You may think you know all the sports connections to the OJ Simpson car chase in Los Angeles in 1994. But Mike Tirico has another one for you.
On top of Arnold Palmer playing his final U.S. Open round, the kickoff of the FIFA World Cup in the U.S., the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden and the New York Rangers championship parade, Tirico was calling a high school All-Star game with Lee Corso in Daytona Beach.
“I’m sitting in not exactly a four-star hotel in Daytona. Corso’s across the hall or next door, I forget,” Tirico said on SI Media with Jimmy Traina. “And the OJ chase is going on during the Rockets-Knicks game in the NBA Finals … that was an all-time day.”
Tirico continued:
“I get a knock on my door, it’s Corso, ‘do you believe this?’ And Lee sat in my room, and we sat for like 20 minutes and watched the chase play out. It was just an extraordinary day that I will never forget.”
The event was surreal for everyone, but even more so for Corso.
“Lee obviously, through his history with college football, what impact OJ had on the sport, he couldn’t figure out what was going on, and Al Cowlings (being involved), and all of that,” Tirico explained. “I’ve done hundreds of football games now, the very first one I did on network TV was a Florida-Georgia All-Star game with Corso on that day.”
The podcast also featured the always-thoughtful Tirico opining on Simpson’s legacy.
“The icon that was OJ Simpson and is in some ways still because of the legacy, you think about the football career, the NFL career with over 2,000 yards, the TV career, the Hertz commercials … there were so many things that OJ Simpson represented,” Tirico said. “This was a guy that kind of had it all from a football sense, and to watch that all come crumbling down around a horrific crime on top of that, the feelings then were very different.”
A much younger Corso with a very green Tirico in a Daytona Beach hotel room watching Cowlings drive Simpson down the 405 in a white Bronco. Did you have that on your 2023 sports media story bingo card?
[SI Media with Jimmy Traina on YouTube]