Before he was the world’s most infamous murder suspect, OJ Simpson did not have a reputation for killer performances. David Zucker, the director of the 1988 comedy classic The Naked Gun, only hired the Buffalo Bills great for the ironic potential. Which is to say he was a big celebrity who could be had for cheap.
Zucker’s hope was that Simpson would prove to be at least as serviceable as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been in their previous film, Airplane!, which saw the basketball legend lean even further into his acerbic streak. But Simpson proved to be so much more as Detective Nordberg, a Wile E Coyote figure in a live-action cartoon. For those of us born well after Simpson won the 1968 Heisman trophy or became the first player in NFL history to top the 2,000-yard rushing mark in 1973, the ultimate highlight is him as Nordberg creeping on to a houseboat full of heroin pushers and suffering every manner of physical harm before landing face-first into a wedding cake and falling overboard. And just like Wile E, it didn’t matter how many times Nordberg launched down a flight of stairs or folded in half, he always managed to bounce back in time for a sequel film.
Simpson’s knack for not just surviving punishment, but for dusting himself off as if nothing happened, really came through as the years ticked on from the trial of the century. But of course no one ever completely forgot the extent to which he participated in his repeated self-destruction. When his death from cancer at 76 was announced on Thursday, neither the Bills nor NBC Sports (for whom Simpson had worked as an analyst when he was accused of killing his wife and her friend) offered tributes in kind. The NFL related the news via an AP story. LeBron James and Tom Brady were among the chorus of major sports figures who stayed mum. The White House didn’t have much to say about Simpson’s death either – and after Joe Biden had nothing but warm words in the wake of Henry Kissinger’s passing.
“Today,” wrote the sports pundit Bomani Jones, “we will get an answer to the age-old question: what would twitter have looked like in 1995?” But for the most part it looked like a bunch of accounts posting old clips of the late Norm Macdonald, who lost his SNL job in part for making too much fun of Simpson, posting supercuts of the comedian eviscerating the pro football hall of famer from the Weekend Update desk.
For those who may have been put off by the length of Ezra Edelman’s epic ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America, seven-plus hours barely covers the whole story. (Also: now’s a good time to catch up.) There has never been a heel turn quite as dramatic as Simpson’s – a Bay Area projects kid who went on to become a post-racial athletic icon, then the most renowned defendant in American history, then inmate number 1027820 in the Nevada department of corrections, then the embarrassing internet grandpa with the unsolicited football takes. When rumors began floating in February that Simpson had entered a hospice, he posted a video debunking the story and further said that he was preparing to host friends for the Super Bowl.
On the YouTube series It Is What It Is, Simpson would reflect on the lengths to which the NFL still goes to pretend as if he never played a down in the league. When Christian McCaffrey broke the record for consecutive touchdowns scored last year, broadcasters were at pains not to say it was Simpson’s record the San Francisco back had smashed. A recent ad campaign for Visa opens in the 1970s with a mother plunking down a card for a replica jersey bearing the name and number of Joe DeLamielleure, Simpson’s lead blocker – as if that would have happened back then.
For those who came of age in the 90s, the polarizing trial of the century was our Kennedy assassination, our trial run for 9/11. I can remember reluctantly accompanying my father on an airport run during game five of the 1994 NBA finals and being further annoyed when the NBC broadcast was halved to make room for breaking news of the Bronco chase. My stuffy Catholic high school wheeled TVs in to watch the decision in the double murder trial of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, both white. Bill Clinton stepped out of the Oval Office to watch on his secretary’s TV.
Simpson’s acquittal tore the nation in half, with Black people on one side declaring victory against a racially biased criminal justice system and white people looking on appalled at a perceived injustice. Worse, Simpson spent the ensuing decades toying with the idea that he committed the double homicide, reigniting national outrage with the trashy tell all If I Did It. The whole production only made it that much harder to separate the not-guilty attention hound from the fumbling idiot in the Naked Gun films who’s still beloved by so many. And indeed many of Simpson’s closest friends spent years struggling to believe the same guy could also be such a prolific and horrific domestic abuser. Time and again the record made clear that Simpson was, fundamentally, not the good guy he played on screen.
And yet: Simpson didn’t just maintain a supernova level of infamous stardom. He was a solar system unto himself, and touched anyone who ventured into his precarious orbit. The US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, will always be known to a certain set of Americans as the son of the LA district attorney who blew the Simpson criminal case. Lance Ito, the judge in the case, was a nightly whipping boy for the Tonight Show’s Jay Leno – and those Dancing Ito skits no doubt played a role in pushing cameras out of the courtroom. Johnnie Cochran, who milked that spotlight like no one else, emerged as the lawyer you most wanted to have on speed dial. Robert Kardashian, the Simpson pal turned counsel on his high-profile “dream team” defense, achieved a level of dizzying fame that his wife and children have since parlayed into lasting cultural currency. “Good Riddance #OJ Simpson,” wrote Caitlyn Jenner, now far better known for marrying into that family than for past exploits as a gold-medal winning decathlete.
Jeffrey Toobin and Nancy Grace are among the raft of journalists who rose to superstardom on the OJ beat. The murder trial turned news coverage, slanted and sensational, birthed the era of notoriety by proximity (here’s looking at you, Kato Kaelin), launched scores of bestselling books, and made court TV its own small-screen genre with dedicated channels. Sarah Paulson and Sterling K Brown saw their acting careers soar after playing Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden in Ryan Murphy’s 2016 American Crime Story limited series. “Ryan would tell the jury not to be impressed with anything we said, and we would get pissed,” Brown told me in 2019, after winning an Emmy in the role. “Sarah and I were in the trenches together, and it was just a small sampling of what those two individuals went through.”
Just when it seemed as if Simpson had been shamed into oblivion – after his search for the “real killers” in Miami only turned up more problems, after he went to jail in Las Vegas for stealing back his own memorabilia – Simpson somehow managed to resurface in one way or another, not unlike Donald Trump. In the first half of his life, Simpson fashioned himself into a post-racial football idol to appeal to white Americans (“I’m not Black,” goes the unforgettable line from Edelman’s doc, “I’m OJ”). On the sports show It Is What It Is, hosted by the rappers Cam’ron and Ma$e, Simpson slyly remixed his villainy into Black street cred which seemed to be a hit with the show’s young audience on social media. The overall viewing experience was akin to watching Nordberg emerge unscathed again after he had been pushed from the upper bowl of a baseball stadium to his certain death. Only this time, there’s no coming back.
