Long before social media, O.J. Simpson was an influencer

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For those in middle age and beyond, our lives are signposted by a few shared, seismic events.

The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. The start of the first Gulf War. Sept. 11.

O.J. Simpson had the unusual distinction of creating another two of those events.

Where were you when he led police on a slow-motion car chase back to his own house?

And 16 months later, who were you with when the verdict at his double-murder trial was announced?

Mr. Simpson, who died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 76, was best known for everything that happened between those two moments – his arrest, trial and 1995 acquittal.

But he was in many ways the indicative man of his time – a star athlete, a pin-up, a gadabout, a pitchman and a movie star, as well as the most famous unconvicted American criminal since John Wilkes Booth.

Swaths of the current media landscape trace back to Mr. Simpson – everything from sports stars as human brands to true-crime podcasts. He can even take credit for launching the Kardashians.

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Before Mr. Simpson showed up at the University of Southern California in the late 1960s, athletes did one thing – athletics.

If you were good enough, you turned professional. If you were a good enough professional, you got famous and, just maybe, rich. Once you’d broken enough bones, you retired. You bought a restaurant or a car dealership and dined out on the glory days, but the spotlight slid elsewhere.

Mr. Simpson was one of the great running backs in NFL history. That he managed to capture the country’s imagination from a headquarters in Buffalo may have been the greatest testament to his charisma. He played 11 seasons, which is longer than most.

But unlike his predecessors, Mr. Simpson’s ambition did not end once his sports career was over. That’s when it began. He wanted to be in pictures. Any sort.

Mr. Simpson wasn’t a good actor, but he had the look. Most athletes can’t project warmth – their work requires a different tool box – but Mr. Simpson could. He was simpatico.

He became one of those celebrities who have no particular highlights, but manage to be everywhere. On ads, in bad TV shows, in movies of the week, or doing play-by-play. In the seventies and eighties, Mr. Simpson had one of the world’s most familiar faces. After a while, you began to forget that he’d played sports.

Around the time Andy Warhol was thinking about it, Mr. Simpson was famous for being famous. Long before social media, he was an influencer.

Mr. Simpson had one real success – a minor recurring role in the Naked Gun movies. His character, Detective Fred Nordberg, had a single gag – bad things were always happening to him.

Nordberg was forever stepping into a bear trap or planting his hand on a hot stove or going face-first into a wedding cake, whereas the man playing him had never put a foot wrong.

That is the highest level of fame – the one where regular people are expected to get inside jokes about you.

Before Mr. Simpson, celebrities also fell, but most of them were allowed to do it in private. You’d hear later that so-and-so had a drinking problem, or beat her kids, or was broke and desperate for years before the end came.

Mr. Simpson helped create a new media idea – charting the fall with just as much breathless attention as the rise.

Usually, you can see the fall coming a ways off. Mr. Simpson’s happened fast. One day, he was still America’s 220-pound sweetheart. Older, but not old. Popping up on your TV from time to time.

The next minute, he was a serial abuser who had possibly slaughtered his ex-wife and a hapless waiter who happened to be returning a pair of glasses to her.

From the distance of 30 years, it is difficult to describe the disbelief that met the news Mr. Simpson was being charged with two murders. That might have been one of those galvanizing cultural moments as well, had it not been followed almost immediately by his Nordberg-esque attempt at escape.

From that moment on, Mr. Simpson wasn’t on the news – he was the news. No election, no war, no cultural shift in our lifetimes has received the same blanket coverage or holistic interest.

In 1994-95, it was impossible to have no opinion on Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence. People could rattle off small details of the case. Another Simpson first – turning everyone, everywhere, into living-room detectives.

I watched the verdict in a campus pub at a party they’d put up flyers for. When he got off, half the room stood and cheered. I remember feeling that you never know what other people are thinking. This was a rare and, for me, chilling moment of transparency.

A lot of what you see on the internet these days – the tendency toward the most extreme positions, acidic debate, feelings over facts – started then.

As often happens, Mr. Simpson lost by winning. Though free, he was a pariah. Though not convicted criminally, he was sued into oblivion. After a farcical attempt at stealing his own sports memorabilia, he went to jail anyway. Having observed the fall until impact, the audience lost interest.

Years later, a pair of critically lauded TV shows – one a documentary, one a dramatization – about Mr. Simpson’s life and trial aired. How it must have galled him to see the critics finally praising shows that he was responsible for, but couldn’t be part of.

Watching it, it was alarming how quickly it all came back. I suspect many of us have a more detailed understanding of Mr. Simpson’s trial than some of the events in our own life. Yet we still have no idea how it turned out the way it did.

That is O.J. Simpson’s lasting contribution to a culture he helped redefine.

For those who were there when it happened, he was living proof that you can feel sure you know someone, or know what happened, or know how the people around you feel about it. But you don’t.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story said O.J. Simpson died Thursday. His family said he died on Wednesday.