I had been thinking about making my next blog post about another item of paleontological art, but then O. J. Simpson died. And, as one of the few people left alive who is old enough to remember the Nineties, I felt obligated to comment. (And then, of course, it took me a few weeks to actually do it.)
As I noted before, the O. J. trial gave Saturday Night Live its greatest Weekend Update moment ever.
Perhaps my most significant personal O. J. memory is that, during the trial, I had no idea that Simpson had been regarded as one of the best professional football players of all time. I have never been a sports fan at all, and during his football career I was too young to be aware of popular culture in general. Thus, though I had some vague knowledge that he had played football, I knew him mostly as an actor and rental car spokesman. And I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about a guy who was in The Naked Gun. (If Leslie Nielsen had been accused of murdering two people, would that have been the Trial of the Century?)
And then there was a Hertz commercial that aired a few years before the murders, in which a line toward the end proved rather prescient:
“Brutal, Juice, brutal.”
