'Juice,' your public no longer awaits you - Saying goodbye to OJ Simpson

I wish I had been writing this column back in 1994 during the OJ trial because I wanted someone to point out how hard is was to believe that any man (not just OJ) would cut his kids’ mother’s throat and leave her body in the front yard for them to find the next morning. That man would have to be crazy. And OJ Simpson may be a lot of things, but crazy isn’t one of them. That’s what I thought until this weekend when he was booked on suspicion of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, and burglary in Las Vegas. Now I’m thinking he just might be out of his mind.

He was in town to be Best Man at a friend’s wedding and it was supposed to be a joyous weekend (so much for that idea). It all started to go wrong once OJ found out that a memorabilia dealer was in Vegas and in possession of some very personal items belonging to OJ which were supposedly stolen from his mother. Reportedly, OJ’s plan was to, “show up with a bunch of boys and take my (stuff), and they can’t do nothing about it.” This is where he lost me – mainly because he’s a 60-year-old man. A geezer old enough to be a grandfather is going to get a gang of guys and go gather up his goods? Has he been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies? Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m of the opinion that when somebody steals from you, you know they stole from you, you know where they are, and you know they have your stolen stuff on them, you call the police. That’s precisely why we have police.

But not OJ. As he put it, “the police, since my trouble, have not worked out for me,” and that when he calls the police, “it just becomes a story about OJ.” But unlike his road rage incident, his ticket for speeding a boat through a manatee zone, or his stealing satellite TV, this time it’s alright for the story to be about OJ because this time, OJ was actually the victim. Unfortunately, OJ has an express ticket on the crazy train (next stop: Clark County jail), so he apparently decided to conduct a sting operation where he would confront the memorabilia dealer and make him either return the items or OJ would call the cops. He decided to handle it on his own first because, as he put it, “I’m at the point where I don’t rely on the police.”

That plan may have worked had it not been for the fact that two of OJ’s “boys” allegedly had guns on them and one of OJ’s “boys” (the one who first informed OJ the memorabilia dealer was in town) made a tape recording of the incident. So when the tape is played back, OJ’s sting operation has all the elements of and sounds suspiciously like an armed robbery. What’s more, OJ apparently admitted everything to Las Vegas police and even gave an interview to an AP reporter about the incident saying, “this is not a case about OJ stealing anything.” His favorite cereal has to be Coco Puffs, because clearly OJ Simpson is cuckoo.

At this point, the main legal issue will be the guns that were allegedly in the room at the time of this incident and whether or not OJ knew the guns were going to be there. And somewhere in heaven, the late, great Johnnie Cochran is scratching his head wondering, “didn’t you learn anything from your impromptu chats with Detectives Lange and Vannatter? Don’t you remember that rarely has anyone gotten in trouble for saying too little? For your own sake, why can’t you just shut up?”

After his acquittal, OJ Simpson was supposed to go away, that was the deal. Whatever he did (if he did it), he got away with. So he was supposed to take his young daughter and son far away from Brentwood where they have a shot at a normal life, get them through college, and do what every other parent does: make their kids the priority in their life and live vicariously through them. He had run the risk of losing them forever as he rotted away in prison, but thirteen years later, he seems to have forgotten all about that in a useless attempt to prove how tough he is to a couple of guys who, in the grand scheme, don’t mean anything to him. Now he’s remembering that there are a lot of people who want to see him behind bars by any means necessary and realizing that he’s once again in danger of losing the only things that should really matter to him: Sydney and Justin.