Good morning! Hopefully everybody had a good weekend. One less weekend until football. And of course, next weekend is a long one for many people with the Fourth of July holiday. All in all, a good time.
It was a pretty quiet weekend. Sunday only saw a couple links. One was Grant Cohn sizing up Chip Kelly and the good and the bad thus far. CSN Bay Area had a look at some Carlos Hyde comments on 95.7 The Game about assimilating to Kelly’s up-tempo practices. I’ll have a full transcript of Hyde’s comments later today.
It was a fairly quiet weekend for me. Played some softball on Saturday, and then went to a BBQ festival on Sunday. I also spent the weekend catching some of the OJ: Made in America. I’m up through episode 4, and will likely watch the final episode sometime this week. When I wrap up the final episode, I’m going to put together something about it. Simpson was born in San Francisco, and spent the final two seasons of his career with the 49ers. But even beyond that, his criminal trial was one of the biggest events of the 90s.
There are parts of each episode where you’re wondering where the director is going with it, but in the bigger picture, everything adds context to the trial and what it all meant. At one point in episode four, someone talks about how it wasn’t so much the trial of O.J. Simpson as it was the trial of Los Angeles. And it is kind of fitting. Simpson got off for a lot of reasons, and two of them relate to the LAPD. The first is the history of significant racial issues (set up really well in episode 2), and the second is the piss-poor work the crime scene unit did. Add in the DA’s poor handling of so many things (Mark Fuhrman, the gloves, among others), and LA kind of screwed up in a big way.
I do think O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, but his acquittal was a confluence of events that was almost a perfect storm. We obviously got a very specific view of things with the documentary. And we get all sorts of hindsight about the times, the jury, and so much more. And yet, I can see how the jury sufficiently raised reasonable doubt. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and through four episodes, there are no winners in this thing.