"I don't like to be pushed" (1969)
O.J. Simpson, before and after.
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I.
It is difficult to remember that there was a before; that for the span of a generation—before the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in June 1994, before the televised slow-motion car chase, and before the trial that impacted and permeated nearly every aspect of American culture—virtually no one could have never imagined what would become of Orenthal James Simpson, or conceive of how the first sentence of his obituary would eventually read.
Instead, most people saw it like this:
Edgerson and Simpson were roommates during Simpson’s first season in Buffalo in 1969. Edgerson was a veteran. Simpson, struggling to find his place in pro football, was “like my younger brother,” Edgerson told the Buffalo News in June of 1994. “I’ve never known him to be a mean person.”
Here is one thing we can say about Simpson: Before he was a notorious middle-aged man, he was a young man with vast ambitions. He believed he could change the world in a positive way, and the first step toward that dream, for a kid who grew up poor and angry on the streets of San Francisco, was to get wildly rich.
“In the long run, I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of myths about black athletes,” he once wrote. “I believe I can do as much for my own people in my own way as a Tommie Smith, a Jim Brown, or a Jackie Robinson may choose to do in another way. That's part of the image I want, too.”
II.
January 28, 1969: Inside a hotel ballroom in New York City, the Buffalo Bills select a running back with the first pick in the NFL/AFL Draft. There really was no other choice; Simpson was the best player in a draft that would eventually be studded with Hall of Famers. And yet this was still a calculated risk, because no one knew what lengths Simpson would go to to keep himself out of Buffalo.
The months-long melodrama that followed in the wake of the Bills' decision to draft Simpson didn’t even merit a mention in most of his obituaries. But it is worth noting the effect Simpson's choices had even before that moment; it is worth noting that even at the age of 21, Simpson was already pushing both football and the business of sports toward modernity.
It wasn't that the Bills didn't see this coming. All through his senior season, when asked about where he wanted to play professional football, Simpson said he preferred to play in the National Football League rather than the upstart American Football League, of which the Bills were a part; he said he wished to play on the West Coast, where he had grown up and played college football; and he said, according to his book Education of a Rich Rookie (co-authored by sportswriter Pete Axthelm), "I wanted to make a lot of money."
Simpson's agent was Chuck Barnes, a 38-year-old USC graduate who had made his name representing auto racers, and from the beginning, Barnes pushed Bills owner Ralph Wilson, asking for a package that included salary, bonus, and a $500,000 loan to be used for investments. Barnes also asked for a mind-blowing $650,000 for a five-year deal. For months, Wilson wasn't willing to budge from his offer of $250,000 for five years, and refused to even consider the loan (“I'm not the investment banking business,” Wilson reportedly said). What followed was financial push-and-pull that, according to Simpson, left him “edgy” and “fighting his own tensions.”
And yet O.J. waited it out. In the spring, he signed a $250,000 endorsement deal with Chevrolet, a number so mind-boggling at the time that Simpson “gasped when he looked at the figure.” Barnes had already done the work of positioning Simpson as a new brand of African-American superstar. Simpson signed a book deal, made a guest appearance on a CBS show called Medical Center, and would eventually cut deals with ABC and Royal Crown Cola.
In the meantime, he and Barnes began flirting with rival leagues, including the Continental Football League's Indianapolis Capitols, who offered Simpson his $500,000 loan in addition to a $100,000 bonus and a salary of $150,000. A team in Fort Worth offered $15,000 per game, and a Texas mogul named William Morris Jr. offered him a personal services contract worth a million dollars, that reportedly involved Morris taking any profits from Simpson's speaking engagements and appearances—"he could have tried to use me as his personal houseboy if things started going badly,” Simpson wrote.
Faced with a spring signing deadline by the Capitols, Barnes encouraged Simpson to carefully consider the offer. But Simpson didn't want to do it. If he went to the Continental League, he wrote, he'd been seen more as an entertainer than a competitor, more “like a traveling circus” than a football player. They turned it down, and they held out through the summer.
“I don't like to be pushed,” Simpson told Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford in July of 1969. “The last time with Mr. Wilson, it was me, not Chuck, who really got mad. We were negotiating, we were discussing giving up on the loan stuff, but Mr. Wilson wouldn't change his offer at all. Well, I can wait if he can wait.”
Training camps opened, and the August College All-Star Game passed, and Simpson continued to hold out. But much of Simpson's leverage had been sapped by his own agent's savvy, by the fact that many of his endorsement deals hinged on the notion that he actually play football, preferably in the AFL or the NFL. Barnes realized they were running out of time, that they may have to accept the best offer they could possibly stomach. So they signed a four-year contract for $250,000, and they secured a $150,000 loan, which could be paid back over the course of those four years.
Simpson went to Buffalo and broke records and became a cultural phenomenon, an “unthreatening superstar,” according to NFL historian Michael MacCambridge, and for the next 25 years, this was what we imagined he’d always be.
III.
Over fifty years removed from that draft, Simpson's life story now comprises the epitomal tapestry of 21st-century culture, a narrative arc that altered our views of race and justice and celebrity and was punctuated by such an abrupt shock that it dominated American culture in the mid-1990s.
In the end, O.J. Simpson fulfilled that visceral Gatsby-esque ambition for himself: He got rich. He became a business. He forged a new path for black athletes in the modern world. And it still wasn’t enough to bring him happiness or fulfillment. In the end, he shattered every myth about himself, and he shattered his own image in such a sudden and shocking manner that he lost it all. And in a way, so did a nation that’s never really believed in anything in quite the same way again.
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Outstanding column - thank you.