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The Buffalo Bills will open up their new stadium in the 2027 season. One famous figure will not have his jersey, plague or history noted.
Again, free speech, corporation pressure and legacy farming.
So Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones are allowed to have legacies but not this one?
His criminal trial for theft is not the issue. It was the acquittal in the California vs. Orenthal James Simpson trial.
Simpson is one name football fans won’t be seeing at the team’s new stadium.
The new facility cost $2.1 billion and took three years to build, from groundbreaking to last week’s ribbon-cutting. Highmark Stadium honors the Bills’ past with a Wall of Fame featuring team legends — but Simpson, the team’s No. 1 draft pick in 1969, will be notably absent.
“We have made an organizational decision that he is not a fit to display inside our new stadium and family circle,” Pete Guelli, the team’s president of business operations, said in a statement.
The Bills were home to nine of Simpson’s 11 NFL seasons, during which he became the first NFL player in league history to rush for 2,000 or more yards in a single season. Simpson was widely regarded as the best running back of his era before he retired and made the transition to a broadcast career.
Simpson was celebrated for his football legacy until the 1990s, when his life took a dark turn.
In the summer of 1994, Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside her Los Angeles home. When police arrived to speak with Simpson after having discovered the bodies, he did not answer the door — and officers noticed a trail of blood leading from his car to his home.
Los Angeles County prosecutors filed murder charges and moved to arrest Simpson, but he fled, setting off the famous car chase in which he rode in the back of a white Ford Bronco as news helicopters tracked it across Southern California highways.
Simpson was acquitted during the 1995 criminal trial, which became known as the “Trial of the Century.” The case riveted the nation for months. Some defended Simpson, pointing to evidence his attorneys presented that suggested racism in the Los Angeles Police Department influenced the case. Others believed his wealth helped him get away with murder.
Though he was never convicted of murder, Simpson was later found liable for the deaths in a wrongful death civil suit brought by Goldman’s father.
Simpson’s reputation never recovered. In 2008 he was convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas after he targeted a sports memorabilia dealer — an incident he maintained was an attempt to reclaim items stolen from him. He was sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison and served the minimum before he was released on parole.
Simpson died of cancer at age 76.
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