thomas leverett weblog: April 2024

Monday, April 15, 2024

Friday, April 12, 2024

RIP OJ

Everyone's got something to say, I'm sure, about whether he was guilty of the murder of his wife and her friend. What makes people uncomfortable is that if you're white, you thought he was, and if you're black, you thought it perfectly reasonable that he was innocent and was being framed by a vengeful white legal system.

To me the story of O.J. is more about a kind of bizarre parallel to my own life. In 1970 my family moved to Buffalo and I was deeply unhappy, cut off from my friends (I was in high school); in reaction I criticized the city of Buffalo severely: deep snow, gray skies, defeatist people, nothing to do, etc. Remarkably enough, O.J. was doing the same thing at the same time. The difference was, I was a punk high school kid and he was perhaps the best college running back football had ever seen, drafted by the Buffalo Bills because they were in last place, brought to Buffalo from Southern California where he was a media star, and put on a team that couldn't afford a line to protect him; with terrible stats and nowhere to go, he lit out against the city itself. It was boring (Yes!). Nothing to do (Yes!). Way too much snow in winter (Yes!).

Years later I was forced to live in Chicago one summer when my wife went over the edge and was having trouble handling our two young boys. We were given a place in Evanston on Lake Michigan by her brother, with lots of room, a television and no furniture, and I drove to a job in Evergreen, on the southwest edge of the city. Traffic was horrendous and the teaching load was very high. I was at my tipping point especially with the traffic when I came home one day to find the Bronco chase on the television. It was bizarre and surreal. In slow motion we watched the Bronco cruise down some LA interstate and ever since then, I've wondered whether the Bronco brand was altered forever; I think it was.

Many people were glued to the trial which played out over weeks and weeks. I'm white and tended to think he was guilty - who else would have the motive to kill his wife and her boyfriend? But it may have been the kind of trial where the evidence was scant enough that a reasonable jury might conclude that it wasn't enough, and that happens. Maybe the whole world suspects he's guilty but if the evidence doesn't prove it, you have to follow the judge's orders.

Because much of the world still considered him guilty, he couldn't really enjoy his free life outside of bars. What was that sports-memorabilia-kidnapping deal about? By that time people were tired of being reminded that a nation could be so racially divided over the verdict of a jury. But I almost felt like in repentance, he needed to go sit in prison for a while because that's where so many people thought he belonged. I never even got a clear idea of what happened in the sports=memorabilia incident, or if I did I forgot, but I know that much of the world felt like he had to do time still for what had happened with his wife.

One thing I can say about him is that at the same time he was one of the world's most gifted athletes, he was also one of the most charismatic, charming people in the media in that era. When he became a sportscaster he was good at it, because he was personable. But this fame and high profile carried a huge price that he was not entirely prepared for. It made it almost impossible for the world to look objectively at the facts of the murder case, and I found myself constantly questioning whether he could have been framed simply because he had so many enemies.

Years later I went back to Buffalo and found that it was just a place; like O.J., I had blamed it when the real problem was that I had been trapped. Sure it has a lot of snow, but Arizona has a lot of sun. People were nice to me; it was my own fault that I was miserable. But that's the way life is. You make your own bed, and you spend the rest of your life losing sleep in it.