How famous was OJ Simpson in the United States in the mid-1990s?
The fact he was often referred to only by his initials tells us just how famous and popular he was. Simpson had been a star American football player in college and university, and had gone on to become a record-setting running back for the Buffalo Bills team in the 1970s. In more recent years, he had turned to acting, with roles in a number of successful films and a string of adverts for a vehicle rental firm. So he’d become a pop-culture phenomenon as well as one of the most prominent sportsmen in the US. I definitely think that it’s easy, 30 years on, to forget the full extent of his celebrity.
Was the fact he was a prominent black athlete a specific dimension to his fame?
Simpson had emerged in the wake of the huge fame of sportsmen such as Muhammad Ali and [basketball star] Kareem AbdulJabbar, who linked their racial identity with political activism. Simpson was one of the figures who attempted to move beyond that, prefiguring what celebrities including Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan would later do on a
