O.J. Simpson Changed Everything

For those of us born after the baby boom, June 17, 1994, was nothing less than our JFK moment. 

Where were you during the O.J. Simpson chase? The night that law enforcement trailed Simpson—the wildly popular NFL Hall of Famer, sports commentator, and sometimes actor who goofed around in those Naked Gun movies, who was now incomprehensibly a fugitive from justice, wanted for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman—in a white Bronco, up a Southern California freeway, on live television?

Here’s one of a million tales: I was gathered in a parish center of my neighborhood Catholic Church in the Bronx, N.Y., with a group of fellow teenage friends, to watch Game 5 of the NBA Finals between our beloved local team, the New York Knicks, and the Houston Rockets. But rather than share the communal joy that only sports can deliver—the Knicks won, but the game was an overwhelming afterthought—we all lived through, together, a sort of prurient nightmare. Would O.J. Simpson kill himself live, in front of 95 million people tuning in?