The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [20]

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.