Antonio Siberia 12 April 2024
OJ Simpson. OJ Rome. It is not a question of good or evil, of guilt or consolation, on which there will be no shortage of considerations, reflections, condemnations and acquittals today and also in the coming days and weeks. A necessary but rather easy exercise. This is about something else: it’s about Romanity. A Romanity that starts from death: yesterday OJ Simpson passed away, one of the greatest American football players ever, a man who hung up his boots – also an actor and at the center of one of the most controversial judicial and media cases struck American public opinion, accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman and also the protagonist of a chase (after being chased) in Los Angeles, in sunny California, which culminated in his arrest. Well, in these lines today we do not want to chronicle the merits and faults of a man who – however one thinks – will remain in the history of football but we want to tell of his love for Rome.
Indeed, to avoid terms that sound too much like a South American soap opera, his attraction for Rome. This narrative begins with an obvious fact that is not at all obvious: Simpson, due to the sport he practiced and which made him champion, was a gladiator. Without a thousand-year-old Colosseum to perform in but with many arenas, like the football stadiums in the USA. He played for eleven seasons in the NFL (the National Football League, the largest professional American football league in the world) with the Buffalo Bills from 1969 to 1977 and with the San Francisco 49ers from 1978 to 1979. A successful sporting existence that would which then blossomed into a life as an actor. A running pass, we could joke, given that Simpson in 1973 became the first player to run for more than two thousand yards in fourteen games of the season and that once his sporting career was over, he turned to cinema, achieving further fame thanks to a role in the series «The Naked Gun».
His acting life, to return to the era of Rome and how this wonderful city intertwined with the life of the football player, also landed in Cinecittà, our Hollywood on the Tiber. Among the various roles in the films that Simpson has played, there is also that of Inspector Haley in «Cassandra Crossing», a catastrophic film on terrorism with first-rate actors, from Sofia Loren to Burt Lancaster, from Richard Harris to Ava Gardner. The rest is mortality, unfortunately. Yes, because OJ Simpson, a football champion who loved Rome, who was an actor and who was tried and much discussed, died yesterday at the age of 76, for what in Tuscany they still define today with the term malaccio. Damn cancer. Against which no goal, no record race, no role played, no car escape can do anything. Even gladiators die. And Rome, which has seen them in the arena for millennia, knows it. The rest is consolation or – if we want to be romantic – nostalgia. Of the last goal.
2024-04-12 06:02:00
#farewell #cursed #gladiator #love #Rome #Tempo
