In June 2005, on the 10th anniversary of his infamous trial, O.J. Simpson visited a Central Florida bar and sat down with Orlando Sentinel reporter Rick Maese to talk about his life. This story originally appeared in the Sentinel Sports section on June 26, 2005.
KISSIMMEE — O.J. Simpson is on the run.
He slips past a barstool and cuts between two cocktail waitresses. “You mind if I sit down with you?” he asks. “I’m trying to get away from this lady.”
He thought he was stopping by to have a couple of drinks and meet a friend of a friend, who owns this Kissimmee sports bar. Unbeknownst to O.J., the day has turned into a public appearance.
It’s actually not that surprising. Ever since he sat in the back seat of a white Ford Bronco, his entire life has been a string of public appearances. Going to get milk. Dropping his son off at school. Watching his daughter play volleyball.
He’s a traveling circus, a certified freak who draws stares, camera-phones and whispers. He maintains his innocence while maintaining a smile. Under his breath he talks about leaving as soon as he can. He saw the warning sign out front. “O.J. Simpson is here today. 12-6 p.m.”
“Uh-oh,” he thought. “This isn’t good.”
Now a couple of drinks also means signing autographs, shaking hands with old men and posing for photographs with young children. Oh, yeah, and one of the biggest bear hugs of his life — from a former female wrestler who calls herself Matilda the Hun.
Inside this bar, a baseball game plays on more than half of the 14 television sets. Just a few patrons are here this early on a Saturday.
O.J. left once but decided to return. No real good reason other than he’s O.J., and he doesn’t want to disappoint.
“I came over here to say hello to somebody,” he says. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
As the day unfolds, O.J. will always have one eye on the door, planning his escape. And this much will become clear: Things have changed.
They used to chase him down the sidelines at the University of Southern California, where he was named the country’s top college football player in 1968. Then they chased him in Buffalo, N.Y., where he spent most of his Hall-of-Fame NFL career.
And they famously chased him through Los Angeles, where his fame turned to notoriety, where his ex-wife and her friend were killed in June 1994, where he was accused of double-murder and where cops tailed him for 60 miles on the city’s freeway system. It doesn’t seem like it, but this year marks the 10-year anniversary of what many consider to be the trial of the century. Not guilty, the jury decided after eight months.
And here he is, in the spring of 2005, and O.J. is on the run again. The circus is on the move. He takes a seat, sips the last of a beer and begins to talk about life’s crossroads, all the while telling stories from the past and insisting he only cares about the future.
I. UNDER THE BIG TOP
There’s a disc jockey set up in one corner and his voice booms through the speakers.
“Yeeeah, I want everyone in here to show some love for O.J.,” he says.
The place is called Cheerleaders and the waitresses dress the part. But O.J. is the real spectacle here.
He’s almost 58 years old and looks it. He’s wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt covered by an unbuttoned striped blue shirt. There’s a shiny necklace draped around his neck. The gaudy 3-inch cross that dangles at the end looks as if it’s filled with 1,000 diamonds. O.J. says they aren’t real.
“This is from my kids,” he says. “They bought me this because they said I needed some bling. Their exact words: Dad, you need some bling.”
People react positively to O.J. They don’t shy away. He’s not an accused murderer in here. Truth be told, he’s not a Hall-of-Fame running back, either. O.J. is a Court TV icon. He’s a larger-than-life defendant who vowed to spend the rest of his life searching for the real killers, the ones who were really responsible for murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
O.J. is sipping a scotch, he’s talking sports and he’s counting the seconds until he can leave. The DJ is spinning hip-hop music and between songs he’s urging fans to get O.J.’s autograph. “Only 25 bucks.”
O.J. will see none of that money and by all accounts isn’t getting paid to be here.
He considers it a point of pride that he can venture out in public. He doesn’t shy away from people and rarely, he says, is he greeted with rudeness or snide remarks. He poses for 100 photographs a week. The camera-phone is probably the worst invention in his lifetime, he figures.
The patron just wants to say, “Hiya Juice.” And O.J. smiles back. The second that O.J. turns his head, though, the patron pulls out a cell phone, covers the receiver and starts whispering into it.
“I’m not too naive to think I walk into a room and no one is talking about me,” O.J. says. “I know the guy over there in the corner might be whispering to his buddy.
“I’ve been in two places when President Bush has walked into the room. Whooo — believe me, you hear a lot of things. Now no one was gonna say anything to the man’s face. Fortunately I haven’t heard much. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that it’s there.”
II. THE HUN ON THE MICROPHONE
The thumping beat fades out and the DJ is talking again, something about someone who’s “also signing autographs in the house.”
“Did you hear that?” says O.J. “Matilda the Hun, that’s her name.”
Her real name is Suzanne Leigh and she wrestled 15 years ago for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Needless to say, she resembles her ring name.
Maybe in her prime she looked different.
“Come on, man,” he says. “Look at her.”
Matilda grabs the microphone and gazes across the room at the former football great. “O.J., honey, I got something for you.”
As the first chords come out of the speakers — it’s a slow song called “Since I Fell For You” — O.J. covers his face. He doesn’t want Matilda to see him laughing.
“You know I’m dying right now, right?” he says in a near whisper.
“She says we met sometime. In Vegas or something. I don’t remember meeting no female wrestlers in Vegas.”
Maybe there was some night where you drank too much and . . .
“Stop. I haven’t ever drank that much.”
He still can’t believe he’s here. O.J. had a business meeting — he won’t disclose any details — with an Orlando man the previous evening and decided to stick around for a couple of days.
He says his life is changing quite a bit — empty-nest syndrome. His daughter, 19-year-old Sydney, has just completed her freshman year in college at Boston University. And his son, 17-year-old Justin, is about to start his senior year at a Miami prep school. Justin has a license now, so he doesn’t need Dad to double as a taxi driver.
“People ask what I’ve been doing all these years,” he says. “I’ve just been being a dad, trying to raise these kids.”
In early May, O.J.’s eldest son, Jason Simpson, got married in Miami. “It looks like I might be a grandfather in the not-too-distant future,” he says. “Something I’m actually looking forward to.”
Sydney and Justin were the two children O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson had together. They were asleep inside Brown Simpson’s condominium when the murders took place.
It’s just O.J. and Justin living in Miami full-time now. O.J. says though his son is getting recruited in basketball and football, Justin will likely settle on lacrosse in college.
O.J. doesn’t know what he’ll do with all his free time. No one thinks that Hall-of-Famers-turned-murder-defendants suffer from an empty nest. They do, though.
He stares up at a television set, which is showing horse racing.
“What time is it?” he asks.
About 3 o’clock.
“Man, I gotta get out of here. How long have I been here? 40 minutes?”
About an hour.
“Well, they’re getting one more hour out of me. Then I gotta go.”
III. THE MAN WITH TOO MANY FRIENDS
There are maybe two dozen people in the bar. The DJ talks as though there are 2,000.
“We got O.J.! We got Matilda! We got much love in here today!”
A beat starts playing and a man who had been talking with O.J. earlier grabs the mike and begins to rap. “He sounds like Tupac,” O.J. says.
Is that one of your friends?
“Man, I don’t know these people. I just met them yesterday.”
O.J.’s life is full of friends of friends. He knows he has to be careful about who he gets involved with. People have ulterior motives, he says. A friend-of-a-friend is very different from an actual friend.
Everyone wants him to shake some hands and smile. He’ll forget these people. He’ll meet others next week and they’ll all blend together: asking for autographs, recalling an O.J. encounter from 1986, just wanting to say “Hiya Juice.”
And though today’s crowd will blend with last week’s, he’s very aware these fans won’t forget this encounter. They’re going to be telling their friends and family for years about that-one-time-I-met O.J.
“Let me tell you a story,” O.J. says. “It’s about Ernie Banks.”
Turns out O.J. is related to the Hall-of-Fame baseball player, a second cousin. It was 1959 and the Chicago Cubs were in town to play the San Francisco Giants.
“I bragged to all my boys that Ernie Banks was my cousin,” O.J. says. “We went to the game, he hits a home run. It was all amazing. After the game, I’m telling all my friends that I’m going to introduce them to Ernie Banks. He comes out and I’m saying, ‘Hey, Ernie, it’s me.’ He said, ‘Hey,’ and just kept on walking. Man, my boys dogged me forever.
“I never forgot that. I remembered that experience. I never wanted anyone to feel the way I felt at that point. So I smile, I’ll shake their hand, whatever. I don’t want them to feel that way. Like right now, all I want to do is get up, get in that damn car and get out of here. But I’m here, so it’s not a hard thing to smile.”
If he wasn’t here today, he’d probably be golfing, he says.
How often do you get out and play?
“Only the days that end in ‘Y’,” O.J. says.
He plays 18 holes nearly every day. Though he ambles around the bar with some trepidation, he says golfing doesn’t hurt. Last year, he had a knee replacement and says he feels no pain whatsoever any more. The titanium knee makes him feel like a new man.
“You should see me at the airport, though,” he says. “Every time I go through, that thing goes off. It’s OK. They all know me.”
Matilda is back at the DJ booth, again holding the microphone.
She coos, “O.J., you’re always on my mind.”
“Georgia-a-a-a,” Matilda sings. “Georg-uh-uh-uh-uh.”
O.J. is midway through his second scotch and telling old stories. They’re funny and charming — like O.J. — but they’re also a reminder that he once led a very different life. He was on TV, in movies, in commercials.
Do you miss all that stuff that you used to do?
“I’ll tell you, and this is the truth: I’m rarely looking into the past. When I finished playing, I was done playing. There was nothing for me to dwell on. I had two kids to raise. That was my focus. We moved down to Miami and I had a family I had to worry about.”
Do you think about what your legacy will be?
“My football legacy has taken care of itself,” he says. “I just can’t change some things in the past. I can only react to how the public reacts to me. I’ve accepted that some areas of the media will just focus on the negative. And I guess some people will, too. I always thought it’s more newsworthy that I could walk into a bar and people love me.”
IV. THE BOTTOM OF THE GLASS
The DJ is talking again, and it’s mostly ice left in O.J.’s drink.
“O.J., how are you doing over there, my man?” the DJ asks.
“I’m dragging,” O.J. shouts, but the DJ doesn’t understand him.
“You’re chilling?”
“No.” His voice lowers. “I’m dragging.”
Someone else comes up to his table, and O.J. smiles. He signs his name and says “You’re welcome.”
“They’re pimping me out, man,” he says.
He signs another one, this one an 11×14 photograph.
“At an autograph show, these things go for about $150. If the memorabilia people knew I was down here doing this and it was only costing a third of what they go for, there’d be a line out the door.”
In April, O.J. did an autograph show in New Jersey, his first in a decade. Athletes typically get appearance fees to sign autographs for a set amount of time. O.J. mostly lives off of his NFL pension — about $25,000 a month. He says he hasn’t had any other steady income since the trial.
He owes $33.5 million to the family of Ron Goldman from a civil judgment but has vowed to never pay a penny. Under state law, the Goldmans cannot touch O.J.’s money in Florida.
As he sips the last of his scotch, he’s scanning the room.
“I already see how I’m getting out of here,” he says. “No one will even notice me. Right over there in the corner.”
O.J. is planning. He’s looking ahead. That’s what he always does. He doesn’t talk much about the murder charges, says he doesn’t feel the need to prove his innocence on a daily basis. But he alludes to it a few times, mostly in the context of overcoming a personal test.
“Everybody has some rainfall in their life,” he says. “For me, it was like a monsoon. But I got through it.”
Would you trade your successes for some level of anonymity?
“I love my life right now,” he says.
“I’ve always been someone who was always looking ahead. Now I didn’t expect it to be all like this. But guess what: It is what it is. It’s not bad. What can you do? You enjoy it. You keep on keeping on, you know?”
He’s asked his biggest regret and he says that he wasn’t faithful to his first two wives. He says today he avoids temptations and hasn’t wandered in recent relationships. He doesn’t talk about his current girlfriend.
O.J. shakes a couple of hands and rises from his seat. The heavy bass is still booming, chasing O.J. right out the door.
Slowly patrons’ heads pop up from their drinks and they notice that the Juice is gone.
“Wait, he can’t go yet,” says Matilda the Hun. “I just called my friends and they’re about to come down here. Can’t someone get him? Tell him he can’t go yet.”
But he has. He gets into the light blue Lincoln Continental and disappears down the road. The public appearance is over. The circus has moved to its next stop.
EPILOGUE
There was a poll conducted last year by NBC News in which 87 percent of white respondents said they think O.J. is guilty of killing his ex-wife and her friend. Seventy percent of blacks said he’s innocent.
There have, of course, been numerous other polls and there surely will be more. O.J. will be a conversation topic for years to come.
There had been rumors that family members of Ron Goldman were going to show up in Orlando to confront O.J. They didn’t.
There have recently been other rumors that O.J. is shopping a reality-based TV show in which he searches for the real killers. He denies that.
“I learned a long time ago you can’t believe rumors,” he said earlier in the day.
One thing that O.J. said that afternoon still lingers. Maybe he’s right — everyone does have rainfall in his or her life.
But it’s different for him. The sun didn’t come out and dry his rainwater. The ground couldn’t absorb it.
Every day of the past 10 years and every day of the next 10, O.J. keeps plodding through the same puddles, keeping his head raised as high as possible, preferring not to notice that his feet are getting wet.
O.J. Timeline
- July 9, 1947 – Orenthal J. Simpson is born in San Francisco.
- 1962 – Simpson incarcerated at the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center.
- 1968 – As a running back for the University of Southern California, he wins the Heisman Trophy.
- 1969 – Taken as the No. 1 player in the NFL draft by the Buffalo Bills.
- 1973 – Becomes the first player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season, finishing with 2003.
- 1973 – 1994 – Appeared in more than 20 films, including The Towering Inferno (1974), and the Naked Gun films.
- 1974 – Sets a record for touch-downs in one season, with 23 (since broken).
- Oct. 1978 – Simpson separates from Marguerite Simpson, his first wife, with whom he had 2 children.
- 1978 – Bills trade Simpson to San Francisco 49ers.
- 1979 – Retires due to injuries.
- 1984 – Carries the Olympic Torch in the XXIII Summer Games.
- 1985 – Inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Marries Nicole Brown.
- 1986 – Becomes a pitchman for major advertisers, including Hertz.
- Jan. 1, 1989 – 911 call reveals that Simpson has beaten Nicole, allegedly saying: “I’ll kill you.”
- May 24, 1989 – O.J. sentenced for spousal abuse.
- Oct. 15,1992 – Nicole divorces O.J., with whom he had 2 children.
- 1993 – Becomes a sports analyst for NBC.
- June 12, 1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are stabbed to death.
- June 17, 1994 – Simpson is chased by police while riding in his white Ford Bronco, driven by friend A.C. Cowlings.
- July 22, 1994 – O.J. pleads “absolutely 100 percent not guilty.” Judge Lance A. Ito is assigned to hear the case.
- May 15, 1995 – Simpson tries on the bloody gloves. They seem not to fit.
- Oct. 3, 1995 – Jury finds O.J. Simpson not guilty of two counts of murder.
- Feb. 4, 1997 – In a civil trial, jury finds Simpson liable and awards plaintiffs $8.5 million.
- March 26, 1997 – Court orders Simpson to turn over his assets, including his Heisman trophy.
- 1997 to present – Has kept a low profile, but his children and golf remain a passion in his life.
- SOURCES: Sentinel research, AP, CNN.com, CourtTV.com
ORLANDO SENTINEL
