The day of OJ's Bronco chase was one of the craziest sports days ever

This is wild.

O.J. Simpson is dead.

The New York Times obituary headline says it all: “O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76.”

Simpson was a legendary running back — in college at the University of Southern California and in the pros for the Buffalo Bills.

His legacy was forever tarnished by the charge that he murdered his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in the mid 1990s. While Simpson was ultimately acquitted, the broad belief in the culture was that he had done it.

I don’t want to get into that debate here. (I mean, he did it.)

But, I do want to note that the single most famous moment of the entire O.J. saga had a remarkable connection to the world of sports.

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The day was June 17, 1994. Which, in history, is remembered for this:

That white Ford Bronco carried Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings. It was just days after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman had been stabbed to death. OJ was the prime suspect. And he was running from police.

It’s hard to explain to someone who was not alive at that moment just how big a deal it was. It was carried live EVERYWHERE. Everyone was watching it. It was simply massive. (The estimated audience for the chase was 95 million Americans.)

What lots and lots of people forget, however, is that even as the country was glued to that Bronco (and what Simpson might do), the world of sports was in the midst of one of its most momentous days ever.

It started in the morning — pre-Bronco chase — when then President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton attended the first match of the World Cup, which was hosted by the U.S. for the first time ever.

Speaking at the opening ceremonies at Soldier Field, Clinton said:

“The World Cup has captured the imagination of our country, as has the game itself in the last few years. The love of soccer s now a universal language that binds us all together.”

Germany beat Bolivia in that first game 1-0.

A few hours to the east, at the Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania, the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer was playing his final round at the U.S. Open. As his website notes:

Playing at Oakmont in 1994, roughly an hour from his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Palmer came onto the 18th green with playing partners Rocco Mediate and John Mahaffey, but the cheers were all for him. Bowing slightly as the crowd gave him a two-minute ovation, Palmer finished out, waved to the fans, and then went for his post-round interviews.

Palmer later said: “I probably did more choking [up] coming up the last fairway than I have in the last 40 years.” (Palmer had a long history with Oakmont — as this terrific ESPN piece notes.)

Even as Palmer was finishing up on 18 in Pennsylvania, the New York Rangers were parading through midtown Manhattan — a ticker-tape celebration for having won the Stanley Cup three days before. (The team hadn’t won a Stanley Cup in 5 decades.)

But, New York wasn’t done. Because later that day, at Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks hosted the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

And it was here, finally, that O.J.’s chase and the sports world formally collided. Because O.J. was in California, the car chase was playing out in the evening on the east coast — and smack dab in the middle of the Knicks-Rockets game.

Which posed a MASSIVE problem for NBC executives. Did they dump out of a Finals game? Or did they ignore the chase that was captivating the country?

In the middle of the first half, play-by-play announcer Marv Albert threw to Tom Brokaw. Brokaw, with the footage of Simpson being chased by a slew of police cars showing on screen, broke down the situation for viewers.

@sportsstation30 Years Ago: The OJ Simpson Car Chase during the NBA Finals #ojsimpson #NBA #CarChase #ChicagoBulls #NYKnicks

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It was, in a word, incredible. As Bob Costas, who was working the game for NBC, recalled on the “Today” show Friday morning:

NBC was in a unique position. Every other network, every cable entity went live and carried it for hours upon hours. But we had not just a basketball game, an NBA Finals game, involving the No. 1 market in the country, not incidentally, the New York Nicks against the Houston Rockets.

Throughout that evening, Marv Albert was calling the game. Sometimes, he’d throw it to me. I would then transition to Tom Brokaw, who was at 30 Rock. He would summarize the situation, which he called a Shakespearean tragedy, and it certainly fit that description.

And then I’d send it back to Marv Albert. And other times, we’d split the screen, so (Patrick) Ewing and (Hakeem) Olajuwon would be going at it at Madison Square Garden and the Bronco would be making its way slowly down the 405 the other side of the screen. It was surreal, to put it mildly.

It was later reported that Simpson, who had worked with Costas at NBC, tried to call the broadcaster during the game. The two men never connected that day.

The day was so consequential — in culture and in sports — that ESPN made a “30 for 30” documentary out of it called simply “June 17, 1994.”

The documentary, which is amazing, had no narrator. It was simply cuts from news broadcasts and live audio from the day. And what an amazing day it was.