Dark legacy

 O.J. Simpson died yesterday at 76, and again I see that blood-red USC headgear gliding through shoals of golden UCLA headgear back in '67, and see the red buffalo on his Bills headgear as he went over 2,000 yards on a snow-flecked afternoon in '73, an-

I'm sorry, what?

I'm leaving something out, you say?

Well, yes, I suppose I am.

I suppose here is where we relegate all of that football glory to the bottom of the piece in the approved inverted-pyramid style (important stuff up top; less important stuff at the bottom) , and start right off with the white Bronco and the slaughter of his ex-wife and a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if-the-glove-don't-fit-you-must-acquit.

O.J. Simpson was just a Hall of Fame running back before all that, one of the best ever to play the position.

After, he was a sociopath whose celebrity furnished him cover for years, and which allowed him to get away with a gruesome double murder.  And a darkness descended that would forever define him in the public mind.

In that sense justice was served, for if he never went to prison for butchering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the madness of that night would lock him away in a purgatory of his own making for the next 30 years. He could say, and those deluded souls who believed him could say, that he was acquitted by a jury of his peers. But the hard-eyed jury of public opinion knew better, and sentenced him to contempt without possibility of parole for the remainder of his days.

He became a symbol of racial division -- some black Americans actually cheered the not-guilty verdict, seeing in it payback for all the bogus guilty verdicts people of color received down the years -- and then a pariah, and then just an empty shell who ended his own life three decades before his heart stopped beating. By the end he'd become little more than a punchline, an occasional meme in the pitiless landscape of social media.

Yesterday, for instance?

Before the day was out, the first images of a white Bronco photoshopped to look like a hearse began popping up all over the Interwhosis. And then the jokes. And then more memes, and more jokes.

America can be a cruel place.

Never more so than the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman crossed paths with a madman, and a madman's knife.