We should separate OJ the person from OJ the football player. Come on, you can't give him a negative rating for his career, he was one of the best runningbacks the game had ever seen. I've heard some comparisons between Pete Rose and OJ Simpson, that Rose should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame because OJ is in in the Football Hall of Fame. What OJ did had nothing to do with his performance or actions as a football player. Pete Rose gambled while he was managing a baseball team; this was a major ethical oversight involving the game itself. In that case, you can't separate personal actions from career. What makes OJ a sacred cow in my view is that he tapped an undercurrent in American society, namely the issue of racial justice. He was clearly guilty of killing his ex-wife and her friend, yet OJ, a black man, was able to buy justice by getting the best defense attorneys available to defend him. Some blacks saw this as payback rather than bringing justice to a murderer. It really had little to do with his performance as a football player or even amateur actor. The defense was able to spin it into a racial argument and that won it for Simpson; it was a very divisive tactic that made people either love or hate Simpson. People forgot about the facts surrounding the case, it became about race. This is the core issue here.