King Kaufman's Sports Daily
O.J. 3: Sorry, media hordes. This one won't do boffo numbers. Plus: NHL follows up a big success -- four years later.
Read more: Crime, Sports, Media, TV, O.J. Simpson, NHL, Football, Ice Hockey, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
Sept. 19, 2007 | Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz describes reporters convening in Las Vegas to cover the O.J. Simpson robbery case greeting each other by waving three fingers in the air and proclaiming, "O.J. three!"
Is it really?
Simpson's mid-'90s criminal and civil trials in the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were culture-altering events that gripped this country in a way that's almost unimaginable now that our attention is often divided between two or three photogenic white girls who are missing.
We in the media are gleefully gearing up for a third round now that Simpson has been arrested on a host of felony charges stemming from his allegedly bursting into a hotel room with some armed cohorts and trying to claim some memorabilia he says belonged to him.
The media has set up camp, the cable channels have gone into full obsess, the pundits have begun punditizing on the whole thing and I'm proud to add another meta-layer by commenting on the pundits' commentary.
But I don't think this one has the legs of the first two.
Maybe this is O.J. 3, a rubber match, if you will, after Simpson was acquitted of murder in the criminal trial in 1995 but found liable in civil court in 1997. But don't expect this chapter to be as good as Ali-Frazier 3. Leonard-Duran 3 is more like it. Too much time has passed. O.J. has lost a step, and I think the public has lost interest in him.
Oh, there's momentary fascination, in a celebrity-gossip kind of way, in the robbery charge and the audio clip purported to be a recording of the alleged crime. O.J.'s got our attention for the moment because the whole episode is just so bizarre and funny-pathetic.
But can interest in O.J. 3 survive the next episode of "Look What Britney Did"? Is it going to keep our interest even when Brangelina splits or when the dormant Paris Hilton relaunches?
I don't think so. Simpson has gone from being a fascinating nexus of our individual and collective fears, prejudices, beliefs, suppositions and memories to being that annoying sociopath who lives down the street and crashes your parties.
His murder trials were cauldrons of issues having to do with race and class and law enforcement and celebrity and media and justice. This time? A third-rate robbery. And Simpson's actions in the intervening years, his increasingly strange bids for attention, have closed the divide he once created among the citizenry.