Faye Resnick
Resnick, a heavy cocaine addict, was the center of the defense’s attempted theory that the murders were committed by drug lords, apparently brought into Nicole’s life by Faye. According to this hypothesis, Nicole was killed as a payback or message to Faye. The theory was panned then and now. O.J.’s vow to get “the real killers” has been used to mock him for years, especially by sports talk host Jim Rome.
Resnick was the first to cash in on the murder, publishing Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted in 1994 before the trial even started. It painted an unflattering portrait of Nicole. In 1996 she followed up with Shattered: In the Eye of the Storm, in which she gave her opinion of the case and the legal teams. She posed for Playboy, and settled into a rote Los Angeles lifestyle of appearances on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Once exceptionally beautiful, she apparently engaged in so much plastic surgery, botox, collagen injections, lifts, and other enhancements as to effect a somewhat grotesque physical appearance, with huge lips that look to have been stung by a hundred bees. Some photos of her reveal a woman who has spent so much time in a tanning bed or slathered in self-tanning lotion as to look half-black.
Kris Kardashian
It was revealed that Kris Kardashian had numerous affairs while still married to Robert Kardashian. One rumor circulating around the Internet is that her daughter Khloe, born in 1984 when O.J. was still single and partying constantly with the Kardashians, is actually O.J.’s daughter. Photos of her reveal that she is dark and looks significantly different, and bigger, than her sisters Kourtney, Kim, and brother Rob. Unlike her siblings, she has O.J.’s huge head, something he was made fun of by teammates.
Kris married Bruce Jenner before the murders, and had two children with him after them. Eventually, she became famous for her role in the hit TV show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but the real star is her super-hot daughter Kim, who made a sex tape and has carried on affairs with famous athletes and celebrities.
Robert Kardashian
Like Al Cowlings, Kardashian is viewed as a villain who failed to either pursue the cause of justice, or protect his friend Nicole, before or after the murders. His role in the Simpson case is, combined with the behavior of his daughters (particularly Kim) on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, a slight embarrassment to the alma mater he shares with O.J. and his son Rob: the University of Southern California.
In 1996 he granted an interview with ABC. “I have doubts,” he admitted when asked about O.J.’s guilt. “The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side; that causes me the greatest problems. So I struggle with the blood evidence.”
This was laughable. The blood evidence was, in the view of many law enforcement veterans, the most damning evidence accumulated against a murder suspect many ever saw.
When YouTube.com became all the rage, video of the “not guilty” verdict went viral, with millions focusing on the shocked look on Kardashian’s face when he apparently realized he has devoted himself to freeing a murderer. It can be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=jED_PB5YQgk.
F. Lee Bailey
Bailey was one of the most famous trial lawyers in America, but the Simpson case was his last big one. He had a heavy drinking problem that may have affected his judgment, and later was disbarred. He will be 81 in 2014.
Robert Shapiro
Shapiro is not viewed with the same disdain as Kardashian (aiding a criminal act), Bailey (screaming the N-word like Ben Chapman yelling at Jackie Robinson in 1947), or Cochran (literally stirring up hatred in the world). Already one of the most famed celebrity attorneys in America, his ceding the lead counsel role to Cochran may have won the case for O.J., and relieved the burden of history from falling squarely on Shapiro’s shoulders.
Tragedy did not evade Shapiro in his personal life; his son Brent died from an overdose of ecstasy in 2005. He continued to represent and do business, sometimes in an adverse manner, with celebrities after 1994-1995. He is best known today for starting a successful web site called LegalZoom.com, which allows non-attorneys to create documents without hiring expensive lawyers. He turns 72 in 2014.
Johnnie Cochrane
Cochran would be a low figure even if he had not been O.J.’s lead counsel. He made his career on race extortion and race-bating; lying, accusing racism at every turn, stirring turmoil among the people in the manner warned of over and over again both in the Old and New Testaments. Jesse Jackson, the master of this dark art, said a call from Cochran extorting blood money from deep pockets, made “corporations and violators shake.”
The flamboyant, extravagantly wealthy Cochran continued the same theme after the O.J. case. He represented Abner Louima, extorting almost $9 million from New York City in one of the foulest racial episodes in American annals. He also managed to free rap star Sean “P. Diddy” Combs from weapons and bribery charges. A caricatured
“Cochran figure” was a regular on the popular sit-com Seinfeld. Cochran died of a brain tumor in 2005 at age 67.
Judge Lance Ito
64 years old in 2014, Judge Ito still presides over cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court system, and teaches law. He never wrote a book or even grants interviews regarding the Simpson case because judicial ethics prohibits a jurist from doing so unless he resigns, which he said would dishonor his traditional Japanese family.
Detectives Tom Lange and Phillip Vannatter
Maligned by the media, tainted by the untrue brush of racism, both Detectives Lange and Vannatter were good cops who will forever be associated with a losing case. Mark Fuhrman and others found fault with some of their evidence-gathering and questioning of O.J. Simpson in the immediate aftermath of the murders, but they did solid police work which was overshadowed by events beyond their control. Both retired from the L.A.P.D. after the case.
They co-wrote Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson, which detailed each step of their investigation, while answering some of their critics.
Lange is working on Four on the Floor, which details another lurid L.A. murder he was involved in back in 1981, the infamous “Wonderland” killings involving adult film star John Holmes. Vannatter died at the age of 70 in 2012.
Marcia Clark
Clark felt “such guilt” over losing the case. The look on her face as the camera zoomed in on her while O.J.’s “not guilty” verdict was read was the look of shock and even more than that, pure sadness.
“I felt like I’d let everyone down,” she wrote in her memoir, Without a Doubt. “The Browns. The Goldmans. My team. The country.” The book deal was worth $4.2 and it was a big seller. She was divorced in 1995, adding to the pain of a very bad year. She hosted a TV show and was a legal affairs correspondent for Entertainment Tonight.
Clark moved to the suburbs with her kids, and has been sought out for occasional legal opinions by news outlet. She wrote two novels, Guilt by Association and Guilt by Degrees, and has also contributed to the Daily Beast. Clark will turn 62 in 2014.
Christopher Darden
Nobody – not O.J. Simpson, not Johnnie Cochran, not anybody on the defense team; all high-priced lawyers with money – ever sued anybody for slander or libel. Darden’s book, In Contempt, was filled with page after page of detailed descriptions of unethical, oft-illegal, malicious and even downright evil acts by many of them. Aside from an attorney named Shawn Holley stating in 2012 that Darden’s assertion the glove stunt was “self-serving . . . false, malicious, and slanderous . . .” and his attempt to “exculpate himself from one of the biggest blunders in the history of jurisprudence,” nobody ever went after him or the many other people saying the same things about them.
Nobody sued because in order to prevail in a civil trial, as the Goldmans did, they need to prove they are right. None of the Simpson team was right, or in the right, so none sued.
Darden is left to the judgment of history, and like all of us, God, who gave him the strength to bear this great cross o
f his life. He was not the greatest attorney of all time. Neither was Marcia Clark. The greatest attorney of all time, whoever he is, wins cases and stays on the right side of the moral equation. Cochran’s team won, but they won like a college coach who cheats at recruiting, a slugger pumped on illegal steroids. Darden wanted to do it like John Wooden. Alas, he lost. His tactics are subject to much criticism, some severe. He himself would admit as much. Nobody can accuse him of lack of commitment, of not rising before dawn, returning home at midnight, usually seven days a week, foregoing a personal life of any kind, for government pay, all under the most intense possible pressure. Who would sign on to such a thing? Anybody who truly knows what this is like would not, but Darden did and he is a hero.
After the trial, he taught at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles before entering private practice in 1999. In 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger considered him for a judicial appointment. Occasionally he did interviews, as when he told Oprah Winfrey he still believed O.J. to be guilty. He never regained respect for Cochran, accusing him in 2012 of “manipulating” the jury, the evidence . . . and the country, in particular through his use of the glove. He worked as a legal commentator for CNN, Court TV, NBC and CNBC, has frequently been on Fox News, appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and made some appearances in movies.
In Contempt was a best seller, and he wrote several other books after that. In 2013 Darden wrote in TheDailyBeast.com, “The election of Barack Obama pulled us up from the bleak hole created by the Simpson trial and unified many black and white people to believe and hope again - together.” He added he would not have brought the case accusing George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin to trial. Darden turns 59 in 2014.
Mark Fuhrman
Just as none of the defense team ever sued Darden for libel or slander, Fuhrman never did, either, even though Darden still blatantly accuses him of racism. Today, looking at the tremendous success Fuhrman has enjoyed, one really must ponder the notion of justice, whether it is a killer going free, or a racist rehabilitated in the public square. The answer, as always, lies with God, and is not revealed to Man by way of dollars and cents; fame and notoriety; or reputation. Fuhrman, like all men, must repent in his heart and ask forgiveness. He indicates he has done this. Only God knows what is in his heart today.
Even Darden cannot know this, and in truth his accusations are of actions taken in 1994-1995, not in the succeeding years. In 2006, however, Oprah Winfrey asked Darden how he felt seeing Fuhrman becoming wealthy and leading a “very successful life.”
“I think in a lot of ways Fuhrman is far more a disgusting a figure than O.J. Simpson,” he replied. “And you really can’t be a friend of mine if you’re a friend of Mark Fuhrman’s. And to see Fuhrman with his success. To see some of the relationships and friendships he’s developed with people in the media and celebrities and the like, it just makes me want to vomit.”
Darden, however, goes back to the “mistakes” he accepts the blame for in 1995, when he allowed Fuhrman on the stand, ostensibly after being set up by Cochran. Cochran told Oprah what he wrote in his book, that Fuhrman had every opportunity to come clean about his use of the N-word. If there is one single man most responsible for O.J. Simpson walking free, beyond Johnnie Cochran, it is Mark Fuhrman. Hindsight is 20/20, and at the time – for several years after the trial – only O.J. was more hated than Mark Fuhrman.
From that perspective, Fuhrman did himself no favors by lying. He may have blown Darden’s case, but he also destroyed his own life. There is no possible way for him then to see have seen a bright future in which he worked his way back. He appeared, as Hal Holbrook tells Charlie Sheen just before his arrest in Wall Street, to be the man who “looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”
If indeed Fuhrman is a racist who beat the game, then the blacks are left only to gnash and grind their teeth. If he is not the monster he was made out to be, if he changed – who is the same today as he was in the 1970s and 1980s – then good for him.
“We made some mistakes,” Darden admitted. “But the things he did, the thing he did on the witness stand was intentional. He had every opportunity to tell me, to tell Marcia Clark, to tell someone about these epithets. And about . . .”
Using the N-word. Darden could never get himself to say it himself.
Fuhrman’s most toxic statements, made to Kathleen Bell, remain the most disturbing to this day. What, exactly, was his intent, his meaning, when he indicated that “all” the blacks – not black criminals, not just blacks in L.A., but by all presumably every black man, woman and child in America, in Africa, or wherever blacks were sold – should be gathered together and actually burned . . . alive?
It is as horrible a thought, an image, as a human being can have. It is Satanic, in fact an image of hell. It makes Adolf Hitler’s methods – gassing Jews, then burning them only after they were dead – look halfway humane in comparison. But these racist sentiments were never backed up by action. They remained a fantasy. There are no real-life examples of Mark Fuhrman murdering blacks, using the color of authority.
Then there were his comments to the North Carolina screenwriter, Laura Hart McKinney. The prosecution was playing a dangerous game, because they needed Fuhrman’s expert testimony from the crime scene. They thought they had a decade-long window to play with, which excluded the genocidal fantasies expressed to Kathleen Bell. Fuhrman had used the N-word, but insisted not within the last 10 years.
Then the tapes and McKinney’s testimony revealed he had. Except, had he? Vincent Bugliosi, a fair man and no racist, backed Fuhrman on the assertion that he had not, using the theory that his use of the word had been in channeling a character for the McKinney screenplay, which might be based on him, but was not him. McKinney and her husband let the cat out of the bag, trying to shop the script around while Fuhrman was still in the news, the trial still going on. McKinney played the shocked liberal, telling the court Fuhrman was a verbatim racist, even though the tapes show her laughing and giggling at the diatribe, apparently thinking it would play well when Bob DeNiro or Marty Scorsese put it on the screen.
Where the prosecution blew it was in not realizing that the “channeling a character” excuse was a flimsy veneer, especially in the eyes of the mostly-black jury. Once McKinney revealed use of the word, then the Bell evidence was allowed. O.J. Simpson effectively won after that.
Fuhrman was then and remains today an enigma. His own intelligence has always been discomfiting to his detractors. Darden himself was taken aback by the notion that he was dealing with a “smart racist,” which changes the whole dynamic of racism in the first place. The general assumption about racism and bigotry of course is based on ignorance; the ignorant man “pre-judges” that with which he does not yet know about. The white man who does not know much about blacks hates them.
But what about the man who does know about blacks. Did Fuhrman “know” blacks? He grew up in rural Washington state, likely with few black acquaintances or neighbors. He unquestionably knew many in the Marine Corps. Regardless of how low the standards might have been after the Vietnam War, blacks in the corps are among the most impressive among them. They are not “ghetto Negroes.” They are patriots and comrades-in-arms. Marines like to say that there is no black-and-white, just green.
By the time of the Simpson trial, Fuhrman seemed to get along with black colleagues. There were fellow cops, some of whom he played basketball with, and a female associate he regularly lunched with, even babysitting her children. Fuhrman did not like black gangbangers, drug dealers, pimps, hos, and street perps. Did he separate them from “normal blacks?” It appears he did. The accusations of racism in modern society are far more complicated than the blanket image of a KKK rally and the lynching of innocent Negroes. Again, his intelligence is a discomfiting inconvenience. A man who sees things, forms opinions, based on experience
, events, anecdotes; using his brains to analyze and arrive at a conclusion, much like he approaches a case; such a thinking man, if he harbors negative thoughts about blacks, cannot so easily be dismissed.
But racial rules are different. Political correctness trumps all, and in this world the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Johnnie Cochrans are given free reign to run roughshod over common sense, while Fuhrman, practically by virtue of being white, a Nordic, a cop, a Republicans; is guilty and never really allowed to be proven innocent.
But the sharp, media-savvy Fuhrman knew that if he were to rehabilitate himself, it would have to be by returning to the spotlight. He did so using the skills he attained as a cop; his intelligence (in the form of a natural gift for writing), and dogged persistence, hard work.
He started by writing a book called Murder In Brentwood (1997). It was published by Regnery, one of the most conservative publishers of books and magazines in the United States. The conservative base, led by Rush Limbaugh, had been the most outraged over the racial politics that allowed a murderer to walk free, ostensibly because of the color of his skin. White liberals were far more willing to buy into the theory that, while O.J. surely did it, it was somehow symbolic that a “revolutionary” jury overturn centuries of oppression, just as V.I. Lenin once said of reports of a million-plus casualties of Communism, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
It was the age of the Clintons, their messy second term when Bill faced allegations of oral sex in the Oval Office, sexual assault, rape, and corruption on a massive scale. The Right was inflamed and informed, by a new network, Fox News; by conservative talk radio built in large measure on the strength of the Simpson case; a plethora of conservative magazines (Human Events, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, Newsmax); and a new medium called the Internet, particularly an underground muckraker named Matt Drudge. It was a ready-made forum for Fuhrman, far easier for him to navigate than the old phalanx of network Lefties Richard Nixon had to wade through in making his comeback of the 1980s.
He got Bugliosi to write an effusive foreword to his book. Bugliosi (the man who convicted the Manson family), is as dogged an investigator as ever graced the American justice scene. His later book dissecting how John Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, rejected conspiracy theories and their related cottage industry, by using cold, hard facts and analysis. He used the same skills in breaking down Fuhrman’s role. First, he established to his own satisfaction that while Fuhrman was not without racial fault, the portrait painted of him by Cochran and the media was false and unfair. Then he analyzed the case, arriving at O.J.’s guilt – and Fuhrman’s theory of it – using the same dogged police work.
Then Fuhrman apologized. Whether it was a PR stunt or not, the words he used were the best he could use. “The world does not know me; it knows of me,” he starts out. Then he admitted inflicting pain on himself, the citizens of the United States, and those he loved. That pain would “forever haunt me. This is not a book of justification or excuse, but one of truth,” adding that he faced judgment by his neighbors for his private thoughts, which in his case were exposed like an open sore to the world.
“My immature, irresponsible ramblings with a screenwriter were never intended to be heard by anyone but the two of us,” he wrote, but his vaunted intelligence seems to have been drowned out by ego or something, because a police officer saying what he said to McKinney, and then expecting it to never come back to bite him; that was the height of stupidity, even if it was only an internal affairs investigation, not the “trial of the century.” Besides, the words were by their very nature meant to be heard by someone other than the two them; that was the purpose of any screenplay!
Fuhrman admitted showing “disrespect” to “millions of people” through the use of “cruel words. These words echo in my mind daily, and I am ashamed.”
Fuhrman addressed the fact that he was caught; only then did he admit he was wrong. To that he responded, “In my heart, I always knew it was wrong, even if I said them only to create a fictional story.” He was lured by “greed,” hoping to make a million bucks in the movie business, and on top of that was a “lack of compassion.” He failed himself and all around him “when I grabbed the chance to make money.”
Fuhrman did not use his career as an excuse, even though it did expose him to the “dark side of humanity.” He made bad choices. “I take full responsibility for my life and career.” In the end he said simply, “I am sorry.”
Then he wrote two of the best true crime books ever written. There were many books written about the Simpson case, his relationship with Nicole, and its aftermath, but the best was Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood. Whereby detectives Vannatter and Lange wrote a dry re-telling of the case - a 305-page police report – Fuhrman’s read like a Joseph Wambaugh novel. His own personal idiosyncrasies and failures were fleshed out, and his minute-by-minute theory on what exactly happened that evening remains the best yet expressed. He was originally assigned a ghostwriter, but it was quickly discovered he did not need one. He wrote fluidly and intelligently, and on deadline apparently without writer’s block. In fact, writing was a balm, therapy for him as he dealt with his sordid past.
Then he re-entered the public arena, promoting the book and appearing as a guest talking about other cases that came along. He was oft paired with adversaries, as when one of O.J.’s legal advisors, Alan Dershowtitz tried to rattle him on the radio, calling him a “racist cop.” Fuhrman remained calm and steadfast while others sometimes were emotional, even hateful. Act or not, truly sorry or not, his demeanor was his best ally. The book was a hit. Many wanted inside Fuhrman’s head. The books written about the Simpson case helped dispel the myth, even held by many who were “quite sure” he did it, but could not be convinced he was guilty “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Nobody made the case better, on paper and in the electronic media, than Fuhrman. As O.J.’s guilt solidified in the public’s mind, the dastardly deeds of Johnnie Cochrane, F. Lee Bailey, and their minions, became more obvious. As their reputations got worse and worse over time, Fuhrman’s rehabilitation continued, step by calculated step.
Then came Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley? (1998). This time, Fuhrman was given a big contract with an advance by HarperCollins. The respected Dominic Dunne wrote the foreword. But it was the subject of the book that cemented Fuhrman as a legitimate criminal scientist and true crime author: the Kennedys.
As a Republican, it was a prime target for Fuhrman, and delighted conservatives convinced that Joseph P. Kennedy was the most evil “legitimate” citizen of the 20th century; the Kennedy family stole the 1960 Presidential election from Richard Nixon; that JFK was a womanizer whose reckless behavior could have led us to disaster; that Teddy Kennedy was a coward who let a girl drown to save his fat skin; that the family is immoral and criminal, but get away with everything using money, a compliant media, and the Democratic Party.
Fuhrman went back to Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the most moneyed, elite, cloistered communities in the world, to investigate the long-unsolved killing of a girl named Martha Moxley. She lived next to the Skakel family, related to the Kennedys by the marriage of Ethel Skakel to slain 1968 Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.
One of the Skakel sons was long suspected of the killing. He was known to be violent and erratic, but the family used their money, connections and prominence to shut down the investigation. The case never went to trial.
Fuhrman showed up in Greenwich, where he was treated like a skunk at a lawn party. Here was this racist, rogue cowboy from California, trying to tear down one of the most prominent families in Greenwich. All doors were shut, and Fuhrman was excoriated as “that racist cop.” When hateful faces shouted, “You’re him, aren’t you?” he would just give a half-smile and reply, “I just look like him.” His self-deprecating, even humorous way of handling the situation, first on the scene in Greenwich, then as described in the book, humanized him.
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bsp; Then he solved the case. Using dogged police work, with the help of one of the police officers on the original case (who like Fuhrman wanted to right a past wrong), Fuhrman was able to prove that Michael Skakel had murdered Martha. The case went to trial, Skakel was convicted, and he sits in prison to this day.
In 2002, the book was produced as a movie, starring Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman. Meloni’s performance was understated and captured Fuhrman’s personality to perfection. He was not particularly likable; in fact he was rude and irritating, but he was a good police officer and valued the truth. The way he handled accusations of racism were fleshed out nicely. In one scene, he told his colleague he did not blame people for hating him. He was considered not just a racist, but a “genocidal racist.” He took on the worst things he had said, and the worst things people thought about him, head on. It worked and the film was a hit.
From there, Fuhrman has been a regular contributor to Fox News as well as other media outlets, opining as an expert who knows the legal system from soup to nuts on all the big cases that have come across the scene over the years. He turns 62 in 2014.
Orenthal James Simpson
What is there to say about Orenthal James "O.J." Simpson: Trojan legend, NFL record-breaker, Hollywood celebrity, infamous "criminal"; that has not already been said!?
O.J. is one of those people in American society who is instantly recognizable by his first name - as in Michael Jordan - or by his initials, as in his case. That is the way it was when he was a mere college junior. The familiarity reflected nothing but a positive glow on this American icon for decades; until June 12-13, 1994.
Outside of wars, the Great Society, and other terrible acts of massive upheaval, the Simpson murder case did as much damage to America as any event. It can certainly be compared to McCarthyism and Watergate in its affect. It divided a nation that, more than 100 year after the Civil War, felt they had finally healed old wounds. O.J. Simpson, Johnnie Cochran and the players who make up this awful Shakespearean tragedy, ripped those wounds open. We are left with gaping, bloody gashes, never healed in the years since. These wounds metastasized and are now a cancer on society.
There are many casualties beyond the obvious: Nicole and Ron; the Goldmans and Browns; the Simpson family; American jurisprudence. One of the biggest was the University of Southern California.
O.J. is at once a source of some, if not the greatest, pride in the history of USC sports. For that very reason, his fall from grace caused great anguish, embarrassment and public humiliation for the school that made him and then suffered because of him. O.J.'s murder accusation and subsequent trial came on the heels of the L.A. riots (1992) and a major earthquake in Northridge (1994). USC's football team had fallen into mediocrity. A stray bullet from a drive-by shooting that struck a player (injuring him but not seriously) in practice just added to the feeling that the paint was peeling on the school and the city.
Opposing schools taunted USC with card tricks, chants, slogans, "mug shot" posters and marching band routines all spun around the theme of Troy's greatest hero being a man capable of double homicide. His tragedy is an American Shakespeare tale, that of a poor black kid who gets everything, then has to settle into a long twi-light zone of public humiliation and hatred.
Simpson is, outside of John Wayne, probably USC's most famous athlete. He held that "title" before and after his wife's murder. One can argue who is most famous among USC alumni: filmmaker George Lucas, astronaut Neil Armstrong, General Norman Schwarzkopf, director Ron Howard, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, newsman Sam Donaldson, or athletes of great fame like Simpson, Frank Gifford, Tom Seaver, and Marcus Allen. For USC, O.J. Simpson represents, to quote Charles Dickens, "the best of times and the worst of times." He was a marvel to brag about. On the field, O.J. was unparalleled. Off the field, here was the greatest living public relations symbol they could hope for. He symbolized what being a Trojan was all about.
Many claimed O.J. The city of San Francisco, Galileo High School, City College of San Francisco, the Buffalo Bills, the 49ers; but none had so jealous and loyal a claim as USC.
After the murder, the school found itself in a sticky thicket. What to do with all that memorabilia? The photos, the Heismans, the plaques that adorned Heritage Hall? The late 1990s were not kind to L.A. or USC football. The memory of O.J.'s heroics could have come in handy. Now detractors just pointed to their "ancient history" and their problem children: Todd Marinovich (derided as "Marijuanavich") and O.J. Simpson. O.J.'s mug shot, which had made the cover of Newsweek, became a popular poster in the rooting sections of Notre Dame, UCLA, Cal, Stanford and all other points.
Trojan players walking the gauntlet of fans from buses, dressing rooms and other public locations in "enemy" territory were taunted by the posters and the shouts. Rumors of an affair between Nicole and another Trojan legend, Marcus Allen, were circulated. Who knows?
“It broke my heart when the O.J. Simpson case hit the news,” his old coach, John McKay said in one of the last interviews he granted, to StreetZebra.com in 2000. “I still don’t know what happened with O.J. I do know this, the guy I knew and the other players knew, never would have done anything like that. It was just terrible; he was one of the most admired guys in America.”
“Regarding this whole Shakespearean tragedy that O.J.'s life became, I always thought that as he got really big time, in the NFL but more so as a Hollywood celebrity because that world is not real, that he had no real friend to tell him what was up,” his old teammate, USC All-American linebacker Adrian Young, said in What It Means to Be a Trojan: Southern Cal’s Greatest Players Talk About Trojans Football (2009). “On a sports team there's usually somebody to keep you in line, but not in that show biz world. I was not really sociable with O.J., and it's hard to make comments about what happened much beyond what I've said.”
The Simpson murder case occurred at a particularly vulnerable time for the university. Dr. Steven Sample took over as the school's president in 1994. His goal was to turn USC into one of the great academic institutions in the world. USC had always been a fine school. Its film, dental, medical, law, MBA and business schools were world class. It produced the elite of Southern California society: judges, politicians, business leaders. It was the preferred school for the high society children of Beverly Hills, San Marino and Newport Beach. However, it did not compare academically to Stanford or the Ivy League. Rivals Notre Dame, California and UCLA were superior.
Dr. Sample set out to change all that. The Simpson scandal was a huge obstacle to overcome in terms of publicity and fundraising. Football success always correlated with alumni donations. The years after the murders, USC floundered on the field. It got so bad that by 2000, the school's alumni base had in large measure accepted a new reality: a trade-off had been made. A university could either be a great academic institution, or a great football school. It could not be both. College football powers like Miami seemed indicative of this. Football stars were semi-thugs, mostly black, and the price of victory was a criminal element. USC had always had a double standard. Athletes were brought in and coddled through school, often leaving for professional careers without a degree or much education. Now, USC turned from that in favor of academic excellence.
Of all coach Pete Carroll’s accomplishments in the 2000s – two national championships, four Rose Bowl wins, 5-1 in BCS bowls, three Heismans – perhaps his best was creating one of the great dynasties in history while the school’s academic standing went up and up and up! With this success, eventually the shadow of O.J. Simpson lifted. Like a political leader whose accomplishments just drown out his critics, USC was able to replace the taunts with, as Jim Rome calls it, "scoreboard." There is no substitute for it.
USC has recovered from O.J. Too many great memories and gigantic accomplishments have since been performed on the fields of strife in front of too many people for the Stanford's, the Cal's or any other comparable unimpressives to bring up O.J. in the halftime P.R. wars.
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But the racial climate, one that O.J. was so much a part of - the smiling kid from San Francisco's Potrero Hill, arm in arm with black and white teammates at USC and in Buffalo - which forged the path towards the 1970 USC-Alabama game that changed a nation; that climate was found to be a façade of sorts. Just as the 1970 USC Trojans who went in to Birmingham to foil the segregated Tide was not racially harmonious after all, neither was Los Angeles, California and points east.
The school, however, cannot honor him. He cannot come around for banquets, awards ceremonies, halftime presentations. He would be booed unmercifully at his beloved Coliseum. In late December of 2002, Pete Carroll and Carson Palmer led USC into Miami for the 2003 Orange Bowl game against Iowa. While the team was practicing a few days before the game, an unannounced O.J., now living in semi-seclusion in south Florida, emerged and sauntered onto the field. It was an awkward moment, but the Trojan connection, especially (but not only) with the black players was made. For a few brief minutes, O.J. enjoyed some camaraderie. Carroll just let it happen, preferring not to make more of it than it needed to be. Then O.J. left.
When USC returned to the 2005 Orange Bowl, rumors were rampant that O.J. was there and would make a splash. It never happened. Buffalo Bills games? College end Pro Football Hall of Fame inductions? He is persona non grata.