The Juice is Dead
OJ Simpson's death brings to an end a great American tragedy that's impact is still felt to this day, nearly thirty years later
I was sitting on the toilet, which may have been the most appropriate place to be, when I saw the headline on my phone, “OJ Simpson is dead.”
Simpson was the Hall of Fame football player, corporate spokesman and media personality, who eventually was charged and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman.1
As I washed my hands and gazed into the bathroom mirror, staring at my reflection, I wondered what OJ Simpson saw in his own reflection?
I’ve thought many times over the last 30 years about the OJ Simpson murder charges, and the court case that followed, and how it can also be considered a reflection of American society not only then, back in 1994, but for the subsequent 30 years.
In those 30 years, we have witnessed and experienced the downfall of journalism. Newspapers have died. The standards and practices of many journalists no longer exist like they once did. Opinion rules the day. All news is fake news, to a seemingly large majority.
Celebrity, or infamy, rules the day. The proof of this culminating with the election of Celebrity Apprentice television star Donald Trump, who won the 2016 presidential election against a field of seasoned politicians.
It’s been nearly 30 years since that fateful June night in 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside her Brentwood condominium.
What resulted from that event has truly shaped and created the world we know today. In my humble opinion, that event marks the advent of what we may call the “modern” society we live in today.
On that day, I was an 18-year-old who had just graduated high school two days prior. In a few weeks I would be off to college to study journalism, not knowing exactly how the field would morph and dissolve over the next three decades.
The 24-hour news cycle began in earnest that week. Maybe not on the morning of the 13th, the day following the murders, but definitely by that Friday, when the entire country, 95 million viewers strong2, would be glued to their television sets watching a white Ford Bronco slowly roll along a southern California highway.
The lead float in a parade of madness. We never realized or imagined what would follow.
Cars parked along the side of the highway, overpasses became crowded public squares as Californians gathered, some holding signs of encouragement for “The Juice”.
The 1994 NBA Finals, between the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets, was interrupted, as studio host Bob Costas, Simpson’s one-time colleague on NBC Sports’ NFL coverage, gave us details about what was transpiring.
The nation went into a collective trance, a foreshadowing of our current trance with our cellphones. The pizza delivery chain Dominos reported record sales that evening.
The OJ Simpson chase lives on in America’s collective history along with the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo Moon landing, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and 9/11.
If you were alive, you remember exactly where you were and started watching. One of 95 million!
The heinous crime seemed impossible for an affable star like Simpson, who had parlayed his excellence on the football field to being a corporate spokesman for Hertz, and a football announcer and analyst for ABC’s Monday Night Football and NBC.
His trial would become the latest “Trial of the Century,” but this one truly lived up to the billing. A sensational, nearly year-long court drama played out live on CNN, Court TV, and the evening news.
Colleges were just introducing the Internet to students at this time. Web pages still took minutes to load. But the demand for news involving the Simpson case, and the many peripheral personalities (Simpson’s “Dream Team” of Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Kardashian and Deputy district attorneys Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, Detective Mark Fuhrman, Judge Lance Ito, and house guest Kato Kaelin) quickly led to what we understand now as modern media: click bait, sensationalism of the mundane, and a glaring and growing lack of ethical reporting.
Most people also probably remember when they watched the jury deliver its “not guilty” verdict. Many future lawyers were likely born that day.
Many people in the African American communities around the country celebrated. Simpson had become a cause-celeb, especially in Los Angeles, where riots had brought the community to its knees in 1992 following the acquittal of the four police officers, three of them white, who had viciously beaten Rodney King on a California highway.
Regardless of the court’s decision, Simpson had become persona-non-grata to the broader public and other celebrities. He effectively went into hiding. He moved to Florida and kept to himself, playing golf, while always promising to find Nicole’s killer.
I wonder who Simpson saw in the reflection of a mirror?
Simpson never found Nicole or Mr. Goldman’s killer. The killer, for all we know, is still at large.
The truth, however, is that most of us have an idea who did it.
While DNA was a brand new science to many in 1995, including to the jury of Simpson’s peers, we know now how reliable DNA evidence really is.
It seems every week I read a story about a decades-old murder being solved thanks to DNA evidence. Long lost mountain hikers are identified. Suspected murderers are apprehended thanks to DNA evidence left behind on discarded coffee cups or cigarette butts.
OJ would eventually go to jail in 2007 following an incident inside a Las Vegas hotel, where he and a business partner held memorabilia dealers at gun point. Simpson had broken into the room to take back what he claimed had been stolen from him.
He would serve almost ten years of a 33-year sentence.
There’s never been true justice for Nicole and Ronald. There may never truly be justice for what happened that June night in 1994. Now with Simpson’s passing, we lose an important part of that night, and an important part of our own American history.
Simpson died on April 10th due to cancer, according to his family, which was by his side at his deathbed.
A man who gained fame running — on college and professional football fields, through airports in television commercials, from the police in a Ford Bronco on a California highway — and from who knows what else?
A man always on the run, has now seen his life run out.
Rest in peace, OJ. And Ronald. And Nicole.
Simpson would later be found responsible by a preponderance of evidence for both deaths in a 1997 civil trial.
This year’s Super Bowl LVIII, for a point of reference, had 123.7 million viewers, and is the second highest viewed program in television history, behind the Apollo Moon landing.