“At one point I said to Ozzy and Sharon, ‘You guys should do a show where they just follow you around with a camera. I would watch that because of the sheer craziness of you two.’ So their reality show was basically an idea introduced in one of my interviews…I never missed an episode.” (from Howard Stern Comes Again)
Ever since PBS made a show about a dysfunctional family in the early 1970s, there has been a curious fascination about Reality Television. How much of it is actually real? How much is actually scripted? Who would want to put their private lives on full display for the world to see?
For thirty years, reality shows focused exclusively on ordinary people outside the gated communities of Hollywood. That all changed in 2002.
Ever since the successful launch of the Real World a decade earlier, MTV had been slowly transitioning away from playing music videos. As the show kept being renewed every year, the channel starting thinking about expanding the concept.
In 2000, Ozzy Osbourne and his family were featured in an episode of Cribs, the long running series that takes viewers inside lavish celebrity homes. “Then, about a year later,” recalled MTV executive Lois Curren to Entertainment Weekly in their April 19, 2002 cover story, “we had dinner with Sharon [Ozzy’s wife and manager] and the kids. We just laughed so hard over Sharon’s stories that we said, ‘That’s the show. You guys.'”
“I thought it would be like Absolutely Fabulous,” Sharon told EW in the same issue. “Like something popular but only with a small number of people. I had NO idea it would ever be like this.”
As it turns out, that humblebrag would be dead-on accurate. When The Osbournes debuted in March 2002, it became an instant sensation. 5 million viewers tuned in for the premiere, rather small for network Television but record breaking for cable, and that number would only grow throughout the first season. Three more would follow.
Suddenly, the first family of heavy metal were all household names meriting breathless media coverage, a mix of delight (from fans new & old and many professional critics) and harsh condemnation (from the likes of noted scold and future convicted serial rapist Bill Cosby). The show was so popular Ozzy & Sharon were invited to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner where then-President George W. Bush joked that his elderly mom Barbara was a fan. The former Black Sabbath frontman stood, laughed, blew a kiss and smiled in appreciation. All of it captured by MTV’s omnipresent cameramen.
Three months after the first episode hooked viewers into becoming regular watchers, The Osbournes Family Album was released by Sony. Clocking in at exactly 57 minutes, the CD features a mix of songs chosen by the family as well as selected dialogue clips from the show.
Here’s the thing. There’s no mention of the bonus audio anywhere in the track listing or the liner notes. Not only that, there’s no track numbers noted next to the songs that are listed. What we have here is a rarity in the history of recorded music. The Osbournes Family Album is a mystery album where nothing is where it’s supposed to be.
Track 1 does not feature Pat Boone’s version of Ozzy’s first solo single Crazy Train (that’s on track 2). Instead, you hear Ozzy during a radio interview talking about him:
“I used to live next door to Pat Boone [for three years] and I gotta tell you, people think Pat Boone’s a nerd and I always confess I was in that category for a while until I met him, you know?”
While Ted Stryker, a then-afternoon DJ (now one of the morning guys) on KROQ, the LA modern rock station (who several years later became an on-screen DJ for Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime talk show for a brief time), listens and says, “Right,” a couple of times, Ozzy finishes his thought:
“And he really is, I mean living next door to The Osbournes, bricks goes [sic], rocks goes [sic] through the window and cats goes [sic] flying out the door and he never complained once.”
This is taken from the beginning of the fourth episode, Won’t You Be My Neighbour?, the one where the family gets into a bizarre feud with their noisy neighbours next door. (Remember Sharon throwing a ham over to their side?)
For some reason, parts of Ozzy’s opening comment have been trimmed from the CD. In the show, he actually begins, “In my old days, I used to…” and then everything is exactly the same as it is on the CD.
Following Boone’s dorky 1997 cover (its only appearance on The Osbournes is at the start of the second segment of episode six), which sounds like bad spy movie music and features back-up singers actually making “choo choo” noises (a much better abbreviated take featuring Lewis Lamedica became the show’s theme), we’re onto track 3 and another uncredited audio clip featuring Ozzy:
“I love you all. I love you more than life itself. But you’re all fucking mad!”
One of the most famous soundbites from the show (it’s reprinted in the liner notes with “fucking” censored as “f*@%ing”), this is swiped from the premiere episode, A House Divided, where the family moves into their new mansion in California. It’s actually heard twice in the show. The first time during the cold open where we first see Ozzy, Sharon and two of their three kids. At the one minute, four second mark Ozzy utters his comment to 15-year-old Jack in the kitchen.
Near the end of the show, we get a fuller context for the comment just before it reappears at 19 minutes and 14 seconds. In what will be a recurring theme throughout the season, Jack and sister Kelly are not getting along. When Jack comes into the living room/kitchen to complain about her ditching him and one of her friends at a club they were all hanging out at one night, Ozzy wonders why he won’t go to Sharon. Jack explains he already did that and despite promising to sort things out between them, according to him, she’s done “fuck-all.”
Not at all interested in this sort of drama, a lovingly indifferent Ozzy levels with his son and offers his familiar comment while Get Me Through, a single from his 2001 Down To Earth album that he performs live on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show on the same episode, plays in the background. The clip reappears a third time in the season finale during a highlight reel at the 20:17 mark.
Track 4 features Ozzy’s pretty cautionary tale Dreamer (which is sampled on episodes six and seven). Also spawned from Down To Earth (a reference to Black Sabbath’s original name), this plaintive plea for peace and harmony in spite of ongoing anguish and widespread planetary damage was obviously inspired by John Lennon’s Imagine, Ozzy’s favourite all-time song, which coincidentally enough appears on track 12.
The next unlisted audio track is on track 5. In another famous exchange, Ozzy lectures his underage teenage kids just before they go out to the Roxy, the legendary rock club in LA:
“Please don’t [unintelligible] get drunk or, or get stoned tonight. Don’t drink, don’t take drugs tonight.”
Kelly softly insists, “No, no, I don’t do that. I don’t do that.”
“Please,” a concerned Ozzy replies before finishing with, “And if you have sex wear a condom.”
This happens at the 17 minute, 31 second mark of the season premiere. A pink-haired Kelly actually winces after Ozzy’s insistent birth control remark.
In the actual episode, while looking at Jack, Ozzy explains his reasoning, “cause I’m fuckin’ pissed off that I can’t,” which isn’t heard on the CD. The following “Don’t be,” has also been cut for the CD version just before his “Don’t drink” comment.
An abbreviated portion of Ozzy’s comments – the first two lines, then the condom remark – are reprised during the clip montage in episode ten, the season finale, at 18:58.
As was later revealed, both Jack and Kelly had already been developing terrible drug addictions for years. In fact, in one episode, realizing something is very wrong, Sharon and Ozzy have a meeting with them about it, a rare serious moment for the series. But the kids are in denial and will remain out of control until both check into rehab a couple of years later. In 2003, Jack opened up to MTV about his problems. (Recently in 2021, Kelly revealed she’s relapsed.) Ozzy would publicly blame himself and Sharon for not being stricter.
Track 6 is Kelly’s energetic, rocked-up cover of Madonna’s Papa Don’t Breach featuring two members of Incubus (in season two, she performs it at the MTV Video Music Awards with a different backing band, her first ever live gig) which was also a Buried Song on her first album, Shut Up. (You’ll find it on track 11 with 3:25 left on the CD.) Her mostly absent sister Aimee, seen exactly once in a family photo in the opening shot but thereafter with a blurred face (curiously, in one instance, the same family photo later on) and only heard twice, was originally offered the chance to sing it but passed. The Osbourne Family Album is actually dedicated to her:
“This album is dedicated to Aimee Osbourne, to let you know Aimee, we are all so proud of you and love you unconditionally. Mom, Dad, Kelly & Jack.”
Unlike me, most critics were unimpressed, including a fictional, award-winning TV pimp. On the ninth episode of the first season of Chappelle’s Show, which originally aired on March 19, 2003, in the fourth and final skit, Dave Chappelle plays Silky Johnson, the Playa Hater Of The Year. While he looks at a photo of the Osbourne family, regarding Kelly, he zings, “I like the song the girl sings, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’. I got a new song for ya, bitch. It’s called ‘Daughter Don’t Sing’.”
Track 7 actually features two clips with a bit of silence in between. In the first one, we’re in the middle of Kelly complaining to Ozzy about her mostly unseen older sister Aimee booking her an appointment without her permission.
“No,” Kelly says at the top, three minutes and nine seconds into episode four. She’s responding to Ozzy asking his youngest daughter, “Did you have an appointment?” The family’s Australian nanny Melinda is the one who says, “It wasn’t a practical joke.” In the actual show, this is a response to Ozzy’s suggestion of a sisterly prank. Both of Ozzy’s remarks aren’t heard on the CD.
Kelly then complains, “She was gonna send me to the dentist. She was gonna get me a new car. She was gonna send me to a fucking gynaecologist. I’m like, ‘Aimee, my teeth, my car, my body, my vagina, my business.’”
At the time, Kelly had an obsession with talking about her genitals to the point where her own mom wonders perhaps half-jokingly if she should’ve named her Vagina Osbourne instead. (The vagina obsession continues into season two.)
This is part of a much longer conversation that begins just before the two and a half minute mark and runs roughly three and a half minutes altogether. Its placement next to Papa Don’t Preach is deliberate. In the actual episode, Ozzy wonders if Kelly has been sexually active (she does admit to a previous UTI) which she denies in smirking embarrassment. He then jokes that if she does get pregnant, he’ll do some damage to the guy responsible. He picks up a phallic-looking object from the kitchen to drive home the point.
Kelly’s last line, minus her sister’s name, reappears in the season overview segment at the end of episode 10 at 19:04.
The tension between the two siblings continues all these years later. In a 2021 appearance on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Kelly revealed they’ve stopped speaking to each other altogether.
A couple seconds later on the CD, Ozzy is suddenly heard screaming, “Rock and rolllll!!!!!”
42 seconds into the premiere episode, you’ll watch the prince of darkness climb out of a golf cart and stare into the camera as he shouts this. It pops up again in the very last shot at 20:58. It reappears at the 6:01 mark of episode three as we see the rest of the scene play out. Ozzy simply goes from the cart to an awaiting plane. Later that episode, close to nine and a half minutes in, he screams the phrase again as he climbs out of a helicopter.
Track 8 features the original version of You Really Got Me by The Kinks, one of the first songs that turned Ozzy onto rock and roll. It remains a scrappy blast of teenage lust.
Track 9 is also two show clips edited into one. It begins with a gasping Kelly complaining to her mother:
“Oh my God, Mom! The valet guy farted in my car.”
Sharon (appalled): “Ohhh! Ohhhh! I hate that!”
Kelly: “No. No…”
This is also from episode four and follows a longer conversation about their annoyingly rude neighbours at 11:13. Then, suddenly, Sharon takes a shot at a certain famous domestic goddess:
“Martha Stewart can lick my scrotum.”
This is actually from the start of the fifth episode Tour Of Duty as Sharon complains about working in the kitchen. It’s heard right at the start of the show at the 12-second mark. She then turns to the cameraperson and sincerely asks, “Do I have a scrotum?”
System Of A Down’s eccentric and offbeat cover of Black Sabbath’s Snowblind from Vol. 4 (in the liner notes, Jack felt it was overlooked) follows on track 10. Never included on any of their proper albums, the song originally appeared on the 2000 tribute sequel, Nativity In Black II. Snowblind also became a B-Side to their original singles Aerial (strictly the vinyl release in 2002) and Lonely Day (in 2006).
Another quick clip of Ozzy screaming appears on track 11. “Stop shouting at me!” he yells at a silent Jack in his den for some unknown reason 19 minutes and 37 seconds into the opening episode of this first season.
After John Lennon’s memorable left-wing manifesto concludes on track 12, Ozzy’s youngest son is heard asserting some questionable science about his generation:
“Studies show a teenager’s brain doesn’t really become functional until past 10:30, I think.” It’s not clear in that moment if he means a.m. or p.m. but judging by how often he stays out late at night (his parents give him a 2:30 curfew which he rarely follows), it sure sounds like the latter.
He then makes some weird animal noises (while uttering the word “dirty”), something that frequently drives Ozzy and Kelly batty throughout the season and even on the looping scene shown on the menu page of disc one of the first season DVD box set. The whole clip is heard 25 seconds into the premiere episode.
Track 14 showcases one of Aimee’s all-time favourite songs, Drive by The Cars. Sobering and reflective, it has held up remarkably well since its original release in 1984. In the liner notes, Sharon explains that a young Aimee developed, shall we say, an unhealthy attachment to the track:
“Aimee was obsessed with the song to the point where Ozzy and I had to play it for her at least twenty times a day to keep her happy.”
Listening to the song happily reminds Sharon of watching her eldest daughter “as a baby dancing around to the music,” even though it’s a slow-paced ballad.
Track 15 takes us back to the fourth episode as Sharon tries to dissuade Ozzy from throwing firewood towards the house of their new enemies:
“Sharon: “Ozzy!”
Ozzy: “What?”
Sharon: “No, no, no, no, no, here’s the fruit! [pause] Ozzy! Not wood! [pause] You can be picked up for manslaughter! [chuckling through last word] [glass breaks]”
This exchange happens near the end of the show at 19:53. By the way, Ozzy didn’t actually break a window. (MTV added a sound effect.) According to Sharon on the DVD commentary, it was actually open and landed on the neighbours’ coffee table. Since the original airing, in that same commentary Jack reveals relations between the two warring parties actually improved and there were no further confrontations.
Starsailor, a fave of Kelly’s, performs a faithful live version of Good Souls, their engaging hit single from their 2002 debut Love Is Here, on track 16. The UK band played it during their August 28, 2001 gig at the famous Troubadour club in Los Angeles, the same venue that turned Elton John into a star on the rise more than 30 years earlier. It’s an exclusive to this release.
Next up on track 17 is a very relatable Ozzy rant about one of the family pets:
“Who’s pissed…who’s pissed on my fucking carpet? That bastard fucking dog, man. I’m gonna throw ya in the fucking pool. Where is he? Get the fuck out of my house, you fucking…get the fuck out. Go on. Get the fuck out! [opens sliding door and lets out dog] It’s that fucking terrorist, he’s part of Bin Laden’s gang.”
This is from episode two Bark At The Moon and is easily the funniest clip on the whole CD. It begins at the 9:30 mark. After asking, “Why do they do it, Sharon?”, the response is actually spliced in from another clip seven minutes and 21 seconds later:
Sharon: “It’s the therapist. And she’s gonna help us with the dog.”
Ozzy: “No, darling, you don’t need a therapist, you just need to get up at 7 and open the fucking door!”
Part of Ozzy’s opening line (“…who’s pissed on my…carpet?”) returns in the season finale as part of the overall wrap-up at 18:51.
As for the therapist, who makes a brief cameo, her efforts to prevent future in-house dumping by the family’s canine pets (the cats actually go regularly in a litter box) are a predictable failure.
Despite only being in his mid-teens, following an internship at Virgin Records, Jack had somehow been hired by Epic Records, a label owned by Sony, to do A&R to scope out fresh talent. In the first season, we only see one such signing: Dillusion, the same band Kelly takes credit for discovering on the show much to Jack’s irritation. On track 18, this derivative post-grunge outfit dust off the old soft/loud routine, a technique Nirvana perfected a decade earlier, while performing a forgettable song called Mirror Image. In the liner notes, Jack says he had been “developing” them for “over a year” but ultimately, the band would not survive. In fact, this would mark their only official major label release.
A self-titled self-released six-song EP, which excludes Mirror Image, would be available through the band’s official website in 2003. Unfortunately, the website no longer exists. (You can’t even call up a cached version.) In 2004, two songs ended up on an Australian compilation entitled Adelaide Energy – 100% Local Produce. There has been nothing since.
Moving on to track 19, the next unlisted audio track:
Ozzy: “I’ve gotta box of, box of those Viagra, I’m all loaded and I fire blanks, you know?”
Jack: “Aww. [singing in a high voice] La, la, la, la, laaaa!”
Sharon: “No, but he started to take Viagra and we’d wait and wait for it to work. [Ozzy chuckles] I’d fall asleep…
Ozzy: “And I’ll be a…”
Sharon: “…and he’d be there with a big boner and I’m fast asleep and [lightly laughing] he can’t wake me up!”
Ozzy: “I go [louder], ‘ Sharon! I’m ready!’ [Sharon lightly chuckles] She’s going, ‘Get lost!’ [Sharon laughs] I’m lying there like I’m camping with a tentpole. [Sharon laughs]
Jack [singing in a high voice]: “La, la, la, la, laaaa!”
Ozzy and Sharon are discussing their sex life on a 2001 episode of the KROQ radio series Loveline with Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla, as replayed on episode 3, Like Father Like Daughter. (Additional footage from the interview, more than 20 minutes worth, is included on disc two of the first season DVD box set. Ozzy reveals that his anti-depressant medication made him impotent, hence the need for Viagra.)
Jack isn’t in the studio with them. He’s listening with Melinda the nanny in one of the family cars because they aren’t able to listen in the house. Grossed out by the frank conversation, Jack sticks his fingers in his ears and starts singing to block out the objectionable revelations.
In an outtake found on the first season DVD box set, Sharon frankly discusses giving Ozzy a blowjob in front of a repulsed Kelly, who like Jack, already has a problem with her parents kissing in public.
Eric Clapton’s bland tribute to his abused ex-wife Pattie Boyd, Wonderful Tonight, a favourite of The Osbourne parents, is found on track 20. In the liner notes, they declare it “the best love song ever recorded”.
Despite being perhaps the dullest single Slowhand ever released (and apparently a cautionary tale about drunk driving), the song continues to live on through movies and other TV shows. (Curiously, it’s not heard at all during The Osbournes.) Its most famous use was at the end of the Friends episode where Chandler and Monica get engaged (it’s the song they dance to during the closing credits). Less well-known, because it’s only faintly heard, is its mercifully brief presence in an early scene from Captain Phillips as Tom Hanks checks his email on his ship before the hijacking by Somali pirates.
Ozzy is next heard screaming his wife’s name on track 21. This is heard at 12:30 of the Thanksgiving-themed seventh episode Get Stuffed (he screams her name again 28 seconds later) when the singer is outside his property trying to catch the reluctant Puss, the eldest of the family cats, in order to bring her back inside the family mansion. He doesn’t have much luck hence the familiar cry of “Sharon!!!!”
Track 22 features Ozzy’s only American Top 40 single, Mama, I’m Coming Home (co-written with Lemmy from Motorhead) from the 1991 No More Tears album, a fitting tribute to Sharon who frequently calls him Daddy, sometimes in an annoying baby voice, on the TV show. Heartfelt and appropriately bittersweet, it alludes to Sharon saving Ozzy’s career when he was fired from Black Sabbath in the late 70s while also acknowledging their turbulent history. In the liner notes, Sharon recalls that a lonesome, homesick Ozzy wrote it during a long tour and didn’t record it until after he sent his wife the lyrics to look over. “This is my favourite Ozzy song,” she declares.
A brief snippet of Mama, I’m Coming Home is heard close to the nine-minute mark of episode six.
Track 23 captures a moment from midway through season one. Ozzy was preparing for a Christmas show at the end of 2001 and was not exactly pleased with some of the proposed special effects he was looking at when he walked into the venue:
As his wife sings the title of the old Don Ho song Tiny Bubbles (not seen on TV), a grumpy Ozzy remarks:
“Bubbles! Oh, come on, Sharon! I’m fucking Ozzy Osbourne, the prince of fucking darkness! Evil, evil, what’s fucking evil about a buttload of fucking bubbles, then?”
He’s got a point. This famous comment is heard in the fifth episode at 15:46. It returns for the montage in the season finale, five episodes later at 19:59.
The original version of Crazy Train pops up on track 24. (Live portions from a couple of Ozzy’s 2001 concerts appear at the end of episode five and the start of episode six. Episode five also features a brief band rehearsal of it.) First heard on Ozzy’s solo debut Blizzard Of Oz in 1980, it features the late great Randy Rhoads shredding like a motherfucker all the way through. A modest success during its initial release (rock radio embraced it more than Top 40), it has since become a Jock Jam, a frequent rabblerousing crowd pleaser for sporting events like NHL games. A precursor to Dreamer, it also pleads for humanity to come together while also correctly predicting a lot of personal woes for Ozzy. It might be his greatest single.
Track 25 is actually two clips separated by a bit of silence.
It begins with Kelly screaming while being chased by Jack around the family’s pool table as seen 1:37 into episode six, Break A Leg, and again 20:22 near the end of the season finale. In the actual moment, she screams twice, the second time a bit longer. The one-second scream on the CD is followed by an explosion. This appears to be the moment from episode five Tour Of Duty when Ozzy tests out the firework cannon on his Christmas sleigh for his Merry Mayhem show at the 13:59 mark. It’s seen again at the 18:40 mark of the season finale, Dinner With Ozzy.
Then, Sharon asks her family a question:
“Did anybody feed the dogs? [water running]”
Kelly angrily retorts, “NO!”
This part can be seen eight minutes and 33 seconds into episode 2. This exchange is reprised at 18:41 of the finale.
Immediately following is an unrelated quip from Ozzy:
“Maybe we have too many dogs?”
Same episode, but it’s actually said much earlier at 4:51. This is actually snipped from a longer comment. Ozzy begins by saying, “The Osbourne family is a great family of wasting money and saying, ‘Well…,” which leads to his line from the CD, followed by “and we’ll throw the cat in just for fun.” Ozzy isn’t pleased that Sharon has adopted another feline despite saying she wouldn’t.
Right after he says it, you’ll hear a bunch of the family dogs panting and then Lola the bulldog pukes, the latter of which is just after the 17-minute mark in episode eight. All of this is seen and heard again in the season finale round-up starting at 18:41. Seemingly reacting to Lola, an unseen Ozzy moans “Oh.”
In that tenth episode, Ozzy is interviewed while sampling a multi-coursed meal. His comment, “That’s the way we are. [pause] We’re, we’re the Osbournes. [pause] I love it.”, is the very last scene before the end credits roll at 20:55.
The final song is Chevelle’s Family System on track 26. An effective cross between Tool and Incubus, it’s the only song not commented on in the liner notes. The opening track from their breakthrough 2002 album Wonder What’s Next (which ultimately went double platinum), the band would end up playing the 2003 Ozzfest tour. Still active today, they released their most recent album, Niratias, in March 2021.
The compilation concludes with one last clip from the TV show on track 27. As usual, Jack and Kelly are sniping at each other. Both accuse the other of name dropping their famous dad to get into clubs. As Jack tries to defend himself (“Yeah, but…”), a peeved Sharon intervenes:
“I’ll tell you what. I’m Ozzy Osbourne’s wife. Now shut the fuck up and go to bed.”
Sharon’s comment, preceded by Jack’s protest, is heard in the premiere episode 22 seconds in. All the excised digs that lead up to this moment are shown later on in the 14th minute.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, June 1, 2021
2:03 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 
The Death Of OJ Simpson
Cancer is awful. It killed my mother. It nearly killed my Dad. And now, it has claimed another victim. Cancer just killed OJ Simpson.
Most people deeply affected by his crimes will understandably celebrate his demise. I certainly will not miss him. But cancer is an insidious disease. I’ve seen firsthand how it gradually destroys a life, how it painstakingly sucks all the joy out of even the most positive, upbeat person like my Mom. And how chemotherapy drained the energy out of my Dad. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, even a murderer like OJ Simpson.
And make no mistake about it. He killed his ex-wife. He destroyed Ron Goldman. We’ve seen the photos. We know the evidence. Remove all the racial politics of the time. There’s no doubt what Simpson did.
There’s a scene in the original Barbershop where Cedric The Entertainer’s flamboyant character, known for his outspokenness, blurts out what everybody in Ice Cube’s shop is thinking but won’t say:
“We know OJ did it.”
Everybody knew.
The Simpson murder trial was a spectacle, not genuine justice. It was about misplaced loyalty towards a man who did not want to be seen as Black until he was in trouble. It was about a historically wronged community who picked the wrong champion to defend, one they knew deep down was completely unworthy of their support, all to stick it to a system of white supremacy that protected him the entire time and remains mostly unchanged.
To understand who OJ Simpson was and how he came to be, you only need to see one film, the Oscar-winning documentary OJ: Made In America, one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time.
Over the course of eight gripping hours, we learn so much about one of the most consequential public figures in history, a man who grew up in a broken home and then went on to break two more of his own.
The story of OJ Simpson is the story of a man who grew up with no boundaries, who spent his dysfunctional childhood mostly left alone with his friends unsupervised because his exhausted, hardworking, divorced mother needed to take on three jobs just to keep him fed, housed and clothed.
His estranged father was gay, a revelation that had a profound impact on how he viewed masculinity and which his ex-wife Nicole Brown believed was a major factor in his horrendous abuse towards her.
Simpson came to fame, of course, as a young football star destined for the NFL where he would thrive as a running back despite never winning a Super Bowl. Although he hated the bitterly cold winters in Buffalo, the team he played for the most, it never affected his game. He retired a legend.
Coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Simpson was a shrewd operator and a moral coward. While other Black athletes were prominent in the civil rights movement putting their own careers on the line for racial justice and equality, Simpson calculatedly avoided being associated with them. He infamously asserted, “I’m not Black, I’m OJ.” And he openly used racial epithets against other African Americans he wanted nothing to do with.
Like many sociopaths, he was charming and likeable. It led to a pioneering and highly lucrative endorsement deal with Hertz rent-a-car. He was seen as completely non-threatening to white America who openly embraced him. As he ran through airport after airport in TV ad after TV ad, delighted honkies would shout, “Run, OJ, run!”
He made movies like Capricorn One and The Naked Gun Trilogy. His success on the field led to a second life as a sideline reporter for NFL broadcasts. He seemed to live a charmed life.
You had to read The National Enquirer to learn the truth like the time he beat up Nicole on New Year’s Eve 1989 which was not picked up by more respectable mainstream media.
It wasn’t until four and a half years later when he murdered her and Ron Goldman in a terrifyingly intense rage that we all learned what the Enquirer had uncovered this entire time. He was no hero. He was garbage.
OJ: Made In America offers another telling moment about Simpson’s treatment of Nicole right from the very start of their relationship. On their first date, he was so rough with her that her clothes were all torn and ripped. Try as she did to love him as he was, once that was impossible she tried even harder to leave him, finally divorcing him and moving on with a new partner.
We don’t know very much about Simpson’s first marriage to a Black woman which also ended in divorce. Did he abuse her, too? As far as we know, he didn’t which isn’t unusual, by the way. Toxic men don’t necessarily abuse all their partners.
But when it came to Nicole, OJ couldn’t let go. He began stalking her, even watching her be intimate with her new beau from outside her own window. After reaching his breaking point, Simpson successfully disposed of the murder weapon, a large knife, but left behind a trail of blood that sadly was not enough to convict him in the eyes of a mostly Black jury with a misguided agenda to keep him out of prison. Fuck you, Mark Fuhrman.
The OJ Simpson story is also one of uncomfortable irony, the story of a Black man who wanted to seamlessly blend in with white America, who wanted nothing to do with Black causes, who was actually good friends with a number of LAPD officers both white and Black.
While white America was enraged by his violence, Black America, for the most part, was in denial, hoping for once that one of their own would not be locked away. But he wasn’t one of their own. He was OJ. He was a wife beater and a double murderer, an obscenely wealthy star who basked in his own undeserved immunity. He was only Black when he needed outside support.
I will never forget October 3, 1995. I was in College at the time hanging out at our cable FM radio station. Someone came in saying they were about to announce the verdict so we all rushed out and hurried to the end of the hall where a staircase led to a lounge where students hung out in between classes.
There were no seats available so we had to stand and bend over uncomfortably just to see the TV. There was an impatient hush amongst the crowd. Surely, he’s fucked, I thought.
He wasn’t. As soon as the jury foreman stumbled out the not guilty verdict an offensive and collective cheer rang out like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I was so fucking disgusted.
We had a closed circuit TV station that had monitors all over the school. They usually broadcasted college sports when they weren’t showcasing computer graphics announcing college events and activities. But that day every monitor was tuned to the trial on CNN.
As I walked past one, Simpson’s obnoxiously smiling face was still on TV so I gave it the finger, a powerless gesture that didn’t change anything. But it was how I felt, how a lot of us felt including a number of dissenting Black folks who may or may not have been as vocal. It was a lonely position since it curiously felt like we were in the minority.
Three years later, Simpson would finally meet his match in court. He would lose a civil trial that was brilliantly litigated by Daniel Petrocelli who later co-wrote an excellent book about the experience. Snippets of his preliminary hearing testimony would later air in a terrific A&E doc that showed just how badly the Los Angeles DA’s office bungled their own prosecution.
There were a couple of things Petrocelli and his team uncovered that Marcia Clark and company missed. Simpson had written a book in the 70s where he bragged in his typical cavalier fashion that he was a very good liar, that it came easily to him.
And then, there were the shoes. Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman’s killer left behind bloody shoeprints at the murder scene just outside her house. The shoes turned out to be really expensive Bruno Magli’s that only a few hundred people were wearing at the time. When confronted by Petrocelli, OJ claimed he would never wear such “ugly-ass shoes”.
But the lawyer had an extensive amount of photos of him wearing them at numerous NFL football games as he was performing his duties as a sideline reporter for NBC. I’ll never forget the bewildered look OJ gave when Petrocelli showed him the photos. His eyes widened considerably. If only this had happened at the criminal trial.
Simpson wasn’t exactly warmly embraced following these two cases. No one in Hollywood would hire him for parts (his last legitimate gig, an early 1994 pilot for a cancelled series about navy seals, remains unreleased) so he would have to take whatever cheap, demeaning gig he could get.
The most memorable was a ghostwritten book bizarrely named If I Did It. Because he owed the Goldmans tens of millions from the civil case, they took ownership eventually re-releasing it with the If shrunk within the top of the next word I and adding the subtitle “Confessions Of The Killer.” Simpson asserted he had an accomplice named Charlie who tried to talk him out of confronting Nicole and that he conveniently blacked out during her actual murder so he couldn’t actually confess to anything specific.
Judith Regan, the book’s publisher, then sat down with him for a TV interview, the very idea of which completely pissed off so many people, including the Goldmans, the Fox network foolishly yanked it, effectively cancelling its broadcast. Regan was understandably furious. She said she did it hoping he would admit culpability. It would eventually be aired more than a decade later on the same network. The increasingly weird Simpson did not come off as innocent or credible.
And then over a decade later, after numerous screw-ups that in two instances led to a couple of light fines, he fucked up again in the dumbest of ways. OJ and a few of his goons decided to confront a sports memorabilia seller who was in possession of some of his artifacts. Claiming they were stolen from him, OJ decided to take them back by force. The FBI was paying very close attention.
He was soon arrested. The man who got away with committing a double murder would eventually be convicted on the 13th Anniversary of his wrongful acquittal, a point that was not lost on me nor one of his criminal defense lawyers in OJ: Made In America.
After nearly a decade in prison, he would charm the authorities into paroling him. That part of the story, his life after incarceration, inspired another great A&E doc that revealed disturbing things about Simpson like how he would talk to an invisible Nicole on a plane ride clearly feeling haunted by his actions, dark thoughts that went otherwise unexpressed publicly. (He never fully confessed.) Consider it a spiritual sequel to Made In America.
Simpson, who died two days ago surrounded by family at age 76, one year older than my Mom, had apparently been sick with prostate cancer since last year. It’s a terrible disease even when it affects someone as depraved and monstrous as him.
We need to find a cure for all cancers. We need a better justice system that stops protecting the rich and the terminally toxic. We need to stop disproportionately ruining the lives of so many far less privileged folks of colour, especially the innocent ones. And from the beginning of their lives we need to teach boys to be kind to girls, to respect everyone’s boundaries including their own.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Friday, April 12, 2024
3:17 a.m.
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on April 12, 2024 at 3:17 am Leave a Comment