The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

by Bill Simmons

You know what it’s like, actually? O. J. Simpson’s murder trial. A few days after the Goldman/Brown killings, when the Juice made his aborted attempt to flee to Mexico, an overwhelming majority of Americans assumed he was guilty. His criminal trial started and we learned about a pattern of corruption and racism within the L.A. Police Department. We discovered that much of the blood evidence was mishandled. We watched the overwhelmed prosecution team unforgivably botch its case. But none of it mattered because this guy had to be guilty. After all, his blood dripped all over the crime scene, he didn’t have an alibi during the time of the murders, he had a mysterious cut on his left middle finger that matched the drips of blood from someone who fled the crime scene, he had a history of threatening and beating his wife, there were no other suspects and it seemed preposterous that so many inept policemen and forensic scientists could collaboratively conspire to frame someone on such short notice.2 Smartly, if not reprehensibly, the defense team battered the race card home—that was their only chance to get a guilty person acquitted, even if it meant splintering the country and damaging the relationship between blacks and whites in the process—and lucked out because many of the dense jurors couldn’t understand the damaging DNA evidence in the pre-CSI era. To everyone’s disbelief, O. J. Simpson walked. Facing more competent attorneys and a lesser level of proof one year later, the...