O.J. SIMPSON
(9 July 1947 – 10 April 2024)
An American football player, Orenthal James Simpson was considered one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. His life and career were not without controversy, starting in 1969 with his demand for $650,000 over five years to join the AFL’s Buffalo Bills, the largest contract in professional sports history. After an impasse with the team’s owner Ralph Wilson, Simpson finally got his way – but initially proved a disappointment on the field. All that changed in 1972 when, under the tutelage of head coach Lou Saban, he started breaking records and won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player Award of 1973.
While he negotiated his asking price with Ralph Wilson, Simpson took time off to dip his toes in the acting profession, a medium he took to while at USC. In 1969, he appeared in the TV series Medical Center as Cicely Tyson's husband, even though she was 23 years his senior. While still playing in the NFL, he took supporting turns in The Klansman (1974), The Towering Inferno, The Cassandra Crossing, Capricorn One and Michael Winner’s Firepower (1979), all-star productions with actors he could learn from. He had a plan. He also played Kadi Touray in Roots (1977) and started up his own production company, Orenthal Productions, which focused on TV movies. He confessed that he would love to win an Oscar, although his success in The Naked Gun trilogy was perhaps a step in the wrong direction. In fact, he never really cut it as a serious actor, except perhaps in the courtroom.
A national hero by any measure and a positive role model for African-Americans, his lustre was blemished when he was tried for stabbing to death his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman outside his Brentwood condominium in Los Angeles. When he failed to turn himself in, a low-speed police chase ensured in which his getaway vehicle, a white Ford Bronco SUV (driven and owned by his friend Al Cowlings), was watched on live TV by 95 million incredulous viewers.
The subsequent trial proceeded for eleven months in 1995 and trapped the attention of America in an unprecedented media blitzkrieg. The figures involved, from the publicity-seeking judge Lance Ito to Simpson’s friend and defence attorney Robert Kardashian, became household names overnight. Everybody had their own interpretation of Simpson’s innocence or guilt and it was an ongoing TV event for 134 days. A slew of documentaries and dramas later covered the excitement, with a new film (The Juice) expected next year. On 3 October 1995, he was acquitted of all charges, but three years later was found liable in a civil suit and ordered to pay $33.5m to the victims’ families.
It was quite the circus.
But it didn’t end there. In 2007, he was charged with armed robbery and kidnapping when he broke into a hotel room in Las Vegas and, at gunpoint, stole sports memorabilia which he claimed was rightfully his. He was convicted and sentenced to 33 years' imprisonment and served nine years without parole.
O.J. died of cancer at the age of 76, leaving behind four children. His daughter Aaren, from his first marriage to Marguerite Whitley, drowned in his swimming pool not long before her second birthday.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
