Jesse Owens’ 4-gold-medal triumph in the 1936 Munich Olympics mattered as much as it did to the Free World because of Max Schmelling’s earlier knockout victory over Joe Louis. Schmelling’s big win on June 19, 1936 came as a Nazi propaganda build-up to the Olympic competition hosted by Da Fuhror himself, Adolph Hitler. Even though Schmelling refused to join the Nazi Party, he became a hero of the Third Reich, a personal favorite of Hitler, and a potent symbol of the mythical Aryan race as well as the racist state that produced him.

Owns’ success, and the success of other African-American athletes against Hitler’s Olympic supermen balanced the points won by Schmelling. In 1938, Lewis wiped Schmelling’s points off the board by soundly trouncing the hero of the Reich just into the third minute of the first round. It was the first time in professional sports history that anyone had ever heard a sports announcer call a black man an American.

Joe Lewis, nicknamed "the brown bomber" in the 1940’s for his brown skin, his hometown of Detroit, "the arsenal of democracy," and his explosive punch, literally won the first major battle of World War II. He did it within the small confines of a boxing ring in New York with a pair of leather gloves. Ironically, it was Lewis’ decisive, humiliating defeat at the hands of the fearless German fighter that made the rematch so dramatic and the victory so sweet. Only a champion can defeat a champion. Now that Lewis was the champ, with his knockout victory over James J. Braddock in ’37, it was up to Schmelling to prove that his first win was not a fluke. It was up to Lewis to prove that it was.

Everything was riding on the outcome of that fight and the whole world knew it. Everyone knew that Schmelling was fighting a propaganda battle in a war to come that would strike at the heart of America’s ideals—if not its practices. Lewis was fighting for blacks, Jews, Poles, Slavs and everyone else the Nazi’s considered racially inferior. He was fighting for the American ideal of freedom and justice for all. For a time, he was America, its promise its vulnerability and it’s reason to be respected and feared in a brutal contest of power, skill and courage.

When the American fighter won, all but the hardest of hard-core bigots celebrated Lewis as an American hero. The media exercised extreme care to avoid causing him public embarrassment because of his poor writing ability and his inarticulate speech. There were few public objections to the white woman Lewis took as his bride, unlike what happened with Jack Johnson the first African-American boxer to win the World Heavyweight championship—and to marry a white woman.

The day Jack Johnson took the crown from Tommy Burns in 1908 President Teddy Roosevelt denounced him in explicitly racist terms and roving gangs of white men assaulted black people on the streets. A long line of "great white hopes" followed Burns only to fall before the black giant’s fists like wheat before the scythe until Jess Willard defeated him in 1915. Johnson said he took a dive.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know where Eddie Murphy got his Jack Jenkins character from. You know why the bad guy had to be a bigot who put his money on the white fighter to win with 3 to 1 odds against him. And you know why a black man named Sugar Ray and another black man named Quick worked so well together to do violence unto others before others had a chance to do violence unto them.

The magic word is Detroit, the city of champions in the 1930’s. Detroit was the home of the baseball Tigers, the football Lions and two of the greatest fighters the "sweet science" has ever produced, heavyweight slugger Joe Lewis, and welterweight Sugar Ray Robinson—stylish, intelligent—and quick as a cat. Lewis and Robinson could kill you with either hand.

So, what do we have with Harlem Nights, the controversial 1989 action/comedy written, produced and directed by Eddie Murphy? We have a composite of Jack Johnson and Joe Lewis, the poorly educated, stuttering Jack Jenkins who spells Phil with an "F." We have left-handed Richard Pryor playing a smart, stylish Sugar Ray, the owner of an illegal club were music, dancing, booze, prostitution and gambling are all on he menu. Right-handed Murphy plays his adopted son Vernist Brown who goes by the nickname Quick. We have a big fight with everything on the line and rumors that the champ is going to take a dive. We have a setup with Sugar Ray and Quick posing as uniformed cops with night sticks and the bad guys lured to a room with a murderer/police detective’s hat in plain sight where they are all dispatched by a "brown bomber."

Nicknames are an inseparable part of sports. True fans of any sport can tell you the nicknames of the athletes as well as their given names and the city or state they lived in before they turned pro. The more nicknames you know, the more knowledgeable you are likely to be, Like Drebin, Nordberg and Ed talking about boxers in The Naked Gun 2 ½. The following bit of silliness begins with a newspaper clipping of a boxer found in a wallet—a welterweight from Detroit named Hector Savage (sounds like Savague), whose real name is Joey Chicago.

Frank: Well, all I know is never bet on the white guy.

Got all that? A welterweight named Joey from Detroit (a Robinson /Louis composite—neither of which were their real last names and neither of whom was originally from Detroit). Joe Louis’ real name was Joe Louis Barrow. Sugar Ray Robinson’s real name was Walker Smith. In Capricorn One O.J. is an astronaut named John Walker.

What of those other boxing references? Chicago is where O.J. flew after the murders. Cincinnati Reds 3^rd baseman Pete Rose, nicknamed Charlie Hustle, was denied induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his involvement with gangsters and his heavy betting on sporting events. New York: Lewis/Schmelling fight in ’38. Philly: home of Rocky Balboa, and a police force reputed to be racist, corrupt and brutal. A fighter killed in the ring: Hector Camacho killed a fighter in the ring—Goldman died in the killing cage of Nicole’s front yard. Tex Colorado the Arizona Assassin: Tex Cob, an ex-boxer from Detroit who was born in Texas plays an assassin in Razing Arizona (’88) with Nicholas Cage and Holly – rhymes with Magli – Hunter. Nordberg going back and forth in his mind between North and South Dakota: O.J. Simpson supposedly went back and forth in his Bronco between South Bundy and North Rockingham.

South Dakota is where the face of fight-fan Teddy Roosevelt and assassinated President Abraham Lincoln are carved in rock on a monument popularized by Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

Before we proceed, a review of some pertinent facts would be helpful:

In his book Murder in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman makes a Sherlock Holmes moment out of his discovery of the splintered piece of wood on the parkway in front of O.J.’s Bronco on Rockingham. Anthony James plays the killer Hector Savage (Savague), alias Joey Chicago in The Naked Gun 2 ½. James is Ten Watt the cannibal in A World Gone Wild (’88). He’s the local bigot in Sparta, Georgia who murders a man from Chicago in the 1967 classic In the Heat of the Night and steals his wallet. Sidney Poirtier is the visiting Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs who gets picked up at a train station and accused of the murder before he identifies himself and solves the crime like a black Sherlock Holmes. The solution involves a splintered piece of wood, blood in a rented car (O.J.’s Bronco was a rent-a-car) and Virgil’s car parked in a way that could get him lynched. You get all of that and more with the boxer Hector Savage, a.k.a the actor Anthony James.

Orenthal James Simpson plays a boxer in a 1979 movie call Goldie and the Boxer. Boxers wear leather gloves that sometimes get bloody in the small confines of a prizefighting ring as they do in Harlem Nights. Of the three sports figures Mark Fuhrman said in his 1997 book that he admired the most, one was a black boxer—George Foreman. The other two where basketball players Michael Jordan, number 23, and Larry Bird, number 33. The order in which he said the names says a hell of a lot about the order of magnitude he attached to them. Take a close look at that top three list, and all the great athletes in modern history it excluded. Why only three? Why only one white one? And why was he the last one on the list?

The answer can’t be the distance it would seem to put between Fuhrman and the charge of being a racist. For that he would have needed a longer list to permit a believably "random" ethnic dispersion. He was intelligent enough to know that, he had plenty of time to think about it, yet he chose to set that clumsy 3-man list in type for the world to see till the end of written history. George Foreman first? Michael Jordan second? Larry Bird third? Was he lying or was there a truthful meaning in what he said that he was defying to world to decipher?

According to Fuhrman, Chris Darden brought up the question of his favorite sports stars in the course of preparing him for the trial. F. Lee Bailey did ask him what his favorite sport was, to which he replied, "basketball," with a little smirk that made me think that he was "playing the race card" until I found out what a terrific basketball player he was. Had the defense fallen into the trap of assuming the obvious without checking it out, they would have ended up looking like fools seeing "racist" in every innocent thing he said or did.

Still, why put a boxer first, if his first love was basketball—and why a boxer rather than a martial artist, a bodybuilder or a two-for-one guy like Jean Claud Van Dam? It doesn’t fit into anything we know about Fuhrman’s true priorities beginning with himself—or does it?

In the Ali/Foreman championship fight in Zaire, a clear-cut breakdown of support for the two black boxers developed, as it was engineered to, along racial lines. Blacks overwhelmingly favored Ali. Whites overwhelmingly favored Foreman, who had waved an American flag as an Olympic gold medal winner in 1968. His patriotic gesture came after two African-American medallists, Tommy Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) gave a "black power" salute during the awards presentation. Forman thus became a surrogate white man for those who equated the American flag with white power. That undeserved status deliberately conferred upon him by black promoter Don King and white media execs, with no desire or consent on Foreman’s part, left him with no way to win. He didn’t—until he learned how to master the media.

Let’s start there, with Fuhrman using Don King’s Ali/Forman fight promotion in Zaire as a guide to remaking Simpson’s image and his own.

Where could a narcissistic, outspokenly racist homicide detective even begin to think that he could split American public opinion about O.J. along racial lines, make himself popular with white people and put O.J. in a no-win situation? How does he get the kind of media attention he requires? By waiting for O.J. to murder two white people and somehow be the first detective on the case who finds all of damning evidence against him? Kind of a long shot, wouldn’t’ you say? And how does it get us any closer to a good reason for Mark Fuhrman to put George Foreman first on his top three list of favorite athletes, or why he made it a top three list rather than a top five?

Fuhrman rarely limited himself to one reason for doing anything important. If there was a way to kill two birds (so to speak) with one stone or hiding his trail with a slew of false trails, he was sure to do it. That was one of the characteristics that delineated his method of operation on the McKinney tapes, in his psychiatric records, his television interviews, his trial testimony and in his books. George Foreman had to mean something special to him in more than on respect.

What else do we have to work with in tracing down the reason for Fuhrman’s top three list of athletes? We have his note-making style of skewing some facts just enough to claim a hit if close can be called close enough and to claim an honest mistake where ignorance equals innocence. The kind of thing I’m talking about is the Tai menu he identified in his notes as a pizza menu, the blue knit cap that he identified in his notes as a ski mask, and in his book as a "black" knit cap. Not exact matches, but pretty much what you would expect in the rough notes of someone who wasn’t there when the killings occurred, and close enough for a reasonable person to understand how he could have gotten them wrong. If your name is Mark, for instance, you have to expect that someone will call you Mike from time to time the way Rosa Lopez did.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. If Mike can stand in for Mark, Michael Jordan, at least makes some kind of sense when you drop the last name. If Michael Jordan makes sense without his last name in the magic world of minor differences, George Foreman makes sense without his first name. But the order is backwards. Well, it’s backwards if you’re reading from left to right. Lets see what happens when we apply the solid one-two punch of a switch-hitter—or a basketball player who could go strong to the hoop with either hand—somebody like number 33, Larry Bird. From left to right or right to left, 33 is the same number.

So, if we start with the tall white guy who can kill you with either hand in Fuhrman’s favorite sport, keep the first name of the man next to him and the last name of the guy farthest away, what do we have? We have Mike Forman. Same initials, almost the same number of letters, close to the same sound. Sometimes you can do more with "almost" and "close to" than you can with right on. Think of where you have to put an artillery round as opposed to a bullet and you’ve got the picture.

Remember San Diego pitcher Mark Thurmond who lost two big games to the Detroit Tigers in the ’84 World Series. Remember Alan Trammel (3), the right-handed Golden (Goldman) Glove (glove) Tiger with the big stick in the series and "Sweet Lou" Whitaker (1) his Golden Glove teammate who threw right-handed and batted left—most of the time. Now, recall the order in which an Olympian had to finish to win a medal and the order in which Tommy Smith and John Charlos finished the100-yard dash in ’68 (1^st and 3^rd). Recall the order in which a horse or a dog must cross the finish line to finish in the money.

That’s the missing piece of the top three puzzle—sporting events where great sums of money were wagered. Michael Jordan bet big bucks on anything and big buck were bet on games in which he played, especially against Detroit. Larry Bird emptied the pockets of many Detroiters in the 1987 playoff against Detroit when he stole an inbound pass from Isaiah Thomas in the last five seconds and fed the ball to Dennis Johnson for the winning lay-up. If Fuhrman occasionally laid down a big bet on a sporting event, chances are better than even that he laid one down on the Padres against the Detroit Tigers in 1984 and lost, but won with the Boston Celtics against the Detroit pistons in ’87.

The Tigers beat the Padres at home on the same field where Hall-of-Famer Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, played most of his career. Collision Course (’89) with Jay Leno as a Detroit robbery detective begins in front of Tiger Stadium with Leno challenging a couple of guys in a hotrod to a drag race on Michigan Avenue. The stakes are twenty dollars and a pizza. Later in the movie you see the inside of Leno’s apartment with a Liberty Bell lamp on a coffee table, a poster featuring Whitaker and Trammel on one wall and a Detroit Piston’s pennant on another. Tex Cobb, one of the thugs in the movie, was a heavyweight boxer, but not one that you would bet on against the likes of Larry Holmes or George Foreman. On August 2, 1980 Holmes beat Cobb in Detroit on a TKO in one of the bloodiest fights ever recorded.

Whoever bet on George Foreman to win his fight against Michael Morer in 1995 got a huge payoff.

Now Fuhrman’s top three list makes sense in any order. In lists of names like those in the index of his book, Murder in Brentwood, his last name comes first: "Fuhrman, Mark." He did not list his middle name or his street name. What do you want to bet they mean something big? Not having a middle name is itself significant if your initials are M.F. But wouldn’t you love to know his street name? He had to have one.

In Collision Course (’89) Leno plays Detective Tony Costas who gets involved in a murder case. In a thinly disguised reference to maverick automaker John DeLorean, Dennis Holahan plays Derek Jarryd, a maverick automaker who runs into big financial trouble and gets the backing of mobster Philip Madras (Chris Sarandon) to bail him out. O.J. and DeLorean had the same lawyer. A reference to "Jarryd" is therefore an indirect reference to O.J.’s legal problems and the DeLorean gull-winged car used as a time machine in Back to the Future. You will be reading plenty about that in Time Travel and More Time Travel. That’s where you’ll find the Tombstone connection to the pizza that Fuhrman made a big deal out of in his fifth Bundy note.

Collision Course has two pizza references. The second involves a 12-year-old bottle of whisky and a joke about the pizza on Costas’ kitchen table being as old as the whisky. The action takes place in June. Fuhrman’s note concerns this handwritten note: "CARA 575-5713 CAL PIZZA KITCHEN." How do you combine a handwritten note with a tombstone? Try this: When Costas gets pulled over for drag racing (to win a pizza) by an attractive female officer named Bell and her male partner, he makes up a story to get her home phone number, which he writes down – starting with 555… Now we need two sevens, a one and a three. Costas and his Toko counterpart (Ron drove a borrowed Japanese car to Bundy) clime the short flight of stairs to his apartment, the way Ron and Nicole did when they were attacked. As they do so you can read the addresses set into the building’s stone like a tombstone. The number is 3771.

Fuhrman shot a black ATM robber five times in 1987, the year he became a detective. He wrote in his book of putting a pearl handle on a knife for a movie star—which might remind you of the pearl handles on the long and short barreled pistols Eddie Murphy compared to each other in Harlem Nights. He enjoyed beating people bloody. He was ambidextrous. He posed with the bloody, leather, left-hand glove on Bundy and made Rockingham a part of the crime scene with his discovery of the right-hand glove.

The autopsy report on Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson showed evidence of two knives; a short-bladed knife used by a left-hander and a long-bladed knife used by a right-hander. How much imagination does it take to see a gun as a symbol for a knife? In purely Freudian terms, there is no difference.

Fuhrman had unique, personal reasons to be sensitive to the numbers 3 and 1 in connection with the baseball double play combination Alan Trammel (3), right-hand batting shortstop for the Detroit Tigers and "Sweet Lou" Whitaker (1), the left-handed second baseman. Police on Bundy found a small glass heart. In Magic, Corky the throat-slashing killer of the ex-football player in the blue knit cap, leaves a wooden heart at the doorstep of the woman he loves.

The Bundy murders contain a mix of elements spliced together from several movies with interchangeable people places and things. But those elements are not a random collection of this-and-that as required to make Mark Fuhrman look like a murderer who got his ideas from the movies. They are coherent patterns found in the movies, in Fuhrman’s personal and professional history, his books, his interviews and his interpretation of the evidence at Bundy and Rockingham.

Michael Learner plays a bigoted gangster called Bugsy Calhoon in Harlem Nights. When Calhoon orders the murder of a black man named Tommy Smalls for stealing money from him, his prescribed method of execution is a slit throat "from here to here." Like Fuhrman, who wasn’t so much of a bigot that he couldn’t get the hots for Vanity (real name Denise Smith), Bugsy enjoys the company of a Creole  woman  named Dominique La Rue played by Jasmine Guy. Dominique’s job is to invite Vernist (Quick) Brown to her place for sex so she can kill him. Does any of this sound familiar? OK, how about this: Quick brings her a heart-shaped box of candy and ends up killing her.

Earlier that evening Quick had paid a visit to Tommy Smalls whose buzzer didn’t work the way it was supposed to all the time to let him in. On this occasion it wouldn’t have mattered because Smalls was already dead. The police detective who killed him hit him first, and timed the killing so that it looks like Quick did it. The detective shots him five times and his partner cuts his throat. They let the door open, which was how Quick found it. The room was dark. Quick saw the back of Tommy’s head as he walked forward and said, with a different tone that conveyed a different understanding of the situation as he got closer to the body, "Hey! Hey? Hey. Hey."

You know that Faye Resnick set up the meeting with Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson to have sex. Remember the extra pair of women’s legs in The Eyes of Mars book? In the context of the Bundy murders they don’t look so "extraneous," do they?