What’s Wrong With This Picture?

It started with football. O.J. Simpson played with a grace not many could match. One moment in particular sticks in the mind. They were replaying it Monday night all over the late news. There again went No. 32 in the Trojan cardinal and gold, straight through the UCLA line. He cut hard left, accelerated down the sideline, and then, so beautiful, so magical, so graceful, he veered back to the middle of the field, seemingly dodging tacklers he could not even see.

That 64-yard touchdown run defined the wonder of O.J. Simpson as football player. Later would come his professional career, most of it spent in Buffalo. It was spectacular, but it also was in Buffalo, and after the glory of his college days it never seemed more than epilogue. As a football icon, the “Juice” was both made and frozen in time on Saturday afternoons in the fall, nearly three decades ago.

In his second act, Simpson was adopted into that strange family of faces who live inside television sets and chatter away Sunday mornings from September through January, analyzing botched passes, speculating on what the coach might tell the troops at halftime, talking football. He became an NFL analyst. He also leaped over turnstiles, briefcase in hand, on television commercials for Hertz. And he played dumb roles in dumb movies.

He wasn’t exactly smooth in this new work. His head jerked from side to side as he talked. His words got mangled. The on-camera clumsiness was forgiven. Football fans remembered the long runs, the grace. Besides, after so many Sunday mornings, Simpson was almost like kin. He had become Uncle Juice--likable, honest and, more than anything, familiar.

And now what do we have?

*

Now we have a man, stunned, unshaven, sleepwalking past a crush of cameras and reporters, lawyer at his side. “I know nothing,” he says, and slouches off camera. Now we have rumors, leaks. They gain force and grow more awful by the quarter-hour, a freight train of circumstantial evidence moving fast on a single track. We are presented documents from divorce court, glimpses of a marriage gone bad, a suggestion of rough moments and threats, of scenes.

Of the killings themselves, we must invent our own images. There is no slo-mo camera to run back the play, no telestrater to diagram the action. We are given only set pieces, unassembled. The body of a young mother, sprawled in a breezeway. A handsome young man left by the bushes. Blood everywhere. A dog loose on the street, dragging its leash.

We must imagine dashes to the airport, such a bad play on the rental car ad campaigns, the flight across country in first class, the feeling in the gut when the telephone rings at 8:30 a.m. and on the line is the LAPD: “Good morning, Mr. Simpson.” Worst of all, we must imagine the two children, asleep in their beds, unaware of their loss. What will they be told? When? By whom? It all appears so hard and so mean, so ungraceful.

In this murderous city, which has seen so much, the collective shock reverberating from this case is somewhat surprising. Still, shock is the universal emotion--prompted not, sadly, by the grim fact of two more victims, but by the suggestion someone so familiar, Uncle Juice, might be culpable. All over town, people are saying the same thing. I heard a co-worker Tuesday describe a sleepless night, her imagination set loose, working to reconcile the images. And way out in Norwalk I overheard a county bureaucrat, standing at a computer, muddling through the possibilities: “I can’t believe he would do it. If he did it, I lost my idol. He couldn’t have done it, could he? He was my idol.”

*

Benefit of doubt? Presumption of innocence? Of course they will be given to Simpson. Who would not prefer to believe that, somewhere out there, an as-yet-undiscovered piece of evidence waits to snap the picture back into focus, to restore, at least, our Saturday hero, our Sunday morning friend.

A lot of people pretend fascination with sports is some weird riddle. It’s simple. Fans hooked on football are no different from those hooked on any form of performance, any art. They admire to a point of envy what they themselves cannot do. They watch to appreciate the grace, the magic, and those who provide it become heroes.

With these heroes, though, a mistake can be made. There is a desire to believe that the grace extends beyond the weekend dusk, that the great ones carry it into all corners of their lives--that the magic adds up to something more than mere touchdowns. Similarly, no one wants to believe that the beaming faces who talk to us Sunday mornings, so friendly, so familiar, in fact are total strangers, capable of surprises.

Say it ain’t so, a little boy said to another graceful hero, in another era. The sentiment travels well across time.