This story, by senior writer Michael Knisley, first appeared in the June 27, 1994, issue of The Sporting News.
Thank heavens for little boys and girls, for whom the world is still simple. And thank heavens for people like Dr. Greta Pruitt, the principal at the Thirty-Second Street School in Los Angeles, and Paul Valanis, who teaches social studies there.
In a world gone mad again, the little boys and girls are keeping it simple and sane in the school across the street from the University of Southern California campus. Somehow, they're staying safe. I went there last Friday to see the damage being done by the O.J. Simpson story. If OJ. is a role model anywhere, surely he is a role model in this little school, located a half-mile or so from Southern Cal's Heritage Hall, home to Simpson's Heisman Trophy, and hard by his college-days house on Hoover Street. The Simpson saga seemed to have the entire nation doubled over from another blow to its midsection last week, sagging and drained by the news of O.J.'s arrest in the double homicide of his ex-wife Nicole Brown
Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Reeling already after Magic Johnson's revelations about the promiscuity that brought on his AIDS virus, after Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding's involvement in the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, after Mike Tyson's conviction on rape charges, after Vancouver's riots in the wake of the Canucks' Stanley Cup defeat, after Pete Rose's banishment from baseball for gambling, after losses to demon drugs by Darryl Strawberry and lord knows how many others, and after word out of baseball's offices last week that management and labor are going to take away the game again, OJ.'s arrest and sad flight from the authorities felt like a knockout punch.
MORE: The O.J. Simpson trial, explained
What other response is there to these most horrible words from Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti? "We will treat this case the way we would any case in which the defendant is eligible for the death pen alty. Mr. Simpson, under these charges, is in fact eligible for the death penalty."
These are hard times for sports and their role models, and they just keep getting harder. I wanted to see how hard O.J.'s story is on the kids.
Their answers gave me faith in the face of the incomprehensible. Somehow, they knew better than to model their lives after OJ. in the first place.
"It's not right, in any terms," said Ron Bruner, who is 11 years old. "But my parents wouldn't do that, so I wouldn't have any experience with it."
Somebody is doing something right with Ron Bruner and Brandon Kiel and Daniel Tuutau and Thomas Lewis and the other kids in Valanis' social studies class at the ThirtySecond Street School. Their heroes are coming from the right arenas.
"Most of the time, it's not important," said Brandon Kiel, who is 10. "But I always look up to my mom and dad. They were actually my first teachers I ever had, and they've been a good influence."
The kids on 32nd Street are paying attention. They aren't ignoring the news. Last Friday, they knew what was happening to OJ. These 10and 11-year-old kids knew about the evidence against him. Tuutau, who is 11, knew about the bloody glove the police found at Nicole's condominium. Kiel knew the authorities had matched Simpson's blood type to blood found at the scene of the crime. Bruner knew about reports that OJ. had said of his ex-wife, "If I can't have her, nobody can."
And they all knew that maybe they weren't being given the whole truth and nothing but the truth by the feeding-frenzied media, which grabbed the story in its mastiff jaws last week and shook it until a good, sloppy rumor du jour flew out.
TSN Archives: The bell tolls for O.J. Simpson (June 27, 1994, issue)
"Like, when you hear it on the news, they say like, 'O.J. Simpson savagely killed her," " Tuutau said. "They say all this stuff that makes it sound bad, like he really did it. Sometimes, they just make you believe things that are not even true."
And so the visit to the Thirty-Second Street School was restorative. The problem is, those kids in the hallway aren't the Los Angelenos who stopped their cars on the L.A. freeways and lined the overpasses to applaud Simpson and his fugitive friend, Al Cowlings, as OJ. held a gun to his own head during the slow pursuit last Friday night. They aren't the citizens who pressed into police barricades at O.J.'s Brentwood mansion to chant "Juice! Juice! Juice!" while an LAPD Special Weapons and Tactics Team tried to talk him into a peaceful surrender.
And they weren't in the mob that gathered outside police headquarters in downtown L.A. to cheer for a man who authorities say slit a 35-year-old woman's throat and repeatedly stabbed her 25-year-old acquaintanceto cheer even as the double-murder suspect finally was brought in for a mug shot and fingerprinting late Friday night.
In my few short minutes in that hallway with the kids, I saw more understanding than I did from the rest of Los Angeles in the five long days between the Sunday night murders and the Friday night arrests.
How to make sense of it? The freeway rubberneckers and others who found mirth in O.J.'s nine-hour escape from arrest seemed to take the easy route, to make a movie-like martyr out of Simpson in a fashion after "Thelma and Louise" or "Dog Day Afternoon."
(Ironically, Valanis showed his social studies class "The Fugitive," the Harrison Ford movie, last Thursday, the day before Simpson's flight. Ron Bruner didn't miss the connection to Friday's chase.)
It's a scary thing, though, to see a city lose the line between cinema and verite. To react to OJ.'s road-run from police in that manner is to ignore, totally, the rough realities behind Simpson's persona and the coldest of crimes with which he is charged. We all wish the murders hadn't happened, but they did. Someone killed those people willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, and although no one has been convicted, the likeliest perpetrator is OJ. Simpson. Maybe the carnival response from those sick folks who cheered him came because they couldn't comprehend any other reaction, but that doesn't excuse it.
***
We're learning a lot about O.J. Simpson that we didn't know before, and we're learning it in a hurry. It isn't a pretty process, but it is necessary if we're ever to come to grips with the possibility that he is guilty.
"I don't know about the abuse, because I never saw that," says a former Simpson colleague in the broadcasting business. "I knew that he screwed around a lot a lot, a lot, a lot. And he didn't try to be very secretive about it. Even when Nicole was pregnant (with their first child), he used to show up at games with another woman, a redhead. He used to talk about it (sexual conquests) and make a lot of remarks (with sexual innuendo). "It wasn't just that he fooled around. It was more like a compulsion. He had women around him all the time, and he was always chasing around."
TSN Archives: Where the spotlight belongs (Oct. 16, 1995, issue)
Doesn't make him a murderer, I know. But it doesn't make him a movie hero, either.
The only marginally sensible angles I heard through it all last week, outside of the school hallway, come from the people who know about domestic violence, the kind that OJ. committed 51⁄2 years earlier when he was charged with beating Nicole, then his wife, on New Year's Day 1989. And even the domestic-violence experts struggle with the notion that O.J. Simpson might be a killer.
As damning as the physical evidence appears to be at the scene of the murders, O.J.'s history of abuse is just as injurious. He and his closest friends have done a marvelous job of hiding a great deal of that history, even sweeping most of the potential publicity from the '89 arrest under the rug of celebrity. But it is apparently there. O.J. and Nicole seemed to fit the profile for an abusive relationship. Four short items of hard statistical reaction here:
• A crime of domestic violence is committed every 15 seconds in the United States, and those crimes result in a death on the average of once every nine days.
• Usually, a batterer gets worse instead of better. Once a man hits a woman the first time, he will hit her harder and longer the next time. And there will be a next time.
• The percentage of abusers is higher among professional athletes, especially pro athletes in the more violent sports, than it is in the general population. (In fairness, those studies show that the percentage declines among professional athletes who have retired from competition.)
• Jail time is a greater deterrent to further acts of abuse than counseling is. OJ. did no jail time and, in fact, even received his counseling over the telephone after the 1989 incident.
Two longer items of more personal reaction here, from experts on the issue. Experts who in this case can't believe their educated eyes, ears and hard statistics.
• "I was making dinner, and I just came to a complete stop to really listen to the news," says Dolores Velasquez, who sees these tragedies daily as director of both the East Los Angeles Shelter for victims of domestic violence and the Free Spirit shelter for battered women. "I stopped completely, to make sure I didn't miss anything. And when they men tioned about him abusing her before and threatening her... I hate to say it, but I still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. That possibly, for theft or whatever reason, it had been someone else. But in the back of my mind, I was almost positive he had done it. It's terrible to say that I've convicted someone beforehand, but every time I try to say, 'Well, maybe not, maybe not,' someone comes up and says, 'Look, he's done this.' Especially the following day when I came to work. I don't know how many times I said, 'Maybe not, maybe not,' and 'No, no no. Look at this and this and this.' But there was too much evidence that pointed to him already."
• ”At this stage, he was acting very much like any nearing-middle-aged man acts," says Alan Davis, president of the National Council on Domestic Violence, Child Abuse and Family Violence. "Basically, he was threatened, losing a beautiful young wife, having a hard time hanging onto her, losing her to a younger man. All kinds of stuff. Still, I guess I personally have believed, in spite of all that he has done on the record about abuse, that he hadn't committed this crime. That he, himself, wouldn't do it. But time will tell. We'll all know. It's just that at all points along the way, I had believed he hadn't done this. He's a tragic figure at this point. But one of the things that we are increasingly prone to do is to give sympathy to the perpetrator and not very much to the victim."
A friend in the television industry, who is also a longtime friend of O.J.'s dating back to their days at Southern Cal, says Simpson told him several months ago about a problem with Nicole over the terms of their divorce settlement. Apparently, O.J. may have been arranging business deals and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep them from his ex-wife.
"He said Nicole wasn't happy with the amount of money she was getting." he says. "I understood it involved deals that he was about to set up, or had just set up, that could still affect the terms that he was going to try to have those done in cash. And then I read into that, 'Oh, he means to hide it away.' That's my read on that. And then somehow, the concept got to her, and she called the IRS. That's the way I understand it."
It's difficult to hear that and not wonder about the genesis of the passage from O.J.'s suicide letter to the public, read on national television last week: "At times I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend, but I loved her."
I don't know what value, probably none, such things have in a murder trial. But the jurors in OJ.'s case, whether they like it or not, are going to find themselves struggling with the separation between perpetrator and victim-especially if the jurors spent last Friday night waving at a white Ford Bronco from an L.A. freeway overpass. The fact is, never has a person of such celebrity and almost-universal esteem been brought to trial on such heinous charges.
So far, the jurors in the trial of public opinion-you, me, the freeway sign-maker who painted "Go O.J." on the side of his van as
Simpson and Cowlings passed by on Friday, even Velasquez and Davis aren't dealing with that separation so well. Murder aside, we're all privy here to the fall of another role model, and we ought to be mature enough to place the blame for that where it really belongs.
Knicks guard Derek Harper says it eloquently: "We (athletes) are on a pedestal. We get everything done for us. Everyone thinks that we can do no wrong. Sometimes, that makes it difficult for us to deal with life when things don't go right. We've always had doors opened for us. And when we get in a situation where they stay closed, it's hard to know how to react."
***
I don’t fully understand the connections here, but I know the feeling I had Friday night in front of a television in a hotel
On three-quarters of the screen, the slow pursuit of Simpson and Cowlings, wanted for double-homicide and aiding and abetting a fugitive, amid a line of stopped traffic and wildly waving people on an L.A. freeway. In the lower-left corner of the screen, in-your-face trash-talking from Anthony Mason and Hakeem Olajuwon, technical fouls from Mason, John Starks and Vernon Maxwell, Patrick Ewing restraining Mason, his teammate. Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
And I thought of Ron Bruner, earlier that day, when I asked him at the Thirty-Second Street School if he'd feel any differently about the week's events had they involved Joe Montana instead of O.J. Simpson.
"He's probably the highest-paid football player," Bruner said. "I wouldn't look up to him anymore. (Simpson) probably did it. He'll get fried, and who cares? But I hope (Montana) doesn't do anything like that.""
And I thought: Thank heavens.