There is a point, in the five-part “O.J.: Made in America,” where you hear O.J. Simpson’s voice on a so-called “suicide tape” he made on June 17, 1994, hours before the infamous white Bronco chase, saying, “Please remember me as The Juice. Please remember me as a good guy.”
But Simpson’s legacy is far more complicated than he or the average American could ever have imagined back then — a point driven home by the sweeping, compelling, all around terrific “OJ: Made in America,” an ESPN Films’ “30 for 30” documentary that will launch on ABC Saturday, then air in its entirety over 10 hours on four nights next week on the cable sports channel.
Peabody and Emmy-award winning director Ezra Edelman covers all of Simpson’s life, giving due attention to the lengthy portion when he was indeed “The Juice,” a charming, dazzling, likable, massively gifted athlete. Edelman went through archival footage and interviewed 72 people, including childhood friends, fellow teammates, civil-rights activists, religious leaders, those who prosecuted him for murder and jury members who acquitted him. There are so many insights, so much information, and yet, when it’s all over — and this is a credit to Edelman — you’d still watch more.
The film opens with a hearing at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center — where Simpson is serving a sentence of nine to 33 years after being convicted of robbery and kidnapping for a 2007 incident involving his attempt to recover sports memorabilia that Simpson said had been stolen from him — then flashes back to his earlier glory days.
Orenthal James Simpson, whose ancestors had headed west from Odessa, La., in the hope of escaping racism, had grown up a poor kid in San Francisco, the son of a hard-working mother and a mostly absent father. Simpson arrived at USC in 1967, and rose to fame as an unstoppable running back for the USC Trojans, winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968. In a turbulent era when many other black sports stars, including Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Bill Russell, were using their fame to spotlight racial injustice, Simpson, personally ambitious, was reveling in the embrace of white fans. This, despite the fact that the USC campus was near Watts, the Los Angeles neighborhood that had been torn apart by riots in August 1965, triggered by the arrest of a black motorist for drunk driving.
“What I’m doing is not for principles or black people,” Simpson once said. “No I’m dealing for O.J. Simpson, his wife and his babies.” At the time, he was married to first wife Marguerite, a black woman who had been his childhood friend Al Cowlings’ girlfriend when they got involved. Cowlings forgave him.
We see clips of Simpson’s amazing USC runs, of Bob Hope fawning over him and Howard Cosell praising his “impeccable character.”
Sports journalist Robert Lipsyterecalls that in 1969 Simpson told him about a wedding where he heard a white woman say, “‘Look, there’s O.J., sitting with all those [racial slur].” Lipsyte said that that must have been terrible, but Simpson said, “‘No, it was great … She knew that I wasn’t black. She saw me as O.J.”
Simpson, eyeing endorsem*nt deals, “realized he had to be pleasing to white people,” Lipsyte says.
The recent FX series “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” did a great job of putting Simpson’s 1995 criminal trial for the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman into a context of the racial divide in Los Angeles between the black community and the L.A. Police Department, in the wake of the brutal videotaped 1991 beating of black taxi driver Rodney King and the riots that followed in 1992 when an all-white jury in Simi Valley acquitted the four LAPD officers involved. But over five episodes, “Made in America,” goes back further — to many other previous incidents. And it shows why, though Simpson may have forsaken his people, they would, years later, still rally around him in his hour of need.
Drafted in 1969 by the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, Simpson became the first player ever to rush for 2,000 yards in a season — a feat that made him a star and a sought-after pitchman.
“For us, O.J. was colorless,” says former Hertz CEO Frank Olson, who took Simpson golfing at tony clubs, including Arcola Country Club in Paramus. (Simpson would eventually join, becoming the club’s first black member since its founding in 1909).
And yet, Simpson’s Hertz ads almost always showed white people rooting for him as he ran through airports.
We also see great clips of Simpson’s showbiz career, including an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” (as a black Conehead, 1978), “The Towering Inferno,” “Roots,” “Capricorn One”and “The Naked Gun” movies (1988 and 1991).
By the end of the 1970s, Simpson was back in Los Angeles, living in a Brentwood estate. Though still wed to Marguerite, at The Daisy nightclub in Beverly Hills, he became smitten by a beautiful 18-year-old waitress — Nicole Brown, who was white.
Simpson and Brown’s 1985 wedding video, seen in episode 2, shows a radiant bride and a beaming groom. But his cheating continued. And, according to Robin Greer, Nicole’s friend, “Most of their big fights were about that.” And then came domestic abuse calls — former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, who would gain infamy during the trial for past racist comments that came to light, remembers responding to one in 1985 — and those still-difficult-to-listen-to 911 calls from Brown in the years to come.
Episode 3 replays the gruesome scene on Brentwood’s Bundy Drive, where, early on June 13, 1994, police found the bloody bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman — who continue to be forgotten victims in this tale. Much here is familiar terrain, but there are far more details about the day of the June 17 Bronco chase, including the tense standoff (with SWAT teams at the ready) in Simpson’s driveway before his arrest.
The next episode is mostly devoted to the trial of the century, which officially began in January1995 and ended on Oct. 3, with Simpson’s acquittal. It took less than four hours for the predominantly black jury to reach the verdict. One juror says that after being sequestered for 267 days, it was time “to go home.” Another woman, also black, acknowledges that her vote was payback for all the injustices her community had suffered in courtrooms.
Among those interviewed: Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, assistant DA Marcia Clark, defense attorneys Carl Douglas and Barry Scheck, and Ron Shipp, a black LAPD police officer and one-time Simpson friend, who came to believe Simpson was the murderer and ultimately testified against him during the trial.
Such integrity is refreshing. Simpson’s former agent, Mike Gilbert, later reveals that he advised Simpson, who was nervous about trying on “the gloves,” to stop taking his arthritis medicine for two weeks so his hands would swell. Simpson did that, he says.
Though found not guilty, Simpson did not return to his old life, as the last episode shows. Ostracized by his white friends, he was civilly sued and found liable for the victims’ wrongful deaths and ordered to pay their families $33.5 million in damages in 1997. Simpson moved to Florida, where his life became filled with outlandish escapades, including a “hypothetical confession” book in 2000 (the rights to which the Goldmans got) and a hidden camera show, “Juiced With O.J. Simpson.”
The denouement came in 2007, when Simpson was arrested in Vegas on robbery charges, after he led a group of menwho entered a room at a hotel-casino and took sports memorabilia at gunpoint. Thomas Riccio, who plotted the robbery with Simpson, then secretly recorded it on audio tape, which he sold to TMZ for $150,000, he says in the film. Riccio was later given immunity, after handing the entire recording over to police, and testifying against Simpson, who was convicted in 2008 and will be eligible for parole in 2017, when he’s 70.
In the film, one of Simpson’s childhood pals calls the conviction and sentencing “white justice.” But others might call it karma.
Episode 1 of the documentary will re-air at 7 p.m. Tuesday on ESPN. Episodes 2 through 5 premiere, one each night, at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday on ESPN.
Email: rohan@northjersey.com
