Buffalo Bills teammate Joe DeLamielleure details last conversation with O.J. Simpson

It was about a month ago, Joe DeLamielleure said, when he got a call about his former Buffalo Bills teammate O.J. Simpson.

Simpson’s health was deteriorating. J.D. Hill, another former Buffalo teammate of both men, contacted DeLamielleure and said O.J. would appreciate him reaching out because, as Hill told his old teammate, “O.J.’s not doing well.”

“So I called O.J.,” DeLamielleure, who made the Pro Football Hall of Fame and was Simpson’s most well-known blocker in their 1970s heyday, said in a phone interview Thursday. “It was, ‘How’re you doing?’ Not so much of ‘Hey, I’m sick, buddy.’ We were just checking up on each other. He said he had cancer, but also said, ‘Hey, I’m getting better.’ He sounded like himself. He was in Nevada when I talked to him.”

Simpson died Wednesday at age 76, and his death from cancer was announced Thursday by his family. He left a complicated legacy, as a symbol of football stardom, racial polarization and domestic violence.

Joe D, as most people call DeLamielleure, said the 10-minute conversation a month ago didn’t include any details about Simpson’s cancer, and that Simpson said several times he was feeling well.

Still, when DeLamielleure was walking out of a gym in Summerville, S.C., and heard the news Thursday morning about Simpson’s death, he wasn’t shocked.

“We’re at that age where we’re losing a lot of guys,” said DeLamielleure, who is 73 years old. He lived in Charlotte for roughly two decades before he and his wife moved to Summerville eight years ago to be closer to four of their 13 grandchildren. “A number of our former Buffalo teammates are dead now. And it didn’t surprise me, really, because I knew about the cancer.”

DeLamielleure’s memories of Simpson as a teammate are fond ones.

Simpson was nicknamed “The Juice,” and Joe D and the rest of the offensive line was called “The Electric Company,” with the idea being that the electric company turned on the juice each Sunday afternoon in Buffalo. Simpson “was a normal guy who was a superstar,” DeLamielleure said, and he still remembers the way Simpson insisted his offensive line get credit time and again for his various rushing records.

But did Simpson murder his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994?

“The O.J. Simpson I knew would never do that,” DeLamielleure said. “He was the best guy in the world, when we were teammates.”

Still, DeLamielleure said Thursday he doesn’t want to declare one way or the other if he thought Simpson committed a double murder. Simpson was found not guilty in a controversial verdict after a trial that enthralled America for months in 1995. The jury apparently believed the defense team’s argument that a racist Los Angeles police force had framed Simpson for the murders.

“I don’t want to say if I thought he did it or not,” said DeLamielleure, who was once an assistant coach at Duke and also coached at several high schools in the Charlotte area. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I just hope that he was squared up with the Lord.”

When Simpson was about to be charged in the knife attack that killed his former wife and Goldman in June 1994, rather than turn himself in, he and friend Al Cowlings led Los Angeles police on a low-speed chase in a white Ford Bronco.

NBC broke into its coverage of the NBA Finals midgame to go live to the chase, as did many other networks. Simpson was threatening suicide for some of the chase, which was watched by 95 million people and finally ended with Simpson returning home and being taken into custody.

At the time, DeLamielleure was an assistant football coach at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The college had a satellite hookup, and DeLamielleure went live on CNN — at the behest of the college, he said — and offered occasional commentary for much of the chase about his football friendship with Simpson.

“It was unreal, and it lasted for hours,” DeLamielleure said of the car chase and the broadcast. “That was my friend in that car. Then I finally got home and my wife said, ‘Where were you?’”

Simpson had been a broadcaster and an actor after his Hall of Fame playing career ended. After winning a Heisman Trophy at Southern Cal, he was the first NFL running back to eclipse 2,000 yards, and did so for Buffalo in a 14-game season (NFL teams now play 17 games). DeLamielleure remembered Simpson renting out an entire theater so his Bills teammates and their significant others could go watch his movie “The Towering Inferno” when it was released in 1974.

“He was famous,” said DeLamielleure, a rookie starter when Simpson rushed for 2,003 yards in 1973. “He was like Muhammad Ali. Willie Mays. Bill Russell. Those were the superstars for that era.”

Although in 1995 Simpson was found not guilty in his double-murder criminal trial, in 1997 the Brown and Goldman families won a $33.5-million civil judgment against him. Simpson never made much progress paying that judgment.

Later, in a completely unrelated case, Simpson served nine years in prison for kidnapping and armed robbery in connection with his attempt in Las Vegas to re-acquire from some sports memorabilia dealers what Simpson claimed were his own stolen personal items. He was released from a Nevada state prison in 2017.

Through it all, DeLamielleure maintained occasional contact with Simpson. He saw him a few years back at an autograph session near Buffalo. Simpson “would never do anything like that with the general public,” DeLamielleure said, because there was no telling what the reception would be like.

So Simpson was instead autographing items “in a warehouse somewhere,” DeLamielleure said. The two visited for a while there, and Simpson seemed happy.

“That was about five years ago,” DeLamielleure said. “It was nice to see him. And as for O.J. and what he did or didn’t do, it’s not my place to judge anybody. But I really liked him as a teammate.”