Former Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson is one name football fans won’t be seeing at the team’s new stadium.
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The new facility cost $2.1 billion and took three years to build, from groundbreaking to last week’s ribbon-cutting. Highmark Stadium honors the Bills’ past with a Wall of Fame featuring team legends — but Simpson, the team’s No.1 draft pick in 1969, will be notably absent, according to NBC affiliate WGRZ.
“We have made an organizational decision that he is not a fit to display inside our new stadium and family circle,” said Pete Guelli, the team’s president of business operations, in a statement to the station.
The Bills were home to nine of Simpson’s 11 NFL seasons, during which he became the first NFL player in league history to rush for 2,000 or more yards in a single season. Simpson was widely regarded as the best running back of his era before retiring and transitioning to a broadcast career.
Simpson was celebrated for his football legacy until the 1990s, when his life took a dark turn.
In the summer of 1994, Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside her Los Angeles home. When police arrived to speak with Simpson after discovering the bodies, he did not answer the door — and officers noticed a trail of blood leading from his car to his home.
Los Angeles officials filed murder charges and moved to arrest him, but Simpson fled, setting off the now-infamous car chase in which he rode in the back of a white Ford Bronco as news helicopters tracked the vehicle across Southern California highways.
Simpson was ultimately acquitted during the 1995 criminal trial, which became known as the “Trial of the Century.” The case riveted the nation for months. Some defended Simpson, pointing to evidence presented by his attorneys that suggested racism inside the Los Angeles Police Department influenced the case. Others believed his wealth helped him get away with murder.
Though he was never convicted of murder, Simpson was later found liable for the deaths in a wrongful death civil suit brought by Ronald Goldman’s father.
Simpson’s reputation never recovered. In 2008 he was convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas after targeting a sports memorabilia dealer — an incident Simpson maintained was an attempt to reclaim items stolen from him. He was sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison and served the minimum before being released on parole.
Simpson died of cancer at the age of 76.
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