Among the sheaf of letters I collected from my office mailbox the other day, one in particular caught my attention. It was addressed to "George (The Racist) Kimball."

The writer, who did not sign his name, objected to the inclusion of O J Simpson (in the Number One spot) on a "Football Hall of Shame" I had been asked to compile for another of those turn-of-the-century lists.

"Why doesn't anyone want to consider that the gigallo (sic) was the primary target and that Nickole (sic) just happened to be in the wrong place," wonders the unsigned note. The note also included the writer's conclusion, to wit: ". . . that you're a racist bastard."

As I had taken pains to point out in the text to which the anonymous letter-writer objected, O J actually came away with a split decision in two trials resulting from the 1994 double homicide. He was acquitted in a murder trial characterised by police bungling and an indifferent prosecution, but found responsible for taking two lives in a subsequent wrongful death suit brought in civil court.

Although a small lunatic fringe insists on clinging to the notion that Simpson was a wrongfully-accused victim of society, it is difficult to imagine that, say, 30 years from now a Hollywood director will re-open the case by making a film predicated on the bald-faced assertion that O J was innocent.

Yet a seemingly unlikely scenario will begin playing itself out in theatres across the country tomorrow, when Norman Jewison's widely-acclaimed The Hurricane opens for nationwide release. The film, purportedly based on the life and times of one-time middleweight contender Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, actually opened at selected theatres on December 29th, in order to make it eligible for the 1999 Academy Awards. In 1966, Hurricane Carter, a good-but-not-great middleweight who had already spent more than half of his life behind bars, was accused along with an accomplice, John Artis, of an after-hours triple-murder in a saloon in Paterson, New Jersey. The pair were tried and found guilty. Despite having his cause embraced by the liberal establishment, Carter would spend the next two decades in prison. He never fought again.

The Hurricane, alas, is very good theatre but very bad history, as one might have anticipated from a movie which notes in its credits "based on the novels (sic) Lazarus and the Hurricane by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton, The 16th Round by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, and the 1970s ballad by Bob Dylan entitled The Hurri- cane." Almost a quarter-century later, I can recall my own reaction after a disk-jockey friend played me an advance copy of Dylan's 1976 protest ballad. Two phrases in particular stuck in my craw. First, Dylan's bland assertion that Carter had been imprisoned "for something that he never done". And second, the song's repeated refrain that Carter "could have been the champion of the world".

There is no doubt that both the police and the prosecutors cut many corners in their zeal to convict Carter and Artis, but the contention that it was an outright frame-up rests on shaky ground indeed.

However, far from being deprived of a title shot, Carter got his in 1964. This fight, conveniently ignored by Dylan, is depicted in the film. In Jewison's version The Hurricane beats Giardello to a bloody pulp, but the champion, despite literally never laying a glove on Carter, is awarded the decision on the scorecards of all three judges, who must, the viewer is left to believe, have been motivated by the same bitter racism of the New Jersey police.

Here's the problem I have with this attempt at revisionist history: I don't know for a fact whether Rubin Carter pulled the trigger in the Lafayette Grill, but neither does Bob Dylan nor Norman Jewison.

Although Carter is shown being convicted haphazardly by an all-white jury, in fact there were two separate trials, and he was found guilty both times - the second by a racially-mixed jury. Although his arrest is depicted as a case of mistaken identity, the film fails to note that a shotgun and a bullet were recovered from the car in which Carter and Artis were driving shortly after the murder.

More egregiously still, the film invents a malevolent, police detective named "Della Pesca" who devotes his entire life to hounding Carter into prison at every turn, from the age of 11 onward. Della Pesca never existed.

Put it this way: every time Carter was tried on the merits of the murder case, he was found guilty. When the conviction was finally thrown out in 1985 by a federal judge (grimly portrayed by Rod Steiger in the film), it was because the prosecution had "fatally infected the trial" by basely appealing to racism as a motive and by withholding evidence. In other words, not even the judge who sprung them claimed that Carter and Artis were innocent, but rather that their trial had been indisputably unfair.

Left unrecorded are the facts that, once freed, Carter was shortly arrested and charged with assaulting Lisa Peters, the female member of the arcane Canadian commune which had worked for his release, or that Bob Dylan became so embarrassed once Carter's true character emerged that he has refused to perform The Hurricane for the past 20 years.

As the credits roll at the film's conclusion, Jewison, in his haste to bring viewers up to date, informs the audience that "the real killers have never been caught". Ironically, the film's denouement is a grainy clip of a 1994 ceremony in which the real Rubin Carter is shown being presented with a "championship belt" by the real Jose Sulaiman, the president-for-life of the World Boxing Council. The film claims that this was the first time someone who had not won his title in the ring had been thus honoured (which is not true; Sulaiman dispenses WBC belts the way some men hand out business cards). That Sulaiman is widely regarded as a petty despot who exemplifies all that is wrong with the corrupt world of boxing never seems to have occurred to the director. That he interprets Sulaiman's approval as a triumph of vindication for Rubin Carter illustrates how little of the real world of boxing he understands. Or of the real world, period, for that matter.