Simpson knew the truth and he was a bad actor

It was fitting somehow that when the cops came after O.J. Simpson, who became more famous for standing trial for killing his wife and an innocent bystander than he ever was for running up and down the field with a football under his arm, he went back to doing the thing he’d done best. He ran.

This was the news, and it was huge news, 30 years ago, after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had been stabbed to death in Brentwood, Calif., and is news again today because Simpson is dead now, of cancer, at the age of 76.

And long before what was called the Trial of the Century, Simpson sure was in that white Ford Bronco with his friend Al Cowling. O.J. Simpson didn’t act like an innocent man that day, because he never acted like an innocent man from the time he stood in front of the country and the world and talked about finding the “real killers.” It wasn’t much of a performance. But then Simpson was always a bad actor.

He knew the truth and how much blood was on his hands, whether he was later acquitted in that trial in Judge Ito’s courtroom or not, because in those days, long before celebrities in this country could get away with anything and everything and generally fold the judicial system into a party hat, you could even be famous enough to beat a murder charge. Two, actually.

And that is exactly what O.J. Simpson, one of the greatest football players who ever lived, did. He beat the charge of killing his wife and killing Ron Goldman, and when he finally was sent to jail much later — and after a civil jury found him liable for the murders — it was for a different kind of crime, Simpson acting like a thug in a Las Vegas hotel because he wanted his memorabilia back.

Back in the day, here is what Judge Jackie Glass said at Simpson’s sentencing:

“Earlier in this case, at a bail hearing, I asked — said — to Mr. Simpson I didn’t know if he was arrogant or ignorant or both. And during the trial and through this proceeding, I got this answer, and it was both.”

So, he didn’t get the pass he got in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom. And still there was a large segment of people who wanted to believe that Simpson was still innocent, of everything. He was The Juice, after all. He had won the Heisman Trophy and been a star with the Buffalo Bills and run through airports in Hertz commercials and even had roles in the “Naked Gun” movies. He had been in the booth for Monday Night Football. He had been part of the football studio show at NBC.

Even then, people who worked with him spoke of how obsessed he was with his ex-wife, telling friends that he had never gotten over her, asking male colleagues if they had anybody like that in their lives. Then came that night in Brentwood, and Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, stabbed to death and left to bleed out in front of her home. Now the whole world was obsessed with O.J. Simpson. It was sports, it was Hollywood, it was murder, always the main event.

Then came the trial. Then came Johnnie Cochran putting the LAPD on trial as a way of defending his client, long before we arrived at the moment with those gloves, and “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran and his Dream Team finally ended up winning that acquittal. If you were around then, or watched “O.J: Trial of the Century,” you know how it happened. The show won. The spectacle won. Celebrity won. There was just no justice for Nicole Brown Simpson, or for Ron Goldman. They didn’t matter in the end.

After that, and even through a jail term, Simpson was still treated like a celebrity as he lived out his miserable life. There was even a book from him — “If I Did It: Confessions of a Killer” — in which Simpson offered a hypothetical version of the murders. Somehow it was commissioned by ReganBooks, an imprint of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing company HarperCollins, before Murdoch finally made the announcement that a book he never should have touched with a stick had been canceled. The statement read this way: “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project. We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

At the time, we all wondered what in the world took him so long. But up to the point of the book being canceled, Simpson was still trading on his name, infamous now or not, and the fame he’d once experienced as a running back, as an actor, as a pitchman, as a commentator, despite being nothing more than a has-been. Who knows, maybe if his ex-wife and Ron Goldman hadn’t died the way they did, if he’d continued on being The Juice, he could have run for office the way another bustout ex-running back and Heisman Trophy winner like Herschel Walker did not long ago.

“I’m absolutely, 100% not guilty,” Simpson said in 1994.

He was a great football player who became a very bad guy. He lived another 30 years after two innocent people were stabbed to death, not nearly enough of those years spent inside a jail cell. It took a long time but finally there is a reckoning for O.J., one from which he cannot run.