The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [18]

The creation of a public image-that is, defining what “being O.J.” meant-had been Simpson’s life work. In the years before he was arrested for murder, O.J. Simpson was interviewed countless times about his life story, and he would invariably invoke the same themes, even the same anecdotes. Though it is now difficult to remember in light of the notoriety of the murder case, Simpson for many years enjoyed a clean-cut and lovable image. This was a man who, after all, had been sanctified with a nationally televised “roast” by Bob Hope before he was twenty-five years old. So Simpson often went out of his way to boast in interviews about his hardscrabble origins and rascally past-a history that would take on a more sinister cast after his arrest.

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 7, 1947, the third of four children of James and Eunice Simpson, in San Francisco. (His unusual first name, which O.J. loathed, was an aunt’s suggestion of obscure origin.) His father was an intermittent presence in his life; in later life, he came out as a homosexual, and he died of AIDS in 1985. His mother, who worked nights as an orderly and then a technician in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital, supported the family as best she could.

In an authorized, highly laudatory biography published in 1974, when O.J. was twenty-seven, Larry Fox wrote of Simpson’s childhood: “There was the throwing rocks at buses, the shoplifting (after all, they were too young to buy beer and wine), the breaking up of parties, and, above all, the fights, the constant fights.” And Simpson himself admitted in an extensive Playboy interview in 1976, “If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend… Sports was lucky for me. If I hadn’t been on the high school football team, there’s no question but that I would’ve been sent to jail for three years.”

When asked about his formative influences, Simpson repeated one story from his adolescence over and over again. The year was 1962, and Simpson, a sophomore in high school, was in trouble. In some versions of the story, he had been caught stealing from a liquor store; in others, he had been arrested for a fight involving his gang, the Persian Warriors, in his Potrero Hill neighborhood. Simpson was asleep in his apartment when there was a knock at the door. Knowing of O.J.’s troubles, as well as of his athletic promise, a concerned adult had arranged for Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder for the San Francisco Giants, to pay a call.

“Willie didn’t give me no discipline rap; we drove over to his place and spent the afternoon talking sports,” Simpson told Playboy. “He lived in a great big house over in Forest Hill and he was exactly the easygoing friendly guy I’d always pictured him to be.” (In a revealing segue in the interview, Simpson went on to defend Mays because “a short time after that, Jackie Robinson took a shot at Mays by saying he didn’t do enough for his people.” But, Simpson protested, “Mays always put out good vibes.”) Of the Mays visit Larry Fox wrote, “Willie’s message was not so much in his words. It was in his achievements and what these achievements had brought him in the way of material goods.” Telling the Mays story in the book I Want to Tell You, which he nominally wrote later from his prison cell, Simpson said, “It was the first time I saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Getting a big house and putting out good vibes became the leitmotif of Simpson’s professional life. After high school, he spent two years playing football and running track at the City College of San Francisco, a local junior college. He averaged more than ten yards per carry at CCSF, so the recruiters from the big four-year schools came calling in droves. But Simpson only had eyes for the University of Southern California. As a boy, O.J. had admired the pageantry of USC football-the Trojan wearing a suit of armor seated atop a great white stallion. But as a prospective Trojan himself, Simpson saw that USC delivered media exposure-and thus potentially lucrative contacts-beyond that of any other college football program in the land.

Almost half a century earlier, the USC football machine had been willed into existence by one man, an obscure, Illinois-born academic named Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid. After bouncing around several different universities after the turn of the century, Dr. K, as he was known, became president of USC in 1921. There he faced a dilemma familiar to college presidents. “Supported by tuition, possessed of virtually no endowment (hardly more than $1 million by 1926) with which to finance its expansion, U.S.C. needed money,” the historian Kevin Starr has observed. “Football offered a solution.” Dr. K invested in recruiting, bands, and a magnificent new stadium, the Coliseum, which would serve as the centerpiece of the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles. Von KleinSmid’s gamble paid off beyond even his own imaginings. Trojan football became one of the few activities to unite the fractured metropolis of Los Angeles. When USC defeated Notre Dame on a last-second field goal in 1931, a crowd of 300,000, one third the population of the city, greeted the returning team at the train station. The passage of time did not dim the school’s (or the city’s) enthusiasm for the sport. By the 1950s, the Trojans’ greatest star was Frank Gifford, about whom a fellow student, the novelist Frederick Exley, would observe, “Frank Gifford was an All-America at USC, and I know of no way of describing this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican.”