When the chase ended, O.J. was already gone

The death of a football hero who barely bothered to break his fall.

Hank Kingsley, the hopelessly needy sidekick and foil for Larry Sanders, just shook his head when he sensed his co-workers thought O.J. Simpson was guilty. “He’s always been nice to me,” Kingsley said, via Jeffrey Tambor.

He wasn’t the only one. Most media types liked O.J. He knew what they needed, he was generally available and usually thoughtful, and of course he was one of the great running backs ever, the first to gain 2,000 yards in a season. As he became Hertz’s main pitch man and moved easily into the movies with “The Towering Inferno” and “The Naked Gun,” Simpson was a filtered version of Charles Barkley.

So even though Simpson’s habit of slapping around Nicole Brown was widely known, especially to L.A. cops, there have been few more flabbergasting American nights than June 17, 1994. Simpson, distraught and near-suicidal, was in a Bronco driven by former USC teammate Al Cowlings, dogged by police on the 5 freeway in L.A. It coincided with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Rockets and Knicks in New York, and NBC used a split screen to show Cowlings and John Starks driving simultaneously. As the Bronco rolled on, LAPD detective Tom Lange implored Simpson to holster his gun, and people crowded onto the overpasses and cheered the Last Run. Even though Simpson’s adventure and subsequent murder trial wouldn’t physically alter our society, it was a plunge into the nonsensical, an incident that made all of us question our footing. You could question whether we ever regained it.

Simpson died on Thursday, at 76. The real killer was prostate cancer. His final years were spent in obscurity, a wrenching punishment. He spent nine of them in a Nevada prison, after a kidnapping and burglary charge that centered around stolen memorabilia. News of his death evoked little sadness. The Buffalo Bills and USC had no official comment. His family sent out a pro forma statement referring to his death as “a time of transition.”

Among Simpson’s crimes was his betrayal of our perceptions. He worked hard on his artifice. In the courtroom, when the prosecution inexplicably asked Simpson to wear a facsimile of the gloves that were left near the bodies of Brown and Ron Goldman, Simpson shrugged and smirked his way through the exercise. This would later prompt defense attorney Johnnie Cochran to tell the jury, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” which the jury did in early October. Karl Douglas, Cochran’s associate on this case, said Simpson went into “Naked Gun mode” when called upon, as if he’d heard a director yell “Roll ‘em” or a quarterback call an audible.

(As ESPN’s phenomenal documentary “Made In America” informed us, Simpson was advised, by agent Mike Gilbert, to shelve his arthritis medication for two weeks before the glove incident. That way his hands would swell.)

But we should have known that the same camera that never blinks also doesn’t penetrate to the soul. Bill Cosby was one of the few who could rival Simpson for public approval, and he fell almost as far. Lance Armstrong was the stuff of Sports Illustrated covers before we discovered that he’d found better biking through chemistry. Why do we put strangers on pedestals? Why have pedestals anyway?

Good luck trying to explain the impact of the Simpson trial to someone who wasn’t around. The vicious near-decapitation of the victims, the murky incompetence of LAPD investigators and detectives, the sinister specter of Mark Fuhrman and his destruction at the hands of  cross-examiner F. Lee Bailey….all of it was catnip, coast-to-coast. There were 150 million viewers when the verdict came down. Ponderous TV journalists like Ted Koppel, who established “Nightline” during the Iranian hostage crisis, became captivated with the likes of Kato Kaelin. Nearly everyone in the courtroom reached a level of celebrity that resonates even today: Marcia Clark, Robert Kardashian, Gil Garcetti. The Dancing Itos, fashioned around the judge, became a staple for Jay Leno. Norm Macdonald’s weekly skewering of Simpson was a highlight of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, at least until Don Ohlmeyer, a powerful executive producer and O.J.’s golfing buddy, fired Macdonald.

Had it been a mere murder case, it wouldn’t have legitimized Court TV or worked its way into the national square. Cochran and the defense team wouldn’t let that happen. Seizing upon the years of LAPD oppression, Cochran took the sloppy detective work and a long-ago tape of Fuhrman’s N-words and turned the whole thing into a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “A journey to justice,” Cochran intoned, while dropping a plump parallel between L.A.’s power structure and Hitler. In doing so he ripped off whatever remnants of the bandage that were left behind in 1991, when cameras caught policemen trying to kill Rodney King.

Simpson then lost a civil case in Santa Monica, where the criminal trial probably should have happened. He did not attempt an image rehab. Instead he receded into the seediest corners of cyberspace, as his closest friends and supporters blanched. Is it even worth commemorating how this all started, how Simpson’s natural speed and instincts made him the most effective runner since Jim Brown, how he turned 23-Blast into a win over UCLA and a national championship and a Heisman Trophy? Not when Simpson hocked that trophy for a long-since-gone $230,000.

It’s interesting to see what’s happened to the star-maker machinery since. Some of us can remember when Mike Tyson was a likeable ingenue, then became a convicted rapist and an ear-biter, then became a key member of “The Hangover” cast who wound up performing one-man shows across the nation, and is now somewhat beloved and largely forgiven.

The sordid parts of Tyson’s past will be pushed down through the paragraphs of his obituary. Simpson had more to overcome and much less of an appetite to even try. His Bronco ride and its aftermath have left wreckage through which we slog today. But Thursday’s news was almost meaningless. For most of us and maybe even for himself, O.J. Simpson died long ago.