When the Buffalo Bills formally open Highmark Stadium this fall, there will be a plaza just outside the entrance in which the great players in franchise history will be honored. O.J. Simpson will not be one of them.
Simpson is a Pro Football Hall of Famer, the first player in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season and tops on the list of the best running backs in Bills history. But the team announced Saturday that Simpson will not have a place in the new stadium.
“We have made an organizational decision that he is not a fit to display inside our new stadium and family circle.” said Pete Guelli, president of business operations for the Bills, in a statement.
Simpson, who died in 2024, has been a pariah since 1994, when his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were brutally murdered. In one of the most high-profile trials ever, Simpson was acquitted of the murders — but two years later, he lost a civil suit and was found liable for the deaths.
The murders would have been shocking under any circumstances, but the story was even bigger because Simpson had been a beloved public figure, having made a seamless transition from football hero to successful TV analyst and movie star.
I had the chance to work with Simpson in the early ‘90s, and I can attest he seemed like a very nice guy.
Then again, he did once threaten to kill me.
"I’ll kill you, man!”
True story. O.J. Simpson threatened to kill me. Here’s how the story goes…
In 1992, I worked on football Sundays at NBC Sports. NBC had the AFC TV package back then, and I worked for “NFL Live,” the network’s Sunday studio show, hosted by Bob Costas and featuring Simpson among the studio analysts. I worked the “back deck,” a room next to the studio where a handful of us watched games and manned the phones — calling press boxes around the league to get stats and scoring plays from all the games to feed to the studio for live updates, halftime and post-game.
Of course, no Sunday pre-game show began without a football pool for all to enter. At $5 or $10 a pop, it wasn’t big money, but it gave everyone a rooting interest.
Not all the NBC talent took part in the weekly poll, but Simpson sure did. “Juice,” as we all called him, loved the action … and he was good at picking winners.
One Sunday, after Costas and crew signed off from “NFL Live,” Simpson came strutting into the back deck area with a big grin on his face.
“Juice wants his money!” he declared, rubbing his hands together. Simpson was sure he had won the pool that day. But I had helped tally the pools, and Simpson was one off.
“Sorry, Juice, you didn’t win,” I told him.
Simpson was dumbfounded. He asked to take a look at his pool. Sure enough, I miscounted his picks. Not sure how it happened, but I accidentally gave him one less winner than he actually had, so he ended up splitting the pot with the person we thought was the outright winner.
I apologized to Simpson and handed him his winnings. And this is what he said:
“You tryin’ to take money out of the Juice’s pocket? I’ll kill you, man!”
I’ll admit, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Like I said, Simpson was a nice guy, at least to all of us on the back deck. The money he won that day was meaningless to him. I knew he was just kidding when he threatened to kill me.
Right?
As the years go by, I have to wonder.
