There’s a Better Way to Treat Rev. Grier

If the Rev. Rosey Grier was minister of one of the town’s biggest churches, would prosecutor William Hodgman treat him with more deference?

I wondered about that Friday when I watched on television as Grier, once a famous Rams football player, testified at the O.J. Simpson trial. Hodgman tried to pry from him details of a chat with the defendant that allegedly was overheard by one or more jailers. Just what the deputies overheard is unknown. But Hodgman seems to think it will help his case and the hearing will continue today.

Hodgman hammered away in true prosecutorial style. He called him “Mr. Grier,” rather than Rev. Grier. His questioning was blunt and unrelenting.

Hodgman asked if Grier knew Simpson before he was ordained in 1986. “I could have seen him in a lot of different places, I don’t know where,” Grier replied. “More than five times?” asked Hodgman. “No idea,” said Grier. “Less than five times?” Hodgman asked. “No idea,” said Grier.

Some people watching thought Hodgman was on the right track, that Grier was being evasive.

Defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. disagreed. “This man has an absolute right to privacy,” said Cochran. “He is here as a minister.”

Just how much a member of the clergy must reveal is a complex issue. Judge Lance A. Ito allowed limited questioning of Grier, but if the jailhouse conversation becomes crucial to the Simpson murder trial, the issue no doubt will be carried to appellate courts. It might become a landmark church-state issue.

But legalities aside, as I watched Grier’s testimony and listened to a tape of it afterward, I felt I would have treated him differently had I been in Hodgman’s place.

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I first became aware of Rosey Grier as a formidable person in 1968 when I was covering Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for President.

Previously, I’d known he was a great football player, a member of the Rams’ Fearsome Foursome mid-’60s defensive line. But to me he was just a player on a team I didn’t like.

He was at Sen. Kennedy’s side during the California primary campaign, as a friend of the family’s, a campaigner in African American neighborhoods--and as protection.

Kennedy spoke before huge crowds, bigger than anything seen today. He waded into the crowds, indifferent to danger. This was before Secret Service agents accompanied candidates, and Kennedy scorned security. Grier, 6 feet 5 inches, weighing 290 pounds, was by his side, a powerful visual and physical deterrent.

Not enough of a deterrent, of course, to save the senator’s life.

The night Kennedy won the California primary, Grier was with him at the Ambassador. After his speech, Kennedy headed down a narrow kitchen corridor.

There, Sirhan Sirhan opened fire, fatally wounding Kennedy. With the senator on the floor, a crowd in the corridor turned on Sirhan. Grier subdued him. As he testified at Sirhan’s 1969 trial, “I folded his leg around my arm and put him on top of a table.” The crowd moved in on Sirhan. Grier said he saw “one guy hurting his leg and some people coming at him from the front, so I swung on them and kicked the guy back and they seemed to realize we were trying to save the guy so they stopped.”

Having covered the campaign, after seeing the senator taken from an ambulance into old Central Receiving Hospital, and, with many other reporters, standing the death watch, I felt that anyone associated with it, who had shared that experience, was entitled to respect.

This is a sentimental view not shared by all of Kennedy’s old supporters, by the way.

After the assassination, Grier retired from football and drifted from one thing to another. He was a singer and an actor. He wrote “Needlepoint for Men.” He worked with inner-city kids but, as he told Times writer Mal Florence in 1985, “I got so depressed working with those kids for so long I just knew why people killed themselves.”

In 1978, Grier became a member of the Crenshaw Christian Center and in 1986 was ordained a minister.

As a minister, he runs a program for poor kids. But some of his other activities certainly aren’t what Sen. Kennedy would have expected.

He endorsed conservative evangelist Pat Robertson for President and wrote a letter to The Times saying, “If the Rev. Pat Robertson’s candidacy is such a terrifying church-state threat, why isn’t the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s?”

He backed Republican George Bush for President in 1992, and two years before that, campaigned with former President Ronald Reagan for the Republican state ticket. That same year, he wrote a letter to the court supporting Michael Milken, who was up for sentencing after pleading guilty to securities, mail, wire and tax fraud, conspiracy, market manipulation and maintaining false records.

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Obviously, a conventional view of consistency is not what guides Rosey Grier’s political views.

And conventionality is not the guiding principle of his ministry. He’s an unorthodox street minister with an unorthodox congregation, ranging from the delinquent young to the Christian right.

It may not be conventional piety, but who is to say it is not religion?