Before becoming a controversial figure when he was charged with murder and acquitted, O.J. Simpson, who died Wednesday at the age of 76, was a breakout athlete who got his start in his hometown of San Francisco.
People who knew Simpson when he was growing up in Potrero Hill remember him as a star.
"We were very proud of what O.J. accomplished as a kid out of San Francisco, out of Potrero Hill," Simpson family friend Timothy Alin Simon said.
Simon remembered Simpson as a multi-talented athlete, first at Galileo High School and later at City College of San Francisco.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
"I remember one day my mother called me and said, 'Son, you need to get on Muni and come over and see because O.J. is playing basketball here,'" Simon said. "O.J. was a City College student at the time, but he was so famous."
From City College, Simpson was recruited to the University of Southern California, where he won the Heisman Trophy.
As a Buffalo Bill, he was a star running back and NFL MVP.
Simpson returned to his hometown to round out his NFL career with the San Francisco 49ers.
He became one of the first professional athletes to move into media, becoming a sports analyst and paid spokesman and starring in A-list movies.
Then came the scene of a white Ford Bronco driving down the freeways of Los Angeles in June 1994, disturbing images of the double murder scene of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in Brentwood, and then an acquittal after what became known as the "Trial of the Century."
"O.J. was a really popular, well known, well liked figure for a lot of Americans prior to the murder trial," California State University, East Bay history Professor Nolan Higdon said. "I think that's why the murder trial caught people so off guard."
Those events left an enduring image on an entire generation.
"Work stopped, people stopped everything to see what happened with this trial," Higdon said. "It's really difficult in a 2024 context to explain to people just how big of a deal this was 30 years ago."
After Simpson's acquittal, he was found liable for the murders in civil court, forcing him to turn over most of his future earnings to the victim's family.
Years later, he was tried and convicted in Las Vegas of armed robbery and kidnapping, serving nearly nine years in prison.
