Acquaintances are split on if they’ll tune in
O.J. Simpson was a media critic long before Donald Trump fashioned the phrase “Fake News.” One day at Buffalo Bills training camp in the 1970s, Simpson slipped a coin in a news box at Niagara University and lifted out every copy of the Courier-Express, then Buffalo’s morning newspaper.
“This isn’t worth a quarter,” Simpson said as he laughed and left a pile of papers atop the box for anyone to take, perhaps a comic foreshadowing of the Las Vegas robbery conviction that would put him in jail for nearly the last nine years.
That, at least, is the scene as Chuck Maryan remembers it. He was a ball boy for the Bills from 1972 to 1974 while a natural sciences major at Niagara. And he won’t be watching Thursday when Simpson goes before a parole board in Nevada.
“I didn’t treat him any differently from any of the other guys on the team, and he didn’t like that,” Maryan says. “O.J. thought everyone was put on this earth to serve him — everyone. Didn’t matter if you were president or king or a jock washer. You are here to make him happy. That’s how he viewed the world.”
USA TODAY Sports contacted several people who knew Simpson at various points of his life to see if they are planning to watch the parole hearing scheduled Thursday.
Some, such as Maryan, a retired senior mechanical engineer in deep-water well drilling in Louisiana, have no plans to watch. Others, including Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure, who blocked for Simpson in Buffalo, say they will watch.
“It’s kind of a weird feeling to watch something like that and think, ‘Gee, I actually knew the guy,’ ” DeLamielleure says. “My mother used to say, ‘Your reputation is like china. If you drop it once, it’s ruined forever. You can’t put it back together.’ ”
DeLamielleure was a member of the Bills offensive line called the Electric Company because they turned on the Juice — Simpson’s nickname. They opened holes when he rushed for a record 2,003 yards in 1973.
“When the offensive line went out for dinner, O.J. would always pick up the check,” DeLamielleure says. “He was very generous, not only to teammates but to fans. He wasn’t like a superstar today; he’d mingle with anyone, sign autographs for forever.”
John Boutet, archivist and curator for the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame, got Simpson’s autograph more than a dozen times when he was a kid. He plans to watch the parole hearing. “O.J. didn’t just sign autographs,” Boutet says. “He’d talk to you, ask where you went to school and what’s your favorite sport.”
E.J. Flammer took photos of Simpson with members of a Bills booster club in 1993 to publicize a banquet to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Simpson’s record-setting season. Seven months after the banquet, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found dead. Simpson would be acquitted at a celebrated criminal trial that ushered in the era of reality TV.
But he would be found liable for wrongful death at a civil trial where Flammer’s photos, rediscovered midtrial, provided the clinching evidence of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes of the kind that left bloody footprints at the scene.
Flammer says he won’t be watching the parole hearing.
“I kind of heard about the parole board but didn’t even know it was going to be Thursday,” Flammer says. “I guess I’ll watch the national news later, just to see what happened.”
John Q. Kelly, who represented the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson at the civil trial, hadn’t been planning to watch. “I can’t think of anything less interesting,” he says.
But as it turns out Kelly will be watching — for MSNBC. “I’ll be a commentator-slash-insider,” Kelly says, “giving reactions to what Simpson says.” Kelly thinks the FX Network serial The
People v. O.J. Simpson and ESPN’s Oscarwinning documentary O.J.: Made in
America sparked renewed public interest in Simpson last year, especially among those too young to recall his Heismanwinning football career or the trashy spectacle of the criminal trial.
DeLamielleure says he thought of Simpson when Muhammad Ali died last year: “In the 1970s, when O.J. was at the top of his fame, the nation kind of frowned on Muhammad for not going to Vietnam. By the time he died, the guy who was on top in the ’70s was in jail and Muhammad was seen as almost saintlike. I find that very ironic.”
DeLamielleure says he remembers Simpson for a tireless work ethic: “He acted like a guy who was going to get cut or something.”
Simpson did have interest in cuts from the team. Maryan, the former ball boy, has a story about that. Maryan often had the unpleasant duty of telling players to turn in their playbooks at training camp. One time he was rounding up five or six guys before afternoon practice when he passed Simpson’s dorm room, where players commonly gathered to play cards.
“Let me see that list,” Simpson said, by Maryan’s memory. “OK, good. None of these guys owe me money.”