OJ SIMPSON: SPORTING WITNESS

I was interviewed by the BBC World Service programme Sporting Witness, to talk about OJ Simpson as he was being released from prison. My part of the programme was to put his football abilities into context, though I also experienced his charisma first hand at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, where he was accompanied, I think, by Paula Barbieri (I'm not sure because he never introduced her, and there was a certain uniformity to some of his women: having just written about Hefner, you could see OJ buying into the whole Playboy Philosophy. Just check out his house before his lawyers gave it the right-on make-over!) You can link to the show here; it was produced by Simon Watts and it's worth a listen.

MUHAMMAD ALI THROUGH THE EYES OF THE WORLD: THE TELEGRAPH REVIEW

Last week I spent four and a half hours on the BBC World Service's Newshour programme, adding commentary to Muhammad Ali's memorial service, which they were broadcasting live from Louisville. While I was going through my thoughts, some of which I'd posted here, or written for Newstalk.com and the London Review of Books LRB Blog, I remembered reviewing the aptly-named Muhammad Ali Through The Eyes Of The World, for the Daily Telegraph back in November 2001, when the film aired on ITV after a debut at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival;  I was writing quite a bit for them on documentary film at that point. Grabsky's film was trying to do the same thing we were trying to do 15 years later, provide elements of context for this great man's life, so I dug up my original draft of the article, which is slightly different from what appeared in the Telegraph on 10 November; it had been cut a bit for space. I found it moving that I'd concluding with Ali's message of peace--it took only two days after his memorial for America to taste murderous hatred again. And I was pleased that although Grabsky did indeed set a high bar, in the wake of Ali's death, there was a great deal of surpassing that bar. But here's what I wrote in 2001...

“I shook up the world,” yelled Cassius Clay on February 25, 1964, after beating Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion. “The world changed,” agrees a new documentary, Muhammad Ali: Through The Eyes Of The World.

Ali has already been analysed by heavyweight authors. On film, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali: The Greatest was made in 1974; Leon Gast's exceptional smash hit When We Were Kings, about the Rumble In The Jungle, followed two decades later 1996. Will Smith will impersonate Ali soon in a feature film directed by Michael Mann. With the turn of the millennium, Ali has been acknowledged as the past century’s greatest sportsman. So do we really need another documentary? 

“I asked myself the same question,” says ThroughThe Eyes Of The World's director, Phil Grabsky. “What could I add to the canon? I felt what didn’t exist was a film made for people who weren’t boxing fans, and I thought we could add something for those who didn’t necessarily remember the era.” Judging by the response of audiences when the film opened the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, where extra showings had to be laid on, the answer is emphatically yes. 

Grabsky’s film is built from interviews. Celebrities are a selling point, of course, yet far from stealing the spotlight, stars get transformed into fans when faced with idea of Ali. Richard Harris refused to talk about the Burtons or Oliviers he’s worked with, says Grabsky. “He said ‘that’s just tossers talking about tossers, but I want to talk about Ali, because he’s really significant.' 

“I was fascinated when highly successful people made grandiloquent claims for a guy who, in his own words, ‘beat people up for a living’, Grabsky explains. “Big stars tend to isolate themselves from their communities. Today how many of them would dare support political ideas like Ali did?”

The film speaks eloquently the American apartheid from which Clay emerged, and of his stand against the Vietnam war, but inevitably the boxing footage steals the show. And celebrities may be celebrities, but people from the boxing world not only tell the best stories, but prove the most adept at supplying the wider context. When contrarian author Mark Kram claims Clay ‘didn’t change a thing’, Ring Magazine’s Burt Sugar explains exactly what Ali sacrificed when he gave up his title by refusing to be drafted, and younger boxer Howard Davis explains what that meant to those who followed him into the ring. When critic Stanley Couch characterises Ali’s embrace of ‘a gaggle of lunatics’, the Black Muslims, as ‘insane’, sports writer Dick Schaap says he believes ‘only half-kidding’ that Ali was so malleable he, Schaap, probably could’ve converted Ali to Judaism had he tried. Another sports writer, Jerry Izenberg speaks movingly of how with him Ali transcended the ‘white devil’ message of the Nation of Islam.

Grabsky is balanced and exposes bits of Ali’s dark side, his womanising and his capacity for viciousness in the ring (as when Ernie Terrell refused to call him ‘Ali’). But what stands out is the way he uses boxing footage not only to portray the beauty of the fighter in his prime, but also to show the conscious strategy, the intelligence that lay behind Ali’s seemingly natural ability. Yet this footage has its own dark side, as we see Ali’s incredible ability to absorb a punch, popping back up after killer blows from Joe Frazier and Henry Cooper, the punishment he took long before 'rope a dope'. 

Today, the man who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee is bloated by Parkinson’s Disease, his spark as lively as ever but his ability to speak almost gone. Grabsky reveals that towards the end of his career, Ali fought while taking thyroid medicine which robbed him of the very last shreds of his ability. Yet Ali regrets nothing. One friend speaks for the audience: “he doesn’t regret it, I don’t know why I do.”

For Ali always came back. Izenberg reminds us that when he won his draft case in the US Supreme Court, the ultimate ‘beat the man’ verdict; the stand which had made him a hero to the young, now made him the idol of ‘the limo crowd’. Did he really change the world? Like the JFK assassination, or the Beatles’ invasion of America (and don't forget the Fab Four made a pilgrimage to Ali’s camp before the first Liston fight) Ali helped usher in the Sixties; but forty years later he still makes a difference. Were there any doubt about his importance, you could see the man Presidents beg for autographs visiting the World Trade Towers, living his role as America’s leading Moslem, standing up for peace. 

Is there still more to say about Muhammad Ali? Grabsky convinces us that there is. But this film has set the bar just a little bit higher for the next one.

MUHAMMAD ALI: WORLD SERVICE WEEKEND

Sunday morning I appeared on BBC World Service's Weekend programme to discuss Muhammad Ali. You can link to that on the IPlayer here, it's the first item on that half-hour segment, and it's very good.
I just wish I'd finished that Louisville story by mentioning Ali's story of throwing the Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, which he later admitted 'might' have been apocryphal.

OJ AND OUR AMERICA: THE CULTURAL FRONTLINE SCRIPT

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk on the BBC World Service's programme Cultural Frontline, tracing the influence and effects of the OJ Simpson trial; you can read my introduction to that in my post of 2 April, or link direct to the programme on Iplayer here; it comes about 14 minutes in. But for the time the show is no longer available, I thought I'd post my working script (with one footnote) here.

The essay was prompted by the showing of American Crime Story: The People vs O.J. Simpson on BBC television. As the series has now concluded, and I am about to write about it, and about the re-issue of Jeffrey Toobin's book about the trial, I thought this bigger picture might be instructive...

OJ AND OUR AMERICA

Was it really two decades ago? Watching The People Vs. OJ Simpson transported me back to that summer of 1994. After a stressful day in charge of the host broadcast of the opening match of the FIFA World Cup, I'd ordered room service in my hotel to watch the NBA basketball finals, when the infamous white Bronco driven by OJ's friend AC appeared in a box in the screen's lower third. Soon, the basketball was relegated to the box, then it disappeared, as the strange freeway convoy disguised as a police chase took centre stage. It was presented just like sports coverage, because America's new national pastime was television, and OJ gave TV everything it could desire.

It was billed as the 'crime of the century', or the 'trial of the century', but almost every decade in America produces at least one of those. It actually was the television event of the past century, but re-seeing it today generates far more than nostalgia. The Simpson trial balances on two great axes: race and celebrity, and it is both history and prediction. It is America defining itself, by its unending racial schism, and re-defining itself, as Andy Warhol foresaw, by celebrity.

The mini-series sets the scene with the brutal beating of a black man, Rodney King, by white Los Angeles police four years earlier, and the massive riots which followed the cops' acquittal on criminal charges. This signals the first crucial theme: the show dissects the way Simpson's defense was based on the disconnect between black and white Los Angeles. White America believed stars like OJ transcended race; prosecutor Marcia Clark wisecracks that a jury of OJ's peers would actually consist of 'middle aged white millionaires'. Black Americans saw it differently.

The narrative of OJ being framed by cops who resented his wealth and fame, hated his having a beautiful white ex-wife, recalled the Jim Crow era when 'uppity blacks' might be lynched for 'recklessly eyeballing' a white woman. Whites saw OJ as a world apart from Rodney King, but OJ's lawyer Johnny Cochrane knew they had one crucial thing in common, their skin; actor Courtney Vance milks every nuance of racism perfectly.

Twenty-two years later, America has a black president, and something like 20 per cent of the country believes he's a foreign-born Moslem educated in terrorist cells. It's impossible not to feel the embers of prejudice smouldering, waiting to be blown into flames by the next police killing of an unarmed black man.

Race was the strategy, but the trial was defined by celebrity. OJ had always received special treatment from the police and district attorneys in LA. It was easy to see why: when I met OJ while covering the 1992 Barcelona Olympics;, his charisma was overpoweringly physical: he's big in a way Cuba Gooding, the actor playing him on TV, cannot convey, yet moved gracefully with a chiselled handsomeness and easy smile. In the face of his celebrity, the prosecution pulled on kid gloves, but the money and sheer weight of numbers of the defense team pounded every concession into a submission. Judge Lance Ito preened for the cameras even as his head sunk beneath the quicksand; Clark and her assistant prosecutor Chris Darden saw TV punditry in their futures.

The mini-series plays the celebrity card knowingly, by highlighting OJ's friend Bob Kardashian, played with his trademark insecurity by David Schwimmer. Typically, there’s no mention of the garment bag Kardashian removed from OJ’s house, with whatever crucial evidence it contained (NOTE: This comment was premature. The bag did feature later, as Kardashian and AC opened it together to discover it contained nothing incriminating. That moment signalled the show's almost total acceptance of a changed Kardashian, Schwimmer being a character far more sympathetic. But I wonder.) Because what’s more important is that OJ was godfather to Kardashian's oldest daughter, Kim, and there follows a series of knowing winks at the soon-to-be-famous-for-being-famous sisters.

The Kardashian phenomenon was, in effect, enabled by the Simpson trial. It brought together the new world of 24 hour news and multi-channel television in a perfect storm, creating a parallel universe in which the trial became a catalyst for endless argument, speculation, innuendo, and punditry, full of cliché and sophistry, all about style and process, not about substance.

This legacy haunts us today. Not just in the morass of trash television, but in the trash television that has been the two-year cycle of the American presidential elections—an endless series of so-called debates in which nothing is debated, filling countless hours of airtime. Donald Trump, most of whose supporters believe that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, steps seamlessly from awarding pretend jobs on scripted reality shows, to playing a candidate in an endless reality show. Indeed, his candidacy would not be possible were it not for the OJ trial.

The primary voters themselves are like the jurors in a series of OJ trials, distracted by the big money dream teams of consultants who make TV commercials, believing in the celebrities they know from TV, and unable to escape the inflammatory rhetoric that invokes that shadowy cloud of ever-present racial divide. The Simpson trial created the Kardashians and empowers the Trumps; it is the template for today's America, glued to its TV screens, understanding nothing.

THE MANNING LEGACY

I've written a piece about Peyton Manning's retirement for Newstalk in Ireland, you can link to it here. They changed the title; I was hoping for a little of that Bourne Conundrum kind of feel to 'The Manning Legacy'. We shall see. You can also find me talking about Manning on BBC World Service Newshour yesterday: link to it here. I starts about 32 minutes into the piece. I'll also be on BBC World TV News tonight, on Sport Today, probably during the 19:30 bulletin.

SUPERBOWL 47: THE BBC WORLD SERVICE WEEKEND SCRIPT

As I am in New Orleans to broadcast the Super Bowl for BBC television, I recorded an audio essay for the BBC World Service's Weekend programme, for whom I have been a studio guest a number of times. It was broadcast between 7-9 this morning; if you can access the World Service online, you can probably find it, but if you can't, here's my original script. I don't know if the recording was then edited down, and I have added one line to it as well, but this is a look at the Super Bowl aimed at a worldwide audience assumed to know very little indeed about it...

Forget Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, or even the Fourth of July—Super Bowl Sunday may be America's biggest holiday—at least it's the day when more Americans indulge themselves, at the same time, in their REAL national pastime, watching television.

At 6:25 Eastern more than 45 per cent of the country will turn on the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League. At halftime, reservoir levels will drop all across the country as millions of people flush simultaneously. The real audience is probably bigger than the television ratings show—because people watch together, with families, at parties, in bars, & the possibility of reaching some 160 million or more viewers means a 30 second commercial during the game costs $4 million. The three networks who rotate broadcasting the Super Bowl reap a revenue bonanza that more than justifies their three years covering the regular season without the championship game.

The adverts themselves become must-see items. Audiences anticipate mock football matches between puppies or beer bottles with almost as much enthusiasm as they do the real thing. For those not crazy about football there's the pregame show—with Alicia Keys, and the halftime show—a 40 minute extravaganza starring Beyonce. Bookies are offering bets on everything from what colour Beyonce's hair will be, or whether Keyes' version of the National Anthem will run over or under 2 mins 15 seconds, to even the score of the game itself.

Oh yes, the game. It matches the Baltimore Ravens, named after Edgar Allen Poe's poem and coached by John Harbaugh, against the San Francisco 49ers, named after the 19^th century gold rush and coached by John's little brother Jim. As far as the media is concerned, it's Harbaughgeddon! ...no sibling rivalry since Cain and Abel's will have been discussed in such depth by more people so unqualified to analyse it!

That's because there are 5,000 media covering one game, and they have little else to talk about. On media day, Tuesday, hundreds of them descended on the players scattered at podiums around the stadium, all trying to ask a question so ridiculous no one else will have thought of it before. TV Azteca sent a woman reporter dressed in very little at all, insuring only that many American males can now name Mexico's second-biggest network. For the rest of the week the media talk only to each other and any ex-player with a story to tell or something to sell. They wander around the media center looking to add to the din of a hundreds of hosts shouting into the vast void of sports talk radio.

Or they talk about the miracle of New Orleans and its recovery. The city has always been America's most exotic, but during super bowl week it becomes a theme park, a kind of santizied version of mardi gras, the excesses of football replacing the somewhat wilder excess of Fat Tuesday. Large portions of the French quarter have been taken over by television networks, meaning Jackson Square, right opposite the French Market and Cafe du Monde, is now off-limits to anyone not wearing broadcast credentials and makeup.

There are other stories: will the Ravens Ray Lewis retire at 37 with a second championship ring? Did he use New Zealand deer antler velvet extract to help heal a torn biceps? Deer antler velvet; I am not making this up. Oddly enough, when a former 49er, tackle Kwame Harris, was arrested back in San Francisco this week after a restaurant scuffle with his boyfriend, it re-triggered an ongoing controversy over the acceptance of gay players in America's most macho game. And how will the league address the growing issue of concussions and brain damage, especially considering this Super Bowl matches two teams known for their physicality, in a game not known for lacking it. 

Finally, however, the game will kick off, and, despite frequent breaks for commercials and Beyonce, America's eyes will be focussed on the field. Which Harbaugh will triumph? In a game that generates gold, to the extent that they award the winner's trophy not to a player, but to the team's owner, it may be the gold rush 49ers, and brother Jim, who win in the end.

MICHAEL VICK AND TUCKER CARLSON (NO RELATION)

I was on the BBC World Service's World Update today, discussing President Obama's praising Philadelphia Eagles' owner Jeffrey Lurie for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance after he served 19 months in prison for running a dog-fighting ring and abusing his dogs. I was all set to talk about how Obama might have been trying to push his proposed expansion of the Second Chances Act in Congress (Lord knows enough Congressmen have got second chances, and more), and how Tony Dungy has mentored Vick, how Andy Reid has brought him along slowly and transformed his quarterbacking, and how both those coaches had personal tragedies with their own wayward children. I was also prepared to discuss the agenda of the animal rights advocates who use Vick as a way to generate publicity, and the right-wingers who use him as another club to beat Obama over the head with his own blackness. But the conversation was hijacked into that last direction by an unexpectedly virulent clip from Tucker Carlson, the Bow-Tie-That-Talks who plays an intellectual on Fox News.

Carlson (who is no relation to me and that is for real sure) said: 'I’m a Christian, I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances. But Michael Vick killed dogs, and he did in a heartless and cruel way. And I think, personally, he should’ve been executed for that. He wasn’t, but the idea that the President of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs?'

This is fascinatingly hypocritical on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. But let's start with Tucker's so-called Christianity, which sounds a lot more like a version that ends a long time before Jesus actually came along. What happened to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, cast the first stone--well, maybe he thinks it's up to him to cast at least a few stones. Executed for killing dogs? Maybe we just nuke the Dominican Republic and do away with cock-fighting there once and for all. More importantly, it's easy to forgive Tucker Carlson's kind of mistakes, like selling yourself to promote the rich and powerful by using hate and fear. But as I understood Christ's message, it was that you needed to forgive people for the really hurtful, awful things they do. That never sunk in very far with Tucker. Vick, meanwhile, has done the Christian thing and not responded in kind, though the old Mike Vick might have sent the sort of message to Mr. Carlson indicated on the right.

The second, more important message, of course, is the coded reminder that Barack Hussain Obama, as Fox called him, is, uh, black. And that if you ever vote for him again he's going to release hordes of his dog murdering fellow blacks on you--Willie Horton's mutant offspring stealing your daughters, lowering property values, and integrating your Christian academies. Michael Vick is a lot easier a target than, say, Henry Louis Gates, who was merely an uppity black man who wears a bow tie and bristled when accused of breaking in to his own house.

I understand the animal rights people who say 'if he'd done this to people he'd still be behind bars' or 'abusers of dogs and children shouldn't be free to walk the streets' knowing full well that he didn't kill people or abuse children, and that there is a difference between people and animals. I know they want to get their own back. Their job is to demonise a celebrity in order to keep their issue in the news, and someone's right to pay their debt to society and return to his previous life matters little. It is interesting that PETA haven't attacked Vick at all, but his doing public service ads for them might have something to do with that.

The Second Chance Act was enacted by the George W Bush regime, who then failed to fund or enforce it. Obama wants to do something about a prison population that stands at 2.3 million, or almost 1 per 1,000 in America, and 38 per cent of them are black. Americans make up a full quarter of the world's incarcerated, although we are only one-twentieth of the world's population. Prison building and staffing is one of the few growth industries that can't be farmed out to cheaper countries. Yet.

I look at my dog Rufus and my stomach turns at the thought of what Vick did to his dogs, but so far he has done and said all the right things to make one think that his stay in prison did what it is supposed to do, punish, yes, but help rehabilitate, like the new-look Vick we see on the right. The Tucker Carlsons of the world would be happier if the black population could be moved en masse behind bars, a kind of perverse domestic version of Liberia, and maybe the turkeys voting for Christmas who believe what they see on Fox is actually true could all get jobs guarding them. It would be a lot like the ante-bellum South, come to think of it, where the Obamas were quickly put in their place.

Meanwhile, the Eagles lost on Tuesday night, giving NBC a big audience and the NFL a new idea for creating more nights of prime time football: watch the weather reports and move the games. Read my nfluk.com Friday Morning Tight End column on New Year's Eve for more on that...

WORLD SERVICE ALERT: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

I'll be on BBC World Service's The Strand Thursday, 1530 GMT (and repeated I believe--as well as accessible via the net) to talk about the Swedish film version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I saw it back in the fall, tune in and find out what John Landis said after the film!