Throwback Thursday: O.J. Simpson Holds Out in Buffalo

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

On January 28, 1969, inside a hotel ballroom in New York City, the Buffalo Bills selected a running back with the first pick in the AFL/NFL Draft. It was the only logical choice, since this particular back emerged from the University of Southern California with a Heisman Trophy and a can't-miss appellation, and because he was clearly the best player in a draft class that would eventually be studded with five Hall of Famers. And yet it was still a calculated risk, because no one knew what lengths O.J. Simpson would go to in order to keep out of Buffalo.

Nearly half a century later, the months-long melodrama that followed in the wake of the Bills' decision to draft Simpson feels like a footnote, as does everything that occurred in Simpson's life before the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, the televised slow-motion car chase, and the trial that impacted and permeated nearly every aspect of American culture. It was an event so bizarre and improbably seismic that is still being reinterpreted, most recently by FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, which premieres on February 7. But it is worth noting the effect Simpson's choices had even before that moment; it is worth noting that even at the age of 21, Simpson was already pushing both football and the business of sports toward modernity.

It wasn't that the Bills didn't see this coming. All through his senior season, when asked about where he wanted to play professional football, Simpson did not mince words. He said he preferred to play in the National Football League rather than the upstart American Football League, of which the Bills were a part; he said he wished to play on the West Coast, where he had grown up and played college football; and he said, according to his book Education of a Rich Rookie (co-authored by sportswriter Pete Axthelm), "I wanted to make a lot of money." Simpson's agent was Chuck Barnes, a 38-year-old USC graduate who had made his name representing auto racers, and from the beginning, Barnes pushed Bills owner Ralph Wilson, asking for a package that included salary, bonus, and a $500,000 loan to be used for investments. Barnes also asked for a mind-blowing $650,000 for a five-year deal. For months, Wilson wasn't willing to budge from his offer of $250,000 for five years, and refused to even consider the loan ("I'm not the investment banking business," Wilson reportedly said). What followed was financial push-and-pull that, according to Simpson, left him "edgy" and "fighting his own tensions."

And yet O.J. waited it out. In the spring, he signed a $250,000 endorsement deal with Chevrolet, a number so mind-boggling at the time that Simpson "gasped when he looked at the figure." Barnes had already done the work of positioning Simpson as a new brand of African-American superstar. He signed a book deal, made a guest appearance on a CBS show called Medical Center, and would eventually sign deals with ABC and Royal Crown Cola. In the meantime, he and Barnes began flirting with rival leagues, including the Continental Football League's Indianapolis Capitols, who offered Simpson his $500,000 loan in addition to a $100,000 bonus and a salary of $150,000. A team in Fort Worth offered $15,000 per game, and a Texas mogul named William Morris Jr. offered him a personal services contract worth a million dollars, that reportedly involved Morris taking any profits from Simpson's speaking engagements and appearances—"he could have tried to use me as his personal houseboy if things started going badly," Simpson wrote.

Faced with a spring signing deadline by the Capitols, Barnes encouraged Simpson to carefully consider the offer. But Simpson didn't want to do it. If he went to the Continental League, he wrote, he'd been seen more as an entertainer than a competitor, more "like a traveling circus" than a football player. They turned it down, and they held out through the summer.

"I don't like to be pushed," Simpson told Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford in July of 1969. "The last time with Mr. Wilson, it was me, not Chuck, who really got mad. We were negotiating, we were discussing giving up on the loan stuff, but Mr. Wilson wouldn't change his offer at all. Well, I can wait if he can wait."

Training camps opened, and the August College All-Star Game passed, and Simpson continued to hold out. But much of Simpson's leverage had been sapped by his own agent's savvy, by the fact that many of his endorsement deals hinged on the notion that he actually play football, preferably in the AFL or the NFL. Barnes realized they were running out of time, that they may have to accept the best offer they could possibly stomach. So they signed a four-year contract for $250,000, and they secured a $150,000 loan, which could be paid back over the course of those four years. Simpson went to Buffalo and broke records and became a cultural phenomenon, an "unthreatening superstar," according to NFL historian Michael MacCambridge.

Forty-seven years removed from that draft, Simpson's life story now comprises perhaps the epitomal tapestry of 21st-century culture, a narrative arc so rife with twists that in addition to the FX miniseries, ESPN will premiere a five-part, 7.5-hour documentary series about Simpson this summer. But at the time, Simpson was still a young man who thought he was doing the right thing by holding out. At the time, it felt of a piece with Simpson's vast ambitions for himself.

"I don't feel that I'm being selfish about (the money)," he wrote. "In the long run, I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of myths about black athletes … I believe I can do as much for my own people in my own way as a Tommie Smith, a Jim Brown, or a Jackie Robinson may choose to do in another way. That's part of the image I want, too."