 |
| Saturday, December 14 Updated: December 16, 11:52 AM ET Simpson says his life is not a prison ESPN.com |
||||||||||
|
NFL Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson told ESPN's Dan Patrick that he does not feel like he is living in a prison. "No. Hell, I go everywhere," Simpson told Patrick in a conversation that aired on SportsCenter on Sunday and will be part of a one-hour special on Monday at 9 p.m. ET. Simpson's life certainly changed eight years ago. The Hall of Fame running back was acquitted of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in one of the most highly-publicized trials in American history. He was later found liable for the killings in a civil trial. Simpson also said that he is not treated fairly in the media. Some of the highlights:
"She (Starr Jones) was working for King World and the first trip that I took for a celebrity tournament was to the Bahamas for a Sickle Cell function, and she followed, and she was there the whole time. And she said, 'O.J. this is amazing, people should see this, they should see how people at the airport react to you. I'm a reporter, O.J., I'm a reporter. People think you go places and you're a pariah -- hey, I'm going to let them know.' Well, I saw the report it was just a lukewarm kind of report and she called me and apologized to me, she said, 'Man, I took so much heat from my bosses, they said this is too positive, you have to balance it out.' Now I guarantee you I've had eight writers do stories on me or spend time with me and they had the same attitude, that, oh, we're going to set them straight, now that I've seen it with my own eyes. And later will call me apologizing because their editor thought it was too positive a story so they had to balance the story out." "I would tell you they almost never bring up the trial. I mean that's the weird thing. I mean, I rarely talk about the trial over a course of a week. Football. Quite often. Football, quite often, especially here in Miami." "Everywhere I go people are positive, and I travel a lot. I go everywhere. And you can spend a weekend with me and not hear one negative thing that is said toward me. And not one word about the trial ... I do tend to get women, often older women, who come up to me and say, 'Are you doing alright? How are the kids?'... I get a comment like that more than I'm a murderer or something like that, something negative." "I didn't travel much. I mean the first year I stayed real low key. I stayed under the radar. I stayed a lot at my friend's house. ... I remember I went to London and I had to speak at Oxford and I was truly amazed at the reception, and obviously when I got a couple of standing ovations from the Oxford student body after predictions that they were going to eat me alive (laughs), 'cause you know once again I put myself out there. I was really amazed that they were up on the trial, and the questions they asked were about facts of the trial and not pundit speculation (chuckles)." "I'll put my '75 and my '73, my 2,000 (yards) in a 14-game season up against anybody's. I wish I had two more games to play and we'd see how close these guys would be getting to the single-season rushing record." "I don't have a P.R. guy. Do you know how many P.R. companies have come to me? I don't have a P.R. guy, I don't need a P.R. guy, I don't want it, I'm not looking for it, and I'm not looking for press. Every time somebody chases me down and takes a picture of me somewhere and comes up and sticks a mic in front of my face, uh, the next day or week I'll be flipping the channels or flipping the dial and somebody says, 'he just did it for publicity.'"
"I've had two opportunities to get it back. I've had a friend in the entertainment world who would've bought it back for me and I told him no. There's more pressing things to spend that money on. If somebody gave it to me at my house one day, I would say thank you." "I don't think I've ever had an interview where I limited the interviewer on what the questions are. I mean, numerous times I wanted to debate various people from that whole trial and everything from the foreman, to Marcia (Clark) ... I've never limited anyone and I think I've answered all the questions as far as who committed the crime. At this stage it still sits with the other thousands of unsolved murders in L.A. County, since that fatal day in June of '94." "At this point? No. I think I care about the opinions of the people who know me. People who are around me and people who see me."
|
| |||||||||
Sunday Conversation
