Some Drivel On...June 17th, 1994

June 17th, 1994 began with a ticker tape parade for the Stanley Cup-winning New York Rangers hockey team in Manhattan and golf trailblazer Arnold Palmer teeing off for his final round in a U.S. Open at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and the day concluded with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks being preempted on TV to instead show celebrity and ex-NFL star Orenthal James Simpson, wanted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, being chased down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco in what became tantamount to a twisted Hollywood version of a New Orleans Funeral. In other words, historic celebrations of athletes gave way to the infamous fall of one. In his astonishing 2010 documentary chronicling that bizarrely jam-packed day, director Brett Morgen eschewed narration and traditional talking heads to instead cultivate it almost exclusively from TV footage, creating the effect of a story told through channel-flipping fragments and sensations. After all, O.J. Simpson, as James Poniewozik essentially reckoned for The New York Times in the wake of the former’s death last week at 76, was as much media personality as man. The World Cup might have kicked off in America, too, on June 17th, 1994, but the hunt for a fugitive Simpson and the subsequent freeway chase managed to supersede the planet’s biggest event, at least for a day, with a vintage American-style spectacle.

For a comprehensive personal, political, social, and cultural examination of Simpson, “June 17th, 1994” is not it. That’s Ezra Edelman’s sensational five-part “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), and if you don’t have time to watch all eight hours then reading Ray Ratto’s evaluation of O.J. for Defector with Joel Anderson’s assessment at Slate as the necessary chaser will do. But that isn’t to say Morgen’s movie is uninterested in or unaware of these ideas. Far from it, he just manifests them in different ways. As an earlier sequence in which “June 17th, 1994” cuts from the elder Arnold Palmer hitting a tee shot at Oakmont to monochrome archival footage of the younger Palmer rocketing a golf ball down the fairway, Morgen tends to see history in eerie echoes and rhymes. During the freeway chase, a cut to archival footage of Simpson in an old Hertz commercial dashing through the airport echoes becomes a macabre joke, holding up these two sides of Simpson at once and then splitting them right down the middle with a figurative axe. Images of people cheering the Ford Bronco alongside the freeway and from overpasses reverberate with footage of the erstwhile football star being cheered on at L.A. Coliseum during a touchdown run in 1969 in USC’s Game of the Century versus UCLA, portending the Trial of the Century. Perhaps Morgen’s most cutting supplement is adding the recordings of an LAPD detective trying to talk down a possibly suicidal Simpson in the back of that Ford Bronco, underlining the grisly nature of the whole ostensible carnival, a man wanted for murder threatening to kill himself to the primetime entertainment of millions, reality and a distorted, disturbing funhouse reflection of reality blending until you can’t tell them apart.

By never zooming out, “June 17th, 1994” takes a Where Were You? moment and puts us right back in the middle of it, but with accumulated knowledge over time to put into perspective what it always was, a twilight drive through this country’s own splintered, media-addled psyche.

A Thing I Wrote About Stuff

This past weekend was a mournful one. Bill Nunn, the man who gave life to Radio Raheem, the iconic character of Spike Lee’s ferocious, seminal “Do the Right Thing”, who recited the majestic monologue about love ko’ing hate, which seems that much more massive in America 2016, died at age 63 from leukemia. Then an ascending Major League Baseball pitcher, Jose Fernandez, who made a hair-raising defection from Cuba to America, perished in a boating accident. I confess I am not a connoisseur of baseball and so I really only knew Mr. Fernandez’s name vaguely, but in reading about him afterwards and learning of his transcendent talent it was hard not to see this terribly untimely passing in the same light as Len Bias. Those two deaths were so wrenching it was easy to overlook Stanley Dural Jr., Buckwheat Zydeco himself, who passed away from lung cancer. In the New York Times Jon Pareles wrote that “Mr. Dural became the face of zydeco for many listeners far beyond the music’s Gulf Coast regional circuit” and that was certainly true for me. I had no idea what Zydeco was until a couple decades and a few years ago I stumbled upon a Mountain Stage recording of my dad’s that featured Buckwheat Zydeco and I thought “What is this? I like this.”

All this loss of life then was rattling around in my head as I went to see David Rabe’s new play “Visiting Edna” at Steppenwolf Theater here in Chicago on Sunday night. It centers on Edna (Debra Monk), ravaged by cancer, and her son Andrew (Ian Barford) who comes home to visit for what he does not necessarily know will be the last time. It can be a heavy play, with Edna’s cancer literalized in the form of an actor (Tim Hopper) who haunts the edges and inserts himself into the proceedings, a vicious evocation of how cancer gets personal. Yet Rabe does not overly wallow in the dire circumstances. Indeed, there emerges a kind of benign monotony in the conversations and interactions between mother and son as they attempt to find little ways to connect and as we come to realize that over the years these two missed so many attempts at these sorts of connections.

Memories hang over the entire play. There is a moment when mother and son take a day trip to another city to see a specialist and upon returning they explain how it went via a telephone call, the mother and son taking turns talking to a family friend, like it’s an old Bob Newhart Show bit. And what emerges is just how much mother and son enjoyed themselves. It hardly matters whether the specialist they saw can make any difference; the trip itself was the thing, this sudden flash, and how that is something the son realizes he will cling to, this sudden memory that is made. Will this memory be enough to sustain him? The play refrains from saying.

I thought about that when I came home and discovered that Arnold Palmer had died. Just as I am not a connoisseur of baseball, I am not an aficionado of golf, but you don’t have to be an aficionado of golf to know Arnold Palmer. How often do you have two Wikipedia entries bearing your name, one for yourself, one for the drink that borrowed your moniker? Heck, I’m pretty sure I knew Arnold Palmer first as the guy in the Hertz commercial opposite O.J. Simpson. That commercial inevitably popped up in Brett Morgen’s ESPN documentary “June 17, 1994”, a sensational rumination that forewent any kind of narration to instead chronicle the events of the titular day, which included, though were not limited to, the infamous O.J. Simpson bronco chase and Arnold Palmer’s final round at the U.S. Open. The latter is a solemnly melancholy affair, where the past-his-prime Palmer is left to chip haplessly over greens and putt way past holes. It is painful to witness because even if you don’t understand golf the emitted emotional torture is universal.

But there is a moment in “June 17, 1994”, in the midst of all this slow-moving heartbreak, when Morgen cuts from 1994 Palmer in mid-swing to 1953 in Palmer in mid-swing. It is a beautifully weird moment, this sudden flashing back to the past, where Palmer is so full of joy, overflowing with golfing genius. In that grainy black & white footage it looks so distant even as it feels so alive, the strange paradox of all memories, I suppose, where it is difficult to really know if What Happened Back Then is any consolation for What Is Going On Right Now. And then, as quickly as they drop in, those monochromatic memories dissipate, leaving us once again in the movie’s present with Palmer’s current struggle. By forgoing voiceover and, by extension, forgoing explanations of any kind Morgen leaves it up to us, just as Rabe leaves it to us, which feels less like a copout than the stone cold truth. They are either/or, perhaps, all the time. Good memories are worth so much, but somehow never quite enough.

June 17, 1994

I can't say what God was thinking when he awoke twenty years ago and flipped his joke-a-day calendar ("Jesus and Moses are playing golf...") to June 17, 1994, but clearly something athletically cosmic was in the air. It was a day brimming with monumental sports stories. Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer played his last round at the U.S. Open. The United States-hosted World Cup kicked off in Chicago. The New York Rangers Stanley Cup victory parade wound through the streets of Manhattan while the New York Knicks tipped off against the Houston Rockets in pivotal Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. These events and their accompanying story lines were etched in stone, the headlines for June 18th dependent on but a few results. Then NFL Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson, wanted for the murders of his wife, Nicole Simpson, and Ronald Goldman, fled from justice in a white Ford Bronco on prime time TV and the whole damn script got torn up.

“June 17, 1994”, the absolute class of ESPN’s ongoing 30 for 30 documentary series, is the antithesis of modern sports journalism which shapes events to fit the pre-packaged storyline, not unlike an old commercial glimpsed in the film which finds Arnold Palmer and O.J. playing pals and all-around All-Americans. It's an ad that hardly hawks its product (which I forget) and instead informs its audience's expectations of these two men. Sports, however, are about philosophical perception, which might give Stat Wonks an aneurism except that, well, Stat Wonks perceive sports as empirical and fanatics (like me) perceive sports as observational. As Colin McGowan wrote a couple weeks back for Sports on Earth: “(Sports’) ultimate pointlessness frees us to make anything out of them we want.”

That sensation is one director Brett Morgen marvelously illustrates by simply letting the innumerable images beamed to televisions twenty years ago speak for themselves, cross-cutting between the day’s events to render the viewer a channel-surfing voyeur. There is no narration and no after-the-fact interviews. The only outside intrusions are brief screen captions – mostly weighted toward the beginning – to provide our necessary bearings. This is not to suggest that Morgen has merely constructed some random collage - far from it, in fact, as he routinely pairs similar moments from one event with another. And by providing no commentary when he does this, we are left to wonder for ourselves: is this arbitrary coincidence or the pull of fate?

As the film and, by extension, the day continue, the further and further the narrative gets away from those who would fancy themselves its creator. No doubt ESPN, broadcasting the US Open, wants to send Arnold Palmer off in grand style, and instead it is forced to endure a depressing meltdown of missed shots, over and over, one of the game’s greatest reduced to a pleading amateur. “Get in there, you rascal,” a commentator says to Arnie’s golf ball as it rolls past the hole and off the green and into the rough. Listen, ball! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen! Ah, but what does a Titlist care about a production truck back in Bristol? So too is the re-shaping of a storyline found in behind-the-scenes footage of NBC anchor Bob Costas as his network must delicately balance covering Game 5 and the ongoing O.J. Simpson situation, real life intruding on our games, unless - as the film subtly hints - there is not difference. Costas’ face in these sequences is pure anguish, and they unwittingly foreshadow an age (now) when essentially everything would be captured by the camera.

Even O.J.’s chase shape-shifts, not simply from the media’s reaction to the escalating crisis - its resignation as it is forced to conclude the O.J. they had been pitching for decades might be a lie, crystallized in an Al Michaels interview - but in the 911 tapes Morgan serves on the soundtrack as we listen to Simpson talking to the negotiator, refusing to toss the gun he’s carrying, clearly conveying suicidal thoughts. It’s as if this drive down the freeway is also a drive to his resting place. Except, of course, post-chase it would be revealed passports and disguises were in the car, a clear signal that he intended to flee, an impugnation of guilt. In other words, he was spinning his story in the midst of his story.

Each time I’ve watched the film, I settle on a single moment as being most profound. It’s a snippet of the Seattle Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr. rocketing a baseball out of Kansas City’s stadium and into its picturesque outfield fountains, which in and of itself might not be such a big deal except that it ties Griffey Jr. with one Babe Ruth for most home runs prior to June 30th. (What a day, eh?) Of course, little does the film, set almost entirely within the present, know what’s coming in but a couple months – that is, Major League Baseball will go on strike and Griffey Jr.’s assault on Roger Maris’s mythical home run record will have a forced premature end and so McGwire & Sosa will have to do it a few years later and so the Steroid Era will commence and on and on and on goes the story, changing, re-forming, etc. But……does that knowledge possessed by the viewer alter this home run? Does O.J. Simpson running from the law simultaneously on a different channel alter this home run? Does O.J. Simpson running from the law alter his majestic 64 yard touchdown run against UCLA 27 years earlier (shown in flashback)? Is a feat a feat in any language?

That, to quote Mark Strong in “Zero Dark Thirty”, is a fascinating question, and one that “June 17, 1994” purposely leaves each viewer to debate with him or herself. Twenty years on, I still don't think I have an answer.