From football star to murder suspect to Kendall man: O.J. Simpson’s complicated legacy

O.J. Simpson, a college and pro football Hall of Fame running back, domestic abuser and acquitted murder suspect, died Wednesday, his family announced.

Using Simpson’s X account “TheRealOJ32,” his children announced “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace.”

Simpson was 76.

Simpson used size and world-class sprinters’ speed for generational football greatness. He buffed rough edges in speech and manner to craft a Nice Guy public persona irresistible to all the nation’s skin tones. He used both as the foundation for a ubiquitous off the field life on television, in movies, as a pitch man, as the player kids imitated on sandlots. He ran into America’s heart as smoothly as he ran through defenses.

And, America’s heart ripped in two when Simpson was charged with the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, a restaurant waiter returning glasses to Brown Simpson’s home.

He lived in Miami’s Kendall area between being acquitted of those murders in 1995 and going to prison in 2008 after a botched Las Vegas robbery attempt involving his memorabilia. During that time, Simpson was found civilly liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Goldman in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the victims’ families.

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In his Oscar-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” director Ezra Edelman showed the collision of Simpson’s image so carefully curated for crossover appeal; his private life that eventually included domestic violence against Nicole Brown Simpson before her murder; and the Los Angeles Black community’s distrust of police. The title refers to the way Simpson’s life reflects not only his flaws and contradictions, but those of the United States.

The generations that knew Simpson mainly from the white Ford Bronco, the murder trial and the aftermath may not have understood why in 2019 when the NFL named him one of its 100 Greatest Players in celebration of the league’s 100th season.

‘The Juice’

Orenthal James Simpson was born June 9, 1947, in San Francisco and grew up with his sister and single mother in a housing project. At Galileo High School, Simpson joined a gang and did stints in juvenile incarceration, but started long relationships with Marguerite Whitley, her boyfriend Al Cowlings and football.

Before they left high school, Simpson lured Whitley from Cowlings, but Cowlings remained Simpson’s best friend. All three eventually went to the University of Southern California, where Simpson and Whitley got married in 1967.

Simpson’s most famous run in Los Angeles — before the white Ford Bronco chase — decided 1967’s biggest college football game, No. 1 UCLA vs. No. 4 USC. A national television audience watched Simpson gallop 64 yards in the fourth quarter despite two offensive linemen not blocking anyone (they hadn’t heard the quarterback change the play). USC’s 21-20 win and ensuing 14-3 Rose Bowl win against Indiana gave the Trojans the national title.

Simpson finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting that season to UCLA’s Gary Beban, then won the award for college football’s best player in 1968.

USC coach John McKay told Sports Illustrated in 1978, “God gave O. J. Simpson more ability than any back I’ve ever seen.”

As expected, Buffalo took Simpson as the first player the 1969 NFL Draft. Buffalo coach John Rauch, to the relief of every Bills opponent from 1969 to 1971, decided to use Simpson as a decoy for his first three seasons.

Buffalo hired Lou Saban in 1972, and Saban gave O.J. the ball. Simpson led the NFL with 1,251 rushing yards in 1972, an opening act before what might be still the NFL’s greatest rushing season ever.

“The Juice” began the 1973 season with 250 yards, a NFL single-game rushing record at the time, against New England. From there, Simpson galloped to to 2,003 yards, the NFL’s first 2,000-yard rushing season and the only one done in 14 games.

Simpson brought his offensive linemen — nicknamed “The Electric Company” because they turned on “The Juice” — into media interviews with him, giving attention to an often-obscure position group. This also fueled Simpson’s affable image.

Simpson led the NFL in rushing two more times and broke his own single-game rushing record with 273 yards on Thanksgiving Day against Detroit in 1976. NFL Films named him the Player of the Decade. He retired in 1979 finishing his career with two seasons in his native San Francisco and 11,236 career rushing yards.

Simpson sat No. 2 on the career rushing list. His star status, however, was No. 1.

Hollywood and Hertz

No pro athlete could claim to being a bigger multimedia star in the 1970s. Even those who knew little about sports could identify “O.J..”

When America locked in on “Roots” in 1977, it saw Simpson. He hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He played a small security guard role in “The Towering Inferno” and a bigger supporting role in “Capricorn One.” Simpson would later show the comedic side hinted at in his SNL guest host turn with a recurring role in the three Naked Gun movies in the 1980s and 1990s as maladroit Detective Norberg.

If you missed all of the above and didn’t see his commercials for sunglasses or magazine ads for boots, you couldn’t avoid Simpson running through airports in Hertz car rental commercials as Girl Scouts and senior citizens yelled “Go, O.J.!”

No product-endorser link at the time was stronger, a bond Advertising Age honored by naming Simpson its 1977 Pitchman of the Year.

That same year, Simpson starred in the TV movie “A Killing Affair,” with Elizabeth Montgomery as a couple of homicide detectives who begin an interracial, interoffice romantic relationship “that breaks all the rules,” a commercial snarled.

Around that time, Simpson began a real-life relationship with a blonde-haired woman that actually did break some cultural mores.

Brown, beatings and blood in Brentwood

Being a married father of Arnelle, Jason and Aaren Simpson didn’t prevent O.J. Simpson from pursuing Nicole Brown when he met her while she worked as a waitress. Simpson would divorce Wright in 1979 months before Aaren, a toddler, drowned in the swimming pool at Simpson’s home.

Simpson and Nicole Brown married in 1985 and would be parents to Sidney and Justin. Soon after Justin’s birth came the one documented, confirmed domestic violence episode.

That Dec. 31, 1988, beating at the Simpson house got reported in the media. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse and got sentenced to community service. But, Nicole Brown Simpson’s visible injuries or that Simpson absconded from his Brentwood home when the officer at the scene gave him time to get himself together before arrest got little play.

“O.J.: Made in America” contains a 911 call from Nicole Brown Simpson during which she furiously states how many times police came to the Simpson home on domestic violence calls without doing anything effective.

All this spilled out after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, a waiter at Mezzaluna returning glasses Brown’s mother had left at the restaurant earlier that evening, were killed outside Brown Simpson’s Brentwood home on June 12, 1994. She was living there after having separated from Simpson.

The murder investigation, arrest, trial and verdict dominated national attention from the June 17, 1994, (slow police chase on Los Angeles freeways of Simpson in a white Ford Bronco driven by Cowlings) to the Oct. 3, 1995, verdict of not guilty on all charges.

In between, everyone involved with the case even tangentially gained some form of fame or infamy. People tuned in to watch minute-by-minute coverage, many hearing about DNA evidence and seeing how a trial actually works for the first time. Police departments across the country changed policies on how to deal with domestic violence incidents.

Simpson’s legal “Dream Team” included F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian (father of the famous daughters), Alan Dershowitz, and, as lead attorney, Johnnie Cochran. After a bloody glove found at the murder scene didn’t fit Simpson’s hand, Cochran told the jury in closing arguments, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

After the civil trial judgment against him for $33.5 million, Simpson defaulted on his Brentwood home and moved to Miami with Sidney and Justin. He did a pay-per-view TV interview and wrote a book “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer,” in which he gives a hypothesis how he might have killed Goldman and Brown Simpson.

Some of Simpson’s football memorabilia went from his agent to a storage unit and into the hands of memorabilia dealers. On Sept. 13, 2007, Simpson and three went to a Las Vegas hotel room and confronted the memorabilia dealers with guns drawn. Simpson took what he thought was his, but other pieces of memorabilia that didn’t belong to him also got taken. Also, during the robbery some of the victims were confined to the bathroom at gunpoint.

That counted as kidnapping and, on Oct. 3, 2008, Simpson was convicted of multiple charges including kidnapping, assault, robbery and use of a deadly weapon. He would remain in prison until his release on Oct. 1, 2017, after serving nine years of the 33-year sentence.

Simpson spent the remainder of his life living in a Las Vegas gated community, playing golf and occasionally commenting on the NFL (from a golf cart) on social media.