Zig Fracassi has gone by many names during his adult life. He went by Angelo on a summer day in 1973 while standing near a practice field at Niagara University, holding a replica helmet and marker.
That’s where the Buffalo Bills held training camp in the months before O.J. Simpson became the first player in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season. An 8-year-old Fracassi needed only Simpson’s signature to complete his team set — and he got it.
Jump ahead almost 20 years and Fracassi moved from Niagara Falls to Las Vegas, working for a show called First and 10 aired by HBO and Simpson had a regular call-in role. Fracassi got a call one day and Simpson was on the other line, they chatted and he told the man — then known just as an all-time great football player and celebrity — about his story from 1973.
Fracassi’s story isn’t an anomaly, though. Teammates praised Simpson, not just for his football talent. He won the 1974 Horrigan Award, given annually by the Pro Football Writers Association to the league or club official for his or her qualities and professional style in helping the pro football writers do their job.
“O.J. was one of the best teammates I ever had,” Bills Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure told the Gazette in 2022. “What happened after football, I don’t know. But that guy was very unselfish.”
A smile and engaging personality catapulted Simpson to stardom no Buffalo athlete has ever experienced, parlaying a career of running through defenses to running through the airport in a national Hertz car rental commercial, while working as an analyst on Monday Night Football and the NFL on NBC.
And then all of that was washed away on June 12, 1994.
The number of people who remember Simpson as a star football player or television personality is dwindling. Even those who can recall his career still identify Simpson with the double murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, a nationally televised car chase and a trial that gripped the entire country.
Simpson’s children announced on social media Thursday that he died at 76 years old due to cancer. A football legacy already relegated to the shadows may now soon fade away completely for a man known as a killer and a punchline.
“What happened has turned out to be just devastating for the families that were affected,” said Fracassi, who now hosts several shows on SiriusXM radio. “And, people that view him, probably I would think, they had their opinion that he was if he didn’t do it directly, he was definitely involved in the murder. So I think it’s one of those things where you have to look at it in its totality. His later life is not good and people are entitled their opinions, but I think you also have to tell the entire story, what it was before June 12, 1994.”
The problem with telling the whole story, though, as that most people don’t want to think of Simpson in any positive manner and others simply cannot because it seems callous to praise Simpson while the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman still mourn.
Simpson was 6-foot-2, 212 pounds — a big running back for his era — and still had legitimate world-class speed. In his time, Simpson was every bit the equal of Jim Brown, Walter Payton or any other great running back.
Although Simpson’s bust is still in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his name is still on the Wall of Fame at Highmark Stadium and his 1968 Heisman Trophy is still on display at USC, Simpson’s name never comes up in conversations about the great running backs. The Bills did not include Simpson — who was serving a 33-year prison sentence for armed robbery at the time — on their 50th anniversary team in 2009, and although he was named to the NFL 100 team in 2019, his exploits were glossed over in a few breaths.
There are no visuals of Simpson galloping down a sideline that can erase the image of him attempting to fit a black leather glove over his left hand in a court room, nor the image of a white Ford Bronco driving down a Los Angeles interstate with highway patrol in chase.
Fracassi was breaking down Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks on his Vegas-based nationally syndicated radio show when news of the Bronco chase broke on June 17, 1994. It was the moment Simpson’s star shifted away from beloved to reviled, as details about the murders and his history of abuse towards Brown became more widespread.
“It’s like a bit of a gut punch, but then you realize, at the same time, you don’t really know (Simpson),” Fracassi said. “You don’t know what goes on and then it just became one of those things where it became a colossal disappointment, where now instead of him being remembered for his brilliant football career and being the good guy perceptively and all the things you did on TV and movies, that you have to reconcile the fact that whether it was an acquittal or not, there’s this comportment that he was guilty.”
An acquittal in the criminal trial hasn’t changed the public majority’s belief that Simpson was guilty, aided by being found unanimously liable in a civil trial that ordered him to pay $54.5 million to the Goldman family. Simpson’s actions and lack of remorse also made it more difficult to be viewed as innocent man.
Simpson agreed to deals for a book and interviews regarding the murders, but Goldman’s father, Fred, sued for the rights and Simpson was eventually stripped of the rights by a federal judge. In addition to the 2007 armed robbery, Simpson was arrested on two other occasions and his home was searched by the FBI in 2001, suspecting ecstasy and money laundering.
When Simpson was paroled in 2017, travel and whom he could associate with was limited, but there was still little consideration to his past. Simpson began a Nov. 22, 2022, interview with Gazette — among the final interviews he would conduct — and began by bragging about his golf game, harkening back to quips about his vow’s to find the real killers, only to be photographed frequently on a golf course.
By that time Simpson had a desperation about him. Desperate to be important, to still be O.J., even though he was keenly aware that was impossible.
Simpson reveled in talking about himself as a football player, recalling his own greatness ahead of the 46th anniversary of the Bills-Lions Thanksgiving Day game in which he set a then-NFL record with 273 rushing yards, and when it was time to end the call, Simpson seemed disappointed.
Instead of living out retirement in a cosy mansion, Simpson defaulted on his mortgage and the house was foreclosed upon in 1998. And, as of 2022, the Goldmans alleged in court papers that Simpson still owed the family $96 million due to accrued interest from the civil trial.
So Simpson’s last grasp to live in front of a camera were videos posted — usually sitting in a sports bar — offering opinions ranging from daily events to fantasy football to his 873,000-plus followers on X.
“The only thing I have to say is it’s just further reminder of Ron being gone all these years,” Fred Goldman told NBC in a phone interview. “It’s no great loss to the world. It’s a further reminder of Ron’s being gone.”