Fifteen years ago today, O.J. and A.C. went for a little ride

By the way, did the trial really need to last as long as it did?

 

I was sick at home with a flu bug and was watching the Knicks game. For a while, NBC preempted the game to show the chase, then went to the split-screen. I remember being pretty pissed off that the game was briefly preempted.

And I'll admit, a big part of me was hoping that O.J. would shoot himself, just for the shock value.

 

"I see OJ and he looks really scared....."

Classic stuff.

 

12 years old, pretty pissed off that NBC interrupted Game Five for this foolishness. My mother and grandmother, however, were GLUED to the TV and dared me to touch it. So I sat there hoping they'd crash.

 

The Baba Booey call during the chase was one of the funniest things ever.

 

I was in college and heading for my part-time gig at the SD Union-Tribune. I knew O.J. was supposed to turn himself in that day, and on the way I heard Jim Rome on the radio (he was still a local radio guy; where has the time gone?) say OJ couldn't be found and was officially a fugitive from justice. I knew then it would be quite a day.

Got to the newsroom just as O.J.'s lawyer Robert Kardashian (whose daughters have reached a certain level of celebrity 15 years later) was reading a letter from him, which made me sure that he would be found dead somewhere by the end of the day. Then a desker, who was listening on his own radio, said he just heard O.J. was spotted on the freeway, and the chase began.

Of course, I was one of three lucky bastards who got to answer phones for the sports department. I was taking calls from yahoos who were telling me they had inside info on the case and knew stuff nobody else did (Yeah, right! Thank god we were instructed to forward the calls to news), and then others who called bitching about the NBA game being pre-empted and then split screen, telling us we should do something about it, as if we were in charge of programming for NBC.

Man, surreal doesn't begin to describe that day.

 

I was sure he was going to kill himself.

 

It was during wheat harvest. I was riding on a tractor with my grandpa, listening to a radio. I didn't know much about OJ Simpson at the time. My grandpa was interested, but for the most part was baffled by those crazy people in California.

 

It was quite tenses.

 

I actually don't remember that much about the day other than watching some of the chase on TV. But I remember like it was yesterday that I was working on the farm with my dad when I heard on the radio Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

I got out of the pickup and walked up to my dad and told him what I heard and he said to me:

"Well I guess this is one of the few times when you know the husband didn't do it."

Amazing how pristine O.J. kept his image before the murder despite the 911 calls, etc.

 

That is a spectacular post. God bless the people in flyover country.