An American Tragedy.

Here we have, above, the greatest ever (American) footballer; OJ Simpson – commonly known as the Juice – OJ = Orange Juice; geddit??

He is the real live Great American Tragedy – there was a novel called An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser but OJ was a real life one.

Look at him up there – a smiling handsome man with the world at his feet. If ever you watch snippets of American football and it keeps stopping then starting again and then look at OJ – he never stopped. He seemed to glide through the field as if he was slicing melted butter with a hot knife; he dodged and swayed, stopped and seemed to stumble and carried the ball for many a yard which is all written down somewhere and documented.

When I first went to live in Los Angeles in August 1994, OJ was up on a murder charge; he was charged with killing his wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman – he was a waiter in a nearby restaurant and may not have been her friend at all but a waiter who had discovered that Nicole had left something at the restaurant and was merely returning it at the wrong time.

When he walked up the path to OJ and Nicole's house in Brentford, Los Angeles, all those years ago, she was in the process of being murdered with a large knife and he walked in to the situation and suffered the same fate.

The thing that I found hard to process was why there was no blood on OJ who was charged with the crime, the massacre, the orgy of a stabbing – but that was a fact. 

To this day no bundle of bloody clothes have been found.

There is a documentary series on BBC4 at the moment – 5 x 80 minute episodes and they are riveting.

OJ went on trial at the beginning of 1995 and right through to September it dominated the airwaves.

People I knew would go to the trial, there were bits on late night comedy on TV; there was a Marcia Clarke (chief prosecutor) lookalike, on The Jay Leno Show, they even had a Judge Ito and the singing Itos – it was fun for everyone, apart from the victims, and people would try to get home to listen to various aspects of the trial which was live on TV – one day a pal said I have get back to watch F. Lee Bailey, who was some kind of real life Perry Mason.

But at the end of the trial The Juice was found Not Guilty.

I was down by Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the day of the verdict, and people, mainly black people, were selling, The Juice is loose! souvenir T-Shirts. 

A year after the trial, the family of Ron Goldman took OJ to court in a Civil Case and he was found guilty of being responsible for his wife's murder – which is different.

The judge awarded the Goldman family $33 million which OJ would have to pay to them for the rest of his life; every time he got a job he would have to pay the fee to them but I don't think they received a penny.

Before the sheriffs arrives OJ had sent his belongings to various parts of the state.

To cut the story short, a few years later, OJ, who had been living the life of Riley, was informed that a lot of his memorabilia was in the room of a dealer in a Las Vegas hotel and he, and a few others, broke in to the room, one of them wielding a gun, told the inhabitant that they couldn't leave the room till they gave, what OJ reckoned, was his property.

They were put on trial and one of them made a deal for immunity and turned stool pigeon or snitch or whatever you want to call it and spilled the beans about the whole escapade.

OJ was sentenced to – now take note of the figure – a 33 year sentence; no coincidence as 33 million was the amount of dollars the Goldmans won.

Jury members, who found OJ not guilty, have since admitted that it was pay back for the way the black African Americans had been treated in America for all the years from slavery to Jim Crow to plain racial prejudice with lynchings and beatings and bullying.

A group of LA cops beat a small time crook, Rodney King, with sticks and kicks; they were filmed doing it and even though the footage is as clear as day, the cops were found not guilty. This verdict, and the death by shooting dead of a 15 year old African American started the LA riots of 1992.

So there he is above – a man who got away with murder – for it is 99% certain that he did it but he wouldn't be satisfied with that; he had to chance his arm again. Good looking, best at everything to do with sport, golf, weight lifting, godfather to the famous Kim Kardashian has ended up being the pathetic figure serving all that time in a Las Vegas gaol – and now look at him: