OJ Simpson, Joe DiMaggio and the 30 Stockton
OJ Simpson grew up in San Francisco, but through most of his adult life, other than his two years with the 49ers, had little connection with the city.
In the early 1980s there was a friendly and garrulous Muni operator on the 30 Stockton who often gave a running commentary on parts of the city as he drove by. When he passed Galileo High School, he used to say “on your left is Galileo High School, alma mater of Joe DiMaggio, OJ Simpson and me.” That line was always good for a laugh back when OJ was a recently retired football star and well-known entertainment personality. He had not yet killed his wife or become part of what was billed as the “Trial of the Century.”
I began learning about football a few years after I became interested in baseball. This was the late 1970s I was already much more interested in talking baseball than discussing football, but it seemed whenever the topic turned to football, I heard the name of OJ Simpson.
I knew little about OJ other than that he played for a team on the other side of the country called the Bills, had the wonderful nickname “The Juice,” the difficult to spell or pronounce first name Orenthal, and that he wore number 32. I didn’t care enough about football to have a strong feeling about him and probably was only vaguely aware of what position on the gridiron he played.
By the time Simpson died last week at the age of 76, his football career was a footnote to his larger and much more disturbing story, but in the late 1970s, he was probably the most famous football player, and perhaps most famous athlete in America.
It was around this time that Simpson was traded to the 49ers. The 49ers were a pretty terrible team in the late 1970s, so although I was aware they were my favorite team, the few games I watched on television in those years were Raiders playoff games. Simpson did little to help those 9ers teams who went 2-14 in both seasons he was on the team. At that time, I still had no idea of OJ’s San Francisco roots.
The rest of Simpson’s life story is well known. Through the 1980 and early 1990s he became an even bigger entertainment figure primarily because of his role in the Naked Gun films, but other than seeing him in a few of those movies and commercials, I pretty much never thought about him. And then, in June of 1994, while still in graduate school, I found myself at a party in New York when suddenly the people watching the Knicks playoff game called the rest of us over. For the next hour or so we watched the now famous slow chase of OJ Simpson’s in his white Ford Bronco. Watching somebody drive slowly through the freeways of Los Angeles was about as exciting as it sounds.
After the chase, I did not follow the events very closely, but in those years you couldn’t avoid hearing the grisly details of the murders that Simpson committed and the trial that followed. The story murder of OJ’s wife Nicole Simpson’s, Kato Kaelin the witness who seemed a caricature of a bemused Southern California surfer, the lawyers on both sides, “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” the racial politics of the trial and how opinions of OJ varied were all ubiquitous in the media during those years.
At some point as I only distantly paid attention to the crimes, trial and eventual imprisonment and then parole of OJ, I became more aware of his San Francisco roots. Simpson grew up in housing projects in Potrero Hill in the southeast part of the city and then became a star football player while attending high school a few blocks from the San Francisco Bay. However, while Simpson was from San Francisco, other than the two years he spent with the 49ers at the end of his career, he never seemed to have a strong relationship with the city.
Simpson spent much of his professional career in upstate New York. After spending two years at City College of San Francisco, Simpson’s college and post-playing years were primarily in Los Angeles. By the time he killed his wife, OJ was more of an Angeleno than a San Franciscan.
Decades after he retired, Joe DiMaggio, the greatest ballplayer ever to come out of Galileo, or San Francisco, still spent a lot of time in the city. He could be sometimes seen at his family’s restaurant at the wharf, was mentioned more than a few times in the column of the legendary San Francisco journalist Herb Caen and waited in line with other residents of the Marina District following the 1989 earthquake. Simpson may have come back to San Francisco from time-to-time, but he was never close to being a San Francisco institution the way DiMaggio was.
Simpson was, on balance, a pretty dreadful person. He murdered his wife and her friend, managed to slip out of doing time for that crime and then went on to get arrested and convicted for armed robbery when he participated in stealing football memorabilia from a collector in 2007. His story has been chronicled extensively, but his connections to San Francisco always seem to remain in the background. Back on the 30 Stockton, when that Muni operator mentioned Simpson’s connection to San Francisco and to Galileo, we felt a sense of pride, but even by then the Juice had walked away from San Francisco, and for that we can be grateful.
Joe DiMaggio, although not a murderer like OJ, was also a pretty miserable person. Greedy, unfriendly to fans, and likely a tax cheat. You mention that he "waited in line with other residents of the Marina District following the 1989 earthquake". If you read Richard Ben Cramer's excellent biography, however, it was for far less noble reasons: Joe was waiting in line to obtain special police and fire clearance to enter his house to collect a garbage bag filled with $600,000 in cash, money that was unreported ftom autograph show signings. In contrast to Ted Williams, who had a surly public image, but was very kind in private, DiMaggion was awful. A failure as a husband and a father; multiple infidelities with prostitutes; friendships with mobsters, including Frank Costello, who set up a trust fund at the Bowery Savings Bank that grew with every visit to a mob-connected nightclub; and a personal cheapness so profound that no matter how much money he made, he hated spending any of it and relished receiving freebies.
Again, not as bad as OJ, but not a glorious representative of the great city of San Francisco (unlike his brother, Dom)
Great article! Soperb writing. Wonderful way to start the day. You on the other hand are indeed a true San Franciscan!