to race relations), the gap between races was widening. We were in a small war over a former football player turned broadcaster turned actor and the two people he killed.
It seems perverse to talk about a murder trial as being “must-see-TV” but, the entire summer before I started drama school, it was all one could think about. It did seem, as Larry King pointed out, like a show more so than a legal proceeding. All the lawyers and most of the witnesses became household names, the way you’d know any celebrity. (Even today, Marcia Clark, now a crime novelist and sometime journalist, is one of my favorite public figures—she has a bullshit detector like no one else). Young women pined for Kato Kaelin, the “Dancing Itos” were doing their Rockettes number on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Norm Macdonald was ruining his career by landing joke upon joke about O. J. (I still regularly watch the YouTube clips of his infamous and damned funny jokes about the trial). And, of course, we first heard a name that we had no idea would become so ubiquitous today: Kardashian.
The racial divide the trial and acquittal exposed was indeed strong. When O. J. was found not guilty, like most white people, I was shocked while black people cheered. Even as a preteenager, I could see the evidence was so voluminous and the defense “Dream Team” so smug and self-righteous that “not guilty” couldn’t have possibly been the outcome. I suppose it was not until Ezra Edelman’s masterful 2016 documentary O. J.: Made in America that I truly understood why it all unraveled the way it did.
I am not much a fan of sport (save a live baseball or hockey game every now and then) but, for some reason, I always like sports documentaries. I have no “teams,” I suffer through football season with its requisite nonstop chatter, but I remember crying watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. Go figure. ESPN commissioned an excellent series of sports docs called 30 for 30. Many of the episodes were enthralling, especially the one by Alex Gibney, the only real successor to Errol Morris, though perhaps that’s an unfair comparison given Morris’ canonical strangeness. But the coup de grace was Edelman’s movie—a nearly eight-hour film you wished were eight hours longer. Deserving of its Oscar, I maintain it’s one of the finest films (not just documentaries) I’ve ever seen.
Beginning with O. J.’s rise to prominence as a Heisman Trophy-winner at the University of Southern California whilst also presenting an eagle-eye view of race relations in Los Angeles (with Rodney King’s beating being the catalyst for so much unrest), Edelman weaves the whole thing together so beautifully that it will be, for many years, the final word on the matter though, like all great art, it raises more questions than it answers.
In the film, we essentially have O. J.’s former manager telling us he confessed to the murders privately, we have jurors who fess up to the fact the verdict was not so much about O. J., but as retaliation against the acquittal of the policemen who nearly beat King to death. These items in themselves are maddening because, so many years later, there are still many of us whose hearts go out to the victims of the crime. When O. J. passed away (from a very painful form of cancer—karma?), most people on social media posted pics of Ron and Nicole. That’s the appropriate response.
Still, with his death, I realize how large a figure he loomed in all our lives, at least those of us born in the 1980s. The racial ramifications are still with us and conditions in that arena are perhaps worse than they’ve ever been. Yet, there are those who prefer to remember his athleticism. I rewatched Made in America this last weekend and, I must confess, watching him play football in historic footage was akin to watching a prima ballerina perfecting a Tour Jetée. He was remarkable player, but also a remarkably flawed human being. He lived a phony life. His charming smile belied the reality that he was a typical wife beater whose rage and jealousy, almost Othello-like, finally overcame him and brought about his downfall. The story of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown is indeed a tragedy. O. J.’s story, however, is a tragedy on the scale of Ancient Greek tragedy—perhaps the most precipitous fall for any major contemporary figure that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
Now he’s gone, but our situation hasn’t improved. If anything, that verdict divided whites and blacks in an irrevocable sense. All the activists working on his behalf at the time—often as smug as the folks sitting at the defense table—made sure that race was the defining factor, the truth, the DNA, the obviousness, be damned. If he had been found guilty, perhaps L. A. would have turned Bedlam again, just like the riots of the ‘60s and ‘90s.
Racism in America is not a situation we will ever really live down, I fear. The stains of slavery will never be truly washed away. O. J.’s case simply put all the cards on the table (the race card, an unfortunate term, especially) and we watched with rabid interest. Then, because of Court TV and the like, we entered a new world where so-called “trials of the century” pop up every ten years or so. None of them, however, reach the level of societal significance that that trial did—its implications weigh on us every single day. That was the true “Trial of the Century” (at least in the U. S.)—maybe even a pivotal part of our national history, sadly to say.
Maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of all.
