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I spent part of a week with Oscar Pistorius in his native South Africa. He picked me up in the morning at my hotel. In between his workouts, he cooked us lunch at his house. I was a journalist there to profile him for the magazine, but he saw himself as my host.
As I pointed out today on TimesCast, he was not like most big-time American athletes that I have encountered. He was far nicer. With better manners.
But I did worry about him after I left. Oscar was an adrenaline freak at a level I had never seen before. He had already suffered serious injuries when he crashed his speedboat into a pier. He had kept exotic pets, some of them dangerous. He drove us around in his high-performance sports car — not the kind you can get at a normal dealer but more like a race car — at speeds of up to 140 miles per hour. I figured it was just a matter of time before he crashed on the highway and was injured again, maybe worse this time.
But what is said to have occurred this morning in Pretoria, where he is accused of shooting his girlfriend? No, I certainly did not imagine anything like that. As a writer, you never think you truly know everything about someone after spending even the concentrated time you do for a longer story. I saw Oscar as a reckless person, charismatic but impulsive, and not as cautious as he always should be.
But I didn't see anger in him.
I did see fear. One day he told me that the previous night he had sensed an intruder in his home and went for his gun. This is what I wrote:
Pistorius lives in the house with a friend from high school, an engineer who moonlights as a mixed-martial-arts fighter. Pistorius had recently broken off a relationship with his longtime girlfriend, though another young woman was visiting when we got there. As he put together lunch for all of us — fruit smoothies, breaded chicken fillets he pulled from the refrigerator — he mentioned that a security alarm in the house had gone off the previous night, and he had grabbed his gun and tiptoed downstairs. (It turned out to be nothing.)
I asked what kind of gun he owned, which he seemed to take as an indication of my broader interest in firearms. I had to tell him I didn't own any. "But you've shot one, right?" Actually, I hadn't. Suddenly, I felt like one of those characters in a movie who must be schooled on how to be more manly.
"We should go to the range," he said. He fetched his 9-millimeter handgun and two boxes of ammunition. We got back in the car and drove to a nearby firing range, where he instructed me on proper technique. Pistorius was a good coach. A couple of my shots got close to the bull's-eye, which delighted him. "Maybe you should do this more," he said. "If you practiced, I think you could be pretty deadly." I asked him how often he came to the range. "Just sometimes when I can't sleep," he said.
There's no way to know right now what exactly happened and how a young woman, apparently Pistorius's girlfriend, died. It's a terrible tragedy for her and her family, foremost, but also for Pistorius and everyone who admired him.
Below, my interview today on TimesCast.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 14, 2013
An earlier version of this post misstated the day that Oscar Pistorius was arrested in the shooting death of his girlfriend. It was early this morning, Feb. 14, not yesterday.
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