Flatter: My 1st Kentucky Derby interview was with O.J. Simpson

Lexington, Ky.

As laser-focused as I am these days on racing, I often miss out on real news, the kind I used to cover in an earlier phase of my career.

So it was Thursday when I glanced at something that popped up on an information app in one of my devices. Usually it is spewing politically charged tropes or the preening of pseudo-celebrities, all the while pretending to dispense legitimate current events.

This one was different. “O.J. Simpson dies of cancer at 76.”

Sitting in a rather quiet Keeneland press box, I looked up at one of the racetrack ambassadors nearby and said, “Did you hear who died?”

He had. The resultant conversation did not regurgitate the gruesome details of what happened that night on Bundy Drive nor the ensuing legal chapters nor the preceding football accomplishments. It was more a shaking of heads over the fact the flashpoint happened only two months shy of 30 years ago.

It also was about my own two-minute, 18-second encounter with the former and future prisoner 17 years ago when I was covering my first Kentucky Derby. On a dreary, misty morning two days before Street Sense won the roses and seven years before the annual day before the day was awkwardly labeled Thurby, my first ever backside interview at Churchill Downs was with one Orenthal James Simpson.

At the time I was working as a free-lancer in my primary role as the correspondent covering international sport, yes, singular, for Sport 927, yes, singular, the radio station that employed me for three years in Melbourne, Australia. Owned by the Victoria racing industry, it had sent me back to America and assigned me that week to cover the Derby.

Eventually I would make the acquaintance of Larry Jones, who had put Hard Spun through a 57.6-second breeze, and Todd Pletcher, who still was three years from getting off his Derby schneid, and probably every hatted huckster who was within eyeshot of the local TV stations doing their morning shows near the backstretch rail.

But first it was O.J., who said he was attending his fourth consecutive Derby after three previous visits in the ’70s. He was backing Tiago, who was owned by the late Jerry Moss. That would be the same Jerry Moss who campaigned Giacomo to a 50-1 Derby upset in 2005.

“I did pretty well with Giacomo,” Simpson said with a laugh. “That’s why I’m going with Tiago this time. ... One thing about Hard Spun, distance doesn’t matter to him. That’s one horse that can get out front and stay out front.”

Tiago would finish seventh and Hard Spun second, so even if he was not profiting, he was not entirely wrong.

Since he was living in Florida at the time, Simpson said he spent time at Gulfstream Park and Calder, but “not a lot, ’cause I’m on the golf course all the time, so it gets in the way of my golf game.”

Harking back to his more innocent times in college, he said, “I remember at ’SC, we used to hustle and finish track practice, and all of us, including the coaches, we would rush out to Santa Anita and Hollywood racetrack, you know? So we have early track practice so we could get to the racetrack.”

Simpson even had a serious handicapping angle that he shared on that drizzly morning.

“The weather to me affects (the race) more than anything,” he said. “I remember (when) Giacomo won, that was a real rainy day. It took all the surface off the inside of the track. It actually made the inside of the track pretty fast. I paid more attention to the conditions of the track and how the horses tend to run under those conditions more than I do just, you know, who is the fastest horse?”

One problem. The sky was blue and the track was fast the day Giacomo won the Derby. But I was not Marcia Clark, and this was not a gotcha interview.

At no point did I ask O.J. whether he really was at the 2005 Derby. Nor did I ask, “Did you do it?” And at no point did he say, “Ron, it’s about time someone asked me bluntly. Here’s the truth.” Yeah, like he was going to tell some guy from a radio station in Australia.

Jeff Ruby, the owner of the eponymous steakhouses for which the Spiral Stakes would be renamed, was not as kind and gentle to Simpson that week. A night-and-a-half after my interview, he kicked Louisville’s most infamous visitor that week out of his downtown eatery.

“I didn’t want that experience in my restaurant,” Ruby was quoted as saying.

Simpson was welcome the next day at Churchill Downs. So was Queen Elizabeth II. I would offer some pithy observation about their having been together fictitiously in “The Naked Gun,” but I would not be the first to do so.

Someone may correct me, but wasn’t Richard Nixon the only sitting president to show up for America’s biggest race? Donald Trump was there a couple years ago, but he was out of office. I will leave it to others to compare their notoriety with Simpson.

I was asked at some point 17 years ago if I was concerned for my well-being having been in such close proximity to Simpson. I scoffed at the very notion. By that point in my life I was walking the streets and riding the subways of New York on a routine basis. If I felt perfectly safe there, what could happen at Churchill Downs? A temperamental horse seemed more of a risk that an acquitted murderer cum wrongful-death convict.

Years later, when I worked in Las Vegas for a sports-gambling channel, there was some talk about getting O.J. on one of our shows. He just had finished doing nine years for armed robbery at a nearby hotel. Frankly, I am not sure how far we got trying to lure him into the studio. By that point there was a certain been-there, done-that feel to the whole idea.

Other than that memory from the spring of 2007, Simpson’s passing did not evoke any particular personal emotion. For me he was a signpost on a bigger story of his own doing. I remember where I was for the start of the chase and the end of the case. Those stories can wait for a round of cocktails somewhere.

Come to think of it, I have a reservation at the Jeff Ruby’s in Louisville in a couple weeks.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.