‘He Was Not Just Admired But Beloved’: Bob Costas Looks Back at O.J. Simpson’s Career Before Murder Trial

Sportscaster and CNN contributor Bob Costas, who covered O.J. Simpson’s infamous low-speed Bronco chase on June 17, 1994, called in to CNN on Thursday after news broke that Simpson died at the age of 76.

Costas told anchor Wolf Blitzer:

Well, as great as he was as a player, and it’s not enough to say he was a Hall of Fame quality player. He was one of the handful of greatest running backs in the history of college football and then the NFL. And he also had a quality that’s difficult to define, and statistics alone don’t capture it. He was wonderful to watch. And he was always gracious with the press, he was outgoing. He was not just admired but beloved. And then to your point about being a cultural force, this is all prior to the murders, he was, if not the first, he was the first to do it in a big way. An African-American athlete who broke through.

Costas didn’t spend a lot of time on the Bronco chase — which famously occurred while Costas was covering Game 5 of the NBA Finals for NBC, and during which Simpson actually tried to call Costas — and his call cut out a bit, but he said that as a colleague at NBC, Simpson “brought coffee when you first got on the set to everybody” and was “willing to show up at charity events, good company at dinner or on the golf course, all those things, and then everything changed, you know, in June of 1994.”

Watch the video above via CNN.