USC REMAINS SILENT ON O.J. SIMPSON'S DEATH, UNDERSCORING COMPLICATED CONNECTION TO FOOTBALL STAR

AP Photo 

 LOS ANGELES (AP) — A copy of O.J. Simpson's Heisman Trophy still sits in Heritage Hall on the campus of the University of Southern California, at least when it isn't being displayed elsewhere along with the rest of the school's large collection.

Simpson's jersey is still retired by USC in recognition of his two remarkable seasons as the Trojans' tailback, and his No. 32 is prominently displayed at every home football game on the banners that drape the peristyle steps of the venerable Coliseum.

But when Simpson's death from prostate cancer at 76 in Las Vegas was announced Thursday, his school made no public acknowledgement of it.

The silence — atypical for the Trojans, who have lauded their passing football greats with flowery public statements — is an obvious statement in itself about the complicated relationship with one of the most accomplished athletes in USC history.

Lincoln Riley was born 15 years after Simpson won his Heisman, but the current USC coach was left to provide what might turn out to be the university's only prominent words on Simpson's death during his normal spring football media availability.

“Certainly as a head coach here, you obviously know about his history and his legacy, the kind of player that he was here,” Riley said. “We definitely, certainly recognize that, and obviously extend our sympathies to his family on their loss.”

That disconnect largely has been the standard for institutions in Los Angeles and across the nation for the past three decades since Simpson was charged with killing his former wife and her friend in 1994.

The worlds of sports and entertainment largely disassociated from one of the most famous athletes-turned-actors of his generation, and most of his longtime friends and admirers had dropped Simpson by the time he was acquitted in 1995.

So it's difficult to remember that until the public course of Simpson's life changed forever in his late 40s, he was widely perceived as an embodiment of the American dream.

He grew up in the Potrero Hill housing projects of San Francisco, overcoming brushes with gangs, a few arrests and juvenile corrections before finding a way out through football. Simpson then played two seasons at City College of San Francisco, becoming a two-way junior college star.

Major programs offered scholarships to Simpson for the 1967 season, and he chose USC, the school he admired growing up. He arrived on campus with high expectations under coach John McKay, but he exceeded every reasonable prognostication by becoming one of the most dominant running backs in college football history.

Just how important was Simpson to the Trojans while they went 19-2-1 and made two Rose Bowl appearances during his two seasons? He carried the ball a jaw-dropping 674 times in just 22 games for 3,423 yards and 36 touchdowns.

Simpson remained popular in Los Angeles when he went on to his NFL career in Buffalo and San Francisco, and he returned to Hollywood to continue his acting career after his retirement from football. He was an avid golfer and a member of the famed Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, where he played several times a week in 1994 — including the morning before Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered.

Simpson was found liable for the deaths in a civil trial in 1997, and subsequent attempts to rehabilitate his image foundered. Simpson's charmed Hollywood life was over.

The former football star and USC remained publicly estranged for the rest of his life — and an attempt to change that backfired as well.

Simpson visited USC's practice in Fort Lauderdale in late 2002 while the Trojans were preparing to face Iowa in the Orange Bowl. The 1968 Heisman winner, who hadn't been around the team since the murders, chatted with reigning Heisman winner Carson Palmer and others.

Pete Carroll called Simpson “a legend" after welcoming him, but the coach and the school received widespread public condemnation for re-associating with Simpson. His connection with USC was largely finished from there, particularly after his subsequent nine-year incarceration for armed robbery.

Simpson’s death didn’t change how most of his former teammates and friends felt, for better and worse. Many of Simpson’s former USC teammates have also died, and others didn’t want to speak publicly about him when asked Thursday.

Three years ago, Simpson told The Athletic that he didn't enjoy being in Los Angeles because "I might be sitting next to whoever did it. I really don’t know who did this.”

- GREG BEACHAM

O.J. SIMPSON DIES OF CANCER AT AGE 76, FAMILY SAYS

O.J. Simpson went from beloved athlete and actor to, for many, a pariah and presumed killer.Credit...POOL/AFP/Getty Image

 

LAS VEGAS -- O.J. Simpson, the decorated football Simpson's jersey is still retired by USC in recognition of his two remarkable seasons as the Trojans' tailback, and his No. 32 is prominently displayed at every home football game on the banners that drape the pesuperstar and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend but later was found liable in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76.

The family announced on Simpson's official X account that Simpson died Wednesday after battling prostate cancer. He diein Las Vegas, officials there said Thursday.

"On April 10th, our father, Orenthal Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace," the family posted on Simpson's X account.

Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.

On June 12, the bodies of Brown Simpson and Goldman were found outside her condo in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. Simpson was a person of interest in the murders, but rather than turn himself in five days later, he led police on a low-speed chase throughout Los Angeles as a passenger in a white Ford Bronco driven by former NFL player Al Cowlings. An estimated television audience of 95 million watched the drama unfold, with live coverage interrupting regular programming, including the NBA Finals.

Simpson gained widespread popularity across society as the Heisman Trophy-winning tailback for the University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as a commentator for "Monday Night Football" and an actor in movies such as "The Naked Gun" series in the 1980s.

The public was mesmerized by his "trial of the century" on live TV. It featured lead prosecutor Marcia Clark against a "legal dream team" for Simpson led by Johnnie Cochran, who famously pleaded to the jury during closing arguments, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," a reference to a glove matching one found at the scene of the murders. His case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

A criminal court jury found Simpson not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to family members of Brown and Goldman.

A decade later, still shadowed by the California wrongful death judgment, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.

Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a remote northern Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was not contrite when he was released on parole in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and family heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.

"I've basically spent a conflict-free life, you know," said Simpson, whose parole ended in late 2021.

Public fascination with Simpson never faded. Many debated whether he had been punished in Las Vegas for his acquittal in Los Angeles. In 2016, he was the subject of an FX miniseries and a five-part ESPN documentary, "O.J.: Made in America."

"I don't think most of America believes I did it," Simpson told The New York Times in 1995, a week after a jury determined he did not kill Brown and Goldman. "I've gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me."

Twelve years later, after an outpouring of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book by News Corp-owned HarperCollins in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the killings. It was to be titled, "If I Did It."

Goldman's family, still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, won control of the manuscript. They retitled the book "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer."

"It's all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," Simpson told The Associated Press at the time. He collected $880,000 in advance money for the book, paid through a third party.

"It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead," he said.

Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.

David Cook, an attorney who has been seeking since 2008 to collect the civil judgment in the Ron Goldman case, said he spoke with Fred Goldman, father of Ron, on Thursday about Simpson's death. Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was, but Goldman told NBC News that Simpson's death is "just further reminder of Ron being gone all these years. It's no great loss to the world."

"He died without penance," Cook said of Simpson. "We don't know what he has, where it is or who is in control. We will pick up where we are and keep going with it."

Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, who made Simpson the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft in 1969. With Buffalo he became known as The Juice on an offensive line known as the Electric Company. He won four NFL rushing titles, rushed for 11,236 yards in his career, scored 76 touchdowns, made five first-team All-Pro squads and played in six Pro Bowls. His best season was 1973, when he ran for 2,003 yards -- the first running back to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark (doing it in 14 games) while averaging 141.3 yards per game, still an NFL record.

"I was part of the history of the game," he said years later, recalling that season. "If I did nothing else in my life, I'd made my mark."

Simpson's rise in football happened simultaneously with a career in television. He signed a contract with ABC Sports the night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. That same year, he appeared on the NBC series "Dragnet" and "Ironside." During his pro career, Simpson was a color commentator for a decade on ABC followed by a stint on NBC. In 1983, he joined ABC's "Monday Night Football."

Simpson quickly became a charismatic pitchman. In 1975, Hertz made him the first Black man hired for a corporate national ad campaign. The commercials, featuring Simpson running through airports toward the Hertz desk and young girls chanting "Go, O.J., go!" were ubiquitous for years.

Simpson made his big-screen debut in 1974 in "The Klansman," an exploitation film in which he starred alongside Lee Marvin and Richard Burton. The film was a flop, but Simpson would go on to appear in several dozen films and TV series, including 1974's "The Towering Inferno," 1976's "The Cassandra Crossing," 1977's "Roots" and 1977's "Capricorn One."

Most notable, perhaps, was his performance in 1988's "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad" and its two sequels. Simpson played Detective Nordberg in the slapstick films opposite Leslie Nielsen.

Of course, Simpson went on to other fame.

One of the artifacts of his murder trial, the carefully tailored tan suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and placed on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Simpson had been told the suit would be in the hotel room in Las Vegas, but it turned out it wasn't there.

Orenthal James Simpson was born July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring 1967 semester.

He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC -- which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year's national championship.

Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue on the same day that his first child, Arnelle, was born.

He also had two other children, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife. Their daughter Aaren drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year Simpson and Whitley divorced.

Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Sydney and Justin, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

"We don't need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives," he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. "The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the 'no negative zone.' We focus on the positives."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

HEISMAN FINALISTS: LSU QB DANIELS, OREGON QB NIX, WASHINGTON QB PENIX JR., OHIO STATE WR, HARRISON JR.

Jayden Daniels. AP Photo

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