ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994                   TAG: 9406190084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID SHRIBMAN BOSTON GLOBE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium


SAD, SAD DRAMA PLAYED AS NATION WATCHED ON TV

The entire country went to the movies Friday night, riveted by a tragic thriller that unfolded with all the classic elements of contemporary culture - television, automobiles, highways, sports, Hollywood and violence, all culminating in the most stunning chase scene California has ever produced.

The murders, the burials, the charges, the denials, the escape, the pursuit, the standoff, the negotiations, the capture, the arrest and the avalanche of grief and shock that followed the saga of O.J. Simpson have produced one of the greatest shared experiences in modern American life.

In the next several days, assessments will pour forth from all manner of sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists. But the assumption beneath their commentaries will be that the transformation of Simpson from football hero to murder suspect to fugitive to prisoner reached into most every home in the country.

This was an episode in which almost all were witnesses.

In a sushi bar in Washington, where all the talk was in Japanese, the word "Simpson" repeatedly wafted through the air.

Mary Dougal sat down to nurse her baby in Northbrook, Ill., only to find her attention grabbed by an astonishing event on television.

In a restaurant in Lebanon, N.H., the conversation was of the legal strategies Simpson would use - and need.

On the surface, this is a story that left two people dead, another's life in tatters, and children without a mother and, depending how the long legal process turns out, without a father as well. It is the story of the rise of an American hero and then of a startling fall to earth. It is one of the saddest stories of all time. It is a match for Shakespeare or Hugo.

Instead, the events of the past week played out before the country as a television thriller.

That is partly because the nation has grown accustomed to measuring out its dramas the way tabloid editors and television magazine-show producers do. But it is also because this particular drama unfolded in a particularly modern way, with all the tools of the age: helicopters, television cameras, cellular telephones and guns.

And so stations gave their broadcasts names such as "The Simpson Investigation: Manhunt" and "The Pursuit of O.J."

But last week will be remembered as the week a football player's sad odyssey proved that the nation, if not the world, truly had become the global village. Rumors bounced from coast to coast. None was too preposterous to be implausible. Some of them turned out to be true.

But no one tuned out. The apparent suicide note from a man who turned out not to have committed suicide, the bizarre flight of a sometime Hollywood actor in a plot too harebrained for Hollywood, the whoosh of surprise when reporters in Los Angeles were told that a man whose face had been everywhere was nowhere to be found - all of it drew the country into the story, and all of it drew the country together.

It has become something of a commonplace to say that television is the bustling square of the global village, but this evening was different.

What television offered was not as horrifying as a political assassination, not as shocking as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, not as terrifying as the scenes of the TWA pilot with a gun held to his head at Beirut International Airport, certainly not as exhilarating as the victory of the U.S. hockey players at the 1980 Olympics.

It was less than all those things, and yet more.

That was because at the center of this was Simpson, a special kind of American icon. He was a football star. He was a movie star. He was a television broadcaster. He sped through airports.

Children idolized him. Grown men watched him with veneration.

The Juice was accomplished, of course, but he was compelling as well.

The young Simpson was more than a presence. He filled the room, whether at a preseason training table at the Buffalo Bills outpost at Niagara University just a few miles from the falls, or at Mulligan's restaurant on Hertel Avenue in North Buffalo, where his very presence helped create something of a Niagara Frontier version of Club 54 in a drowsy neighborhood.

He seemed to walk a half-inch above the pavement. He seemed to run a half-inch above the Astroturf at Rich Stadium. We had never seen anything like it. We had never seen anyone like him.

And so all night long the television was on, coast to coast, maybe even on ships at sea. The country that had identified so much with someone they called O.J. - his last name was never needed - could not pry its eyes from him, even in his most horrible moment.

We thought about his former wife and her male friend, we thought about his kids, we thought about him. We thought about the world we live in, and how hard sometimes it is to tell the difference between the stories that someone makes up and the stories that are really true. We thought about heroes and why we have them.

It is an enduring question. In Brecht's life of Galileo, one of the characters, Andrea, says she pities the land that has no heroes. Galileo objects. Pity, he says, the land that needs them.



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