O.J. Simpson Died

Adding to the mystery was the fact O.J. actually touched on a cancer diagnosis in 2023 in a video he posted on X — when he said he’d “caught” some form of cancer, but suggested he’d beaten it. In any case, the cancer came back and claimed his life about a year later.

Obviously you go right to the murder trial whenever O.J.’s name comes up. It was HUGE back then, just massive, totally indescribable in terms of scale. It’s one of those moments where everybody remembers where they were. It was the summer of 1995 – we were out of school and used to go to the Boyertown pool, and my friend’s mom would bring a radio with her, like an old school fucking boom box in the pre-smart phone days. She would put the radio next to her chair and listen to the trial while we smacked each other in the face with pool noodles. She wasn’t the only one, either, there were middle-aged white women with radios strewn across the lawn. It was the most high-profile ANYTHING back then. It absolutely dominated the news. Ultimately O.J. was acquitted, but would go to prison for nine years later in his life, after a conviction on armed robbery charges. The guy made headlines for two straight decades.

All of that overshadows everything else he did. O.J. was a superstar football player for the Bills and Niners. He was the Heisman winner coming out of Southern Cal and then went to five Pro Bowls and was a five-time All Pro. He’s in both the college and pro football halls of fame.

O.J. also did a lot of acting before the murder trial, tons of cameos in shows like Dragnet, Roots, Naked Gun, etc. And it was curious to see his social media behavior after he got out of jail. He did the golf cart tweets and was objectively pretty good on those platforms, so I always wondered if the younger kids, who don’t know much about the murder trial and armed robbery case, had a favorable view of O.J. because they were mostly familiar with this goofy old guy on social.