The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (9 page)

As a senior, Simpson picked up where he had left off. He gained 236 yards in the season opener against Minnesota, 220 against Stanford, and a career high of 238 yards against Oregon State. Southern Cal was tied by Notre Dame in its last regular season game and lost the Rose Bowl to Ohio State, but as a senior Simpson won the Heisman in a landslide. The number of O.J.’s jersey—32—was retired at the end of his career. To be sure, his success at USC was limited to the athletic arena. In those days, before the NCAA began to regulate seriously the recruiting and schooling of college athletes, Simpson received virtually no education at USC. Even today, he can barely write a grammatical sentence. As he confided to
Playboy
, “My only interest in school was in gettin’ out, so I took courses like home economics, and didn’t exactly kill myself.”

Simpson was the first player selected in the 1969 professional draft and, in a characteristic gesture, parlayed that first year into a book deal as well as a lucrative contract with the Buffalo Bills.
OJ: The Education of a Rich Rookie
, which was cowritten by Pete Axthelm, is for the most part a stupefyingly dull game-by-game account of the season (“We spent the week working on the I-formation …”), but there are casually revealing moments as well. On the very first page, Simpson wrote, “I have been praised,
kidded, and criticized about being image-conscious. And I plead guilty to the charge. I have always wanted to be liked and respected.” In fact, his good looks and cheerful demeanor with reporters and fans paid dividends as soon as he left college.

Before he had played a single professional game, Simpson won endorsement contracts with Chevrolet and Royal Crown Cola, and a broadcasting deal with ABC. “I’m enjoying the money, the big house, the cars; what ghetto kid wouldn’t?” Simpson went on in that first book. “But I don’t feel that I’m being selfish about it. In the long run, I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of white myths about black athletes—and give some pride and hope to a lot of young blacks. And when I’m finished with the challenges of football, I’m going to take on the challenge of helping black kids in every way I can. I believe I can do as much for my people in my own way as a Tommie Smith, a Jim Brown, or a Jackie Robinson may choose to do in another way. That’s part of the image I want, too.” Simpson had put his views on race more starkly in a 1968 interview with Robert Lipsyte of
The New York Times
. As the country smoldered with racial tensions—and some black athletes, like Robinson and Muhammad Ali, jeopardized their careers to participate in the civil rights movement—Simpson told Lipsyte, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.”

Simpson’s professional football career started slowly. His first Bills coach, John Rauch, favored a pass-oriented attack, and O.J. did not come close to winning the Rookie of the Year award. He missed most of his second year with an injury. In his third year, the Bills won only one game. But after that season, the owner of the team, Ralph Wilson, made a decision to reorient the entire Bills operation around O.J. Simpson. He fired Rauch and brought in Lou Saban, who favored a running attack. The team began using its draft choices on blockers, building the group that would become famous as the Electric Company—because they “turn on the Juice.” In 1972, the first season under Saban, Simpson ran for 1,251 yards, the best in the league, and his professional career was launched.

Shortly before the next season, Simpson spoke on the phone with Reggie McKenzie, his lead blocker on the Bills. As O.J. recalled it for Larry Fox, he said, “You know, with the guys we’ve got
to block, I think I should gain 1,700 yards this year. Maybe I’ll even have a shot at Jim Brown’s [single-season] record.”

McKenzie disagreed. “Why don’t we go for the two grand?”

A 2,000-yard season—something never before done in professional football—became Simpson’s obsession. O.J. gained 250 yards in the Bills’ season opener against the New England Patriots, a new single-game record for the league. As he built his totals with similar performances throughout the 1973 season, football fans followed his race against Brown’s record 1,863 yards and beyond. The hoped-for number had a magical quality. It was one of those round figures that have defined many of sports history’s greatest dramas: the 4-minute mile; the .400 batting average; the 2,000-yard season.

As the year wore on, nearly every story about Simpson noted the contrast between him and Jim Brown. The great Cleveland player, who had been a dour, brooding presence in the game, had churned out his record by crushing everyone in his way, and he was something of a black activist to boot. Simpson relied on speed and agility more than on brute strength. These differences in style, it was said, were reflected in the two men’s temperaments—the militant Brown versus the cheerful Simpson. To the public, Simpson was the anti-Brown, the smiling celebrity, the chipper pitchman, the one who ran around, rather than over, defenders and who never said a discouraging word before the cameras. In fact, these portraits amounted to little more than sportswriters’ tinny conceits, but they affixed Simpson with a glowing image that would last through his arrest for murder in 1994. Simpson did, of course, break the magical barrier in 1973, finishing with 2,003 yards as the nation’s sports fans cheered.

In Simpson’s years as a professional athlete and then afterward, his life amounted to a lesson on the manufacture and maintenance of an image—albeit one that bore little resemblance to the realities of his life. He gave the black community little more than his own example; his charitable activities were minimal. In the seventies, he did a memorable television commercial for sunglasses that ended in a cuddly embrace among Simpson, his wife, Marguerite, and their two little children, Arnelle and Jason. But the marriage—which took place shortly before Arnelle’s birth, in 1968—was a sham. Simpson philandered compulsively, both before and after he
met Nicole Brown in 1977, when she was eighteen years old. Nicole had already moved into the Rockingham house when the divorce from Marguerite became final two years later, the year that also marked the end of his football career. O.J. didn’t marry Nicole until she was pregnant with Sydney, in 1985. When he was inducted into the football Hall of Fame that same year, he said Nicole “came into my life at what is probably the most difficult time for an athlete, at the end of my career, and she turned those years into some of the best years of my life.”

After his football career, Simpson enjoyed a perpetual boyhood, and he drifted between golf games and long lunches, always surrounded by the sycophants who cluster around star athletes. From broadcasting, acting roles, and business investments, he could count on about a million dollars a year in income in the late 1980s. He was charming and courteous to strangers, and would sign autographs interminably without complaint. He was no prima donna. Several production workers at NBC Sports, which he joined in 1989 after several unsuccessful years at ABC, recalled that Simpson was the only on-air talent who gave them Christmas presents. Ironically, in light of how his trial would unfold, Simpson always had a special fondness for police officers, and over the years many of them came by the house on Rockingham to use the pool or shoot the breeze. The cops turned out to be valuable friends, especially when it came to the events of January 1, 1989.

At 3:58
A.M.
on that New Year’s Day in Los Angeles, the phone rang in front of 911 operator Sharyn Gilbert. At first she heard no one at the other end, but her console indicated that the call was coming from 360 North Rockingham, in Brentwood. Then there were sounds—a woman screaming, then slaps. “I heard someone being hit,” Gilbert later recalled. There was more screaming, and then the call was cut off. Though no one ever said any words to her, Gilbert rated the call a “code-two high,” which meant that it required immediate police response.

Officer John Edwards and his partner, a trainee named Patricia Milewski, went to the scene. Edwards pressed the buzzer at the Ashford gate to the property, and a woman who identified herself as the housekeeper came out. She said, “There’s no problem here,” and told the officers to leave. Edwards said they couldn’t go anywhere until they spoke with the woman who had called
911. After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, a blond woman—Nicole Brown Simpson—staggered out from the heavy bushes behind the gate. She was wearing just a bra and a pair of dirty sweatpants.

Nicole collapsed against the inside of the gate and started yelling to the officers, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” She pounded on the button that opened the gate and then flung herself into Edwards’s arms.

“Who’s going to kill you?” Edwards asked.

“O.J.”

“O.J. who?” Edwards asked. “Do you mean O.J. the football player?”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “O.J. Simpson the football player.”

“Does he have any weapons?”

“Yeah,” she replied, still breathless. “Lots of guns. He has lots of guns.”

Edwards shined his flashlight on Nicole’s face. Her lip was cut and bleeding. Her left eye was black-and-blue. Her forehead was bruised, and on her neck—unmistakably—was the imprint of a human hand. As Nicole calmed down, Edwards learned that O.J. Simpson had slapped her, hit her with his fist, and pulled her by the hair. Just before Edwards placed her in the squad car to warm up, Nicole turned to him and said with disgust, “You guys never do anything. You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything about him.” She then agreed to sign a crime report against her husband.

As Edwards turned to the house, he noticed O.J. Simpson, wearing a bathrobe, walking toward him. Simpson was screaming, “I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore! I got two other women. I don’t want that woman in my bed!”

Edwards explained that he was going to place Simpson under arrest for beating his wife.

“I didn’t beat her,” Simpson said, still furious. “I just pushed her out of bed.” Edwards repeated that he was going to have to take him in.

Simpson was incredulous. “You’ve been out here eight times before and now you’re going to arrest me for this? This is a family matter. This is a family matter.”

Edwards requested that Simpson go back into to his house, get dressed, and return to be taken in to the station. As Simpson walked off, the housekeeper, Michelle Abudrahm, went over to Nicole, who was in the squad car, and implored, “Don’t do this, Nicole. Come inside.” The housekeeper was actually tugging on Nicole from outside the car, and Edwards came over and shooed her away. Moments later Simpson, now dressed, returned to the gate and began lecturing Edwards. “What makes you so special? Why are you doing this? You guys have been out here eight times before, and no one has ever done anything like this before.”

Edwards explained that the law required him to take Simpson in to the station. When Edwards turned to brief a second set of officers who had arrived on the scene, the officers saw a blue Bentley roar out of another gate at the property, this one on Rockingham.

Edwards got into his car and took off after Simpson—and four other police cars soon joined in the chase—but they couldn’t catch up with him. Returning to Nicole, Edwards asked what had prompted her husband’s attack. She said she had complained because there were two other women staying in their home, and O.J. had had sex with one of them earlier in the day. Edwards never saw Simpson again.

With Nicole having signed a police report, the police were obliged to bring the case against O.J. at least to the next step. The case was assigned to Officer Mike Farrell, who reached O.J. by telephone on January 3. Simpson explained that after he and Nicole had returned home from a New Year’s Eve party, where they had been drinking, they had had a verbal dispute “that got out of hand.” O.J. said it then turned into “a mutual-type wrestling match. That was basically it. Nothing more than that.” Accompanied by her two children, Nicole came into the West Los Angeles police station the next day, and she, too, minimized the dispute. She said she didn’t really want to go through with a full-fledged prosecution. Farrell mentioned the possibility of resolving the case through an informal mediation with the city attorney’s office. “I would like to have that,” the twenty-nine-year-old Nicole said. “I think that would be neat.”

Still, under the law, Farrell had to present the case to the city attorney’s office, which would have the final say over whether Simpson
would be prosecuted for misdemeanor spousal abuse. The prosecutors were torn, as they so often are in domestic-violence cases. If this really was just a single drunken brawl after a New Year’s Eve party, a prosecutor told Farrell, then maybe they should just let it drop. After all, they had a reluctant victim as their only witness. Farrell was told to ask around the West L.A. station and determine whether there had been other incidents at the Simpson home. If there was a pattern, they would prosecute.

So Farrell asked around—and heard nothing. Both O.J. and Nicole had acknowledged that the police had come to the house eight times to stop O.J. from hurting Nicole, but at first Farrell couldn’t find a single cop who admitted to going to Rockingham. (O.J. had entertained about forty officers at his home at various times, and with their silence, the officers may have been repaying his hospitality.) Eventually, out of all the cops who had handled calls at the Simpson home, one spoke up. Yes, this officer said, he had been out to the house on a domestic-violence incident. Farrell asked him to write up the incident in a memo, and the officer wrote on January 18, 1989, “To whom it may concern”: