6 months ago
52
Last month, I received an email from a journalist in Paris asking for an interview on her podcast miniseries “Scandales.” It was an episode about sports, Camille Maestracci wrote. She had read something I wrote about O.J. Simpson’s troubles, how they had transcended him, and she wanted to talk about it.
I was humbled, of course, and stumped.
“Thank you for reaching out,” I responded. “I don’t recall what I wrote about O.J. so long ago. Please refresh my memory.”
It was the first time in years I had thought about O.J. until my phone pinged Thursday morning with a news alert: O.J. was dead.
Wait? What? O. J.?
Cancer.
O.J. was ill? Where was he? What was he doing?
I recalled a few social media videos from O.J. in recent years that left me shaking my head at the sheer audaciousness of him voluntarily inserting himself in the public eye. After all, he had become a felon who served nine years in prison for a bizarre armed robbery and was already shunned by so much of the public that suspected he got away with murdering his ex-wife and a friend of hers in 1994, after watching what became a trial of the century.
But O.J.’s post from Feb. 9, in which he denied a rumor I hadn’t heard that he was in hospice, had escaped me.
So O.J. did it, again. One last time. He shocked us all.
I didn’t know O.J., though if you grew up with him at a certain time, it seemed like we all did. The great running back. The national pitchman. The actor. The sports commentator. The perpetual smiler.
I did, however, meet O.J. In 1992, I found him early one morning in the bleachers at Tad Gormley Stadium in New Orleans where we were both covering the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. He waved me over, and I took a seat next to “the Juice,” as he was nicknamed, and we chatted about the emergence of 400-meter sensation Michael Johnson; the Reebok-sponsored decathlon competition between the world’s two best at the time, Dave Johnson and Dan O’Brien; and who knows what else.
O.J. was as affable in-person as the persona he presented on television despite being one of the most famous athletes-turned-Hollywood-stars you could imagine. On the eve of the Opening Ceremonies of the Barcelona Games that summer, he invited me, Michael Wilbon, David Aldridge and the late Brian Burwell to meet him at a Barcelona nightclub called Up & Down. We couldn’t turn down a night with the Juice, obviously, so we accepted.
O.J. was tailed by a television crew and, most remarkably, immediately immersed in a surge of Spanish women squealing his name.
O.J.’s stardom preceded him even overseas.
It was just another one of those moments in his life that was not easily fathomed, such as what landed him in prison with a 33-year sentence, which removed him from our psyche for what felt like forever more. O.J. was convicted of being part of a group, some of whom were armed, that raided a Las Vegas hotel room to take back what he said were family heirlooms and memorabilia of his sports career that had been stolen from him.
Wait? What? O.J.?
An armed robber?
O.J. went to Vegas to bum rush some dudes? He’s a gangsta?
I couldn’t believe it. But maybe I should have. For that paled next to his conviction by the public — though not a jury of his peers — for the bloody killing of his second wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
There was not a more shocking real-life Shakespearean tragedy in my life than what began to unfold June 17, 1994. That day, O.J. showed up on national television via TV news helicopters. They caught him being pursued by police while riding in the back seat of his white Ford Bronco driven by his friend Al Cowlings on a Los Angeles highway. Police suspected O.J. of stabbing to death Brown and Goldman, who had been found murdered five days earlier.
I was at Madison Square Garden that day covering Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets. Slowly but surely, the TV monitors on press row showing the telecast of the game began to show a split screen — the game on one half, the police pursuit on the other half.
Fans began to peer over our shoulders. Soon, most of us found a channel just showing the white Bronco leading a parade of police cars on the highway, off an exit, through a neighborhood, to a house. We all but ignored the reason we were in the arena.
Patrick Ewing scored 25 points and grabbed a dozen rebounds to lead the Knicks to a critical 91-84 victory, giving the Knicks a 3-2 series lead in the best-of-seven finals. But I called my editors and told them I was going to write about the big story: It was the chase of O.J.
Indeed, in the postgame news conference room, Knicks coach Pat Riley walked in, took his seat, then looked up at the assembled media and, if my memory serves, asked what was happening with O.J.
What was happening, unbeknownst to us all at the time, was the beginning of the most extraordinary transformation of fame into infamy most of us have ever seen. It seemed like reverse alchemy, really.
For here was a Black man, from the Blackest side of town, who came to national prominence at an exclusive, predominantly White college, USC; who etched his name in the record books of pro football in the most exhilarating of ways; and who deftly swapped Black life for White life and all the apparently rich rewards it brought, such as the quintessential European aesthetic of womanhood, his blond second wife. And it was all disappearing in an astonishing double-murder trial the entire world tuned in to watch, which he somehow, someway slipped out of just as dramatically as he had would-be tacklers in college and the NFL.
O.J. never again resembled what we long thought of him. And the final scene, just like the other acts in his life, was no less stunning.
English (US)