Colin Sheridan: From living the American dream to fumbling it all
COURTROOM DRAMA: Defendant O.J. Simpson and members of his defense team react as the jury walk into the courtroom in Los Angeles in 1995. Pic: AP Photo/Reed Saxon, Pool, File
āWell, itās finally official,ā the late comedian Norm MacDonald told Saturday Night Live audiences in 1995, āMurder is legal in the state of California.ā It was an iconic line on an iconic American TV show that certainly contributed to MacDonald losing his job. The joke worked for nearly every viewer of the show besides the one that truly mattered: his boss at NBC West Don Ohlmeyer, who happened to be an extremely close friend of the subject of the joke, one Orenthal James Simpson. The Juice. O.J. The most famous man in America at a time when everybody wanted to be famous. A person of colour. An athlete. An actor. A celebrity. A man who stood trial for the brutal murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and who led the LAPD on the most infamous car chase in television history, drawing 95million viewers. That he emerged from that āepsiodeā with his freedom was as absurd as it was an indictment of a country completely at odds with itself, beset by the legacy trauma of race division and police corruption.
Simpson died last week at the age of 76 from cancer, yet somehow everything weāve come to know about him suggests he may yet reappear as a surprise guest on a late night talk show. His athletic prowess was phenomenal. His megalomania, preposterous. While it's hard to make an āat bestā case for him, at worst, he was a double-killer with a history of violence who literally got away with murder. Those of us who remember the O.J. trial are unlikely to be the same cadre of people who even know how Simpson became famous in the first place. I grew up in 1980ās Ireland, and was vaguely aware of American Football in that I had heard of The Refrigerator and Joe Montana. I knew when the Super Bowl was on. I was of the Dicky Rock school of NFL interest. I canāt say Iād ever heard of O.J. Simpson before his muder trial other than recognising him from his cameos on various spoof movies, and so was interested to learn this week that, while most Americans knew him as a TV celebrity, few fully knew how he came to be one.
