North County News 6/22/94

O.J. SIMPSON: SUPERSTAR IMAGES DIE HARD

I'm a child of the 70s'. Most of the sporting events and the personalities that shaped the decade have since become the yardstick to which I've measured everything, and everyone else. When you're a kid, sports heroes can make the difference in your entire outlook on life. When you're an adult, especially one who takes the sports world on as a career, your perspective on fun and games and its participants changes dramatically.

Then a hero from your time becomes a tragic figure, a murder suspect, a suicidal fugitive. You're sitting at home watching what you thought was a meaningful basketball game, and then O.J. Simpson is in the back seat of a Ford Bronco with a gun to his head chased by a fleet of L.A. police cars. You try and put together the images of a man who streaked through your past across fields of green, and the man fleeing the law on primetime television.

As cynical as you can become in this life, as hardened a realist as you think you are, if you ever saw O.J. run with a football, it is what you think of first. There is a generation of sports fans who know Simpson from commercials, television, and movies; but for those of us who saw him play the game those long-ago Sundays, the image dies hard.

You can't get around 2,003 yards on a snowy December day ay Shea Stadium. Close your eyes and there he is on the shoulders of giants; a legend of memory.

If Orenthal James Simpson murdered his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, then he is a monster. History will tell you it's not a difficult transition to make, going from hero to monster. But the sports world is, as they say, the toy department. Often we witness the real world come crashing into sports like the terrorist tragedy at the '72 Olympics, or more recently, the assault on Monica Seles, and the murder of Michael Jordan's father. But nothing like this. O.J. Simpson is not the victim, but possibly the villain.

Richard Nixon's passing, with its pomp and plaudits, could not wipe the image of him boarding that helicopter heading for oblivion. All of his accomplishments as a public servant, and his six years as the most powerful man in the free world, sank behind the frozen picture of him resigning in disgrace.

Twenty years later O.J. Simpson is bobbing and weaving through the secondary, reaching the end zone and slowly letting the ball drop behind him. Then, immediately, he is in a courtroom staring into space. The line is painstakingly drawn. You wonder if twenty years hence, the images may not conjur up the latter.

Even writing this, I'm having a problem placing it all into perspective. There is certainly no place in my heart for a murderer. And if O.J. Simpson killed those people, then somewhere along the line he placed his good name somewhere else. Perhaps we 70s' kids are afraid to look for it.

One thing is for sure, there is little place for the fragile human spirit in distant memories. Just a hero running a football across the end zone.

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