I’m almost 55. OJ Simpson was the first sports name I ever knew. I became a Bills fan before I became a sports fan, because my dad watched football on Sundays and I wanted to be with him. Just watch number 32, he’d say. That’s OJ. I bet a lot of you around my age will say the same.
I was a first-year law student at UB when the verdict was announced. It happened during our Criminal Law class, ironically enough. And I feel pretty safe in saying that the reaction was a lot more mixed there than it was in any other 1L crim law class in the country that day, only because a good many of us - it’s still a very local school - had grown up with him as our first sports hero. And though deep down we all knew he was guilty, we also desperately wanted that not to be true - but we wouldn’t admit that to anyone who wasn’t one of us.
As the years have gone by, of course, I’ve only become more convinced of his guilt, and come to terms with it. So when I heard the news of his death, I felt…pretty much nothing. The OJ I idolized as a child died for me 30 years ago.