Year of the Okey-Doke

Pre-season talk about the Buffalo Bills' O.J. Simpson breaking Jim Brown's single-year rushing record of 1,863 yds. sounded like a fantasy floated by the publicity department. All last fall the Bills had managed to win only four games, and though Simpson had made 1,251 yds., the prospect of his gaining more than a mile behind a set of inexperienced blockers seemed as likely as the Dolphins finishing in the cellar.

By last weekend, the whole league knew better. Gaining 219 yds. the previous Sunday on a snow-covered field against a special six-man New England Patriot line-designed to stop O.J. -Simpson pushed his 1973 yardage to 1,803. As he looked toward the final game against the Jets, O.J. was all confidence. "Hey, man," he said, "you know I'm going to do it." Indeed, Simpson kept his word by running his total yardage of the year to 2,001.

Bland Diet. New record or no, Simpson's fifth season in pro football was a standout. Going into the Jets game, the former U.S.C. star had carried the ball 298 times, averaging 6.1 yds. per carry. He had set a single-game rushing record (250 yds.) and led the Bills to a respectable season.

Moreover, in a year when pro football languished on a bland, conservative diet of field goals and zone defenses, "the Juice" provided much needed excitement. O.J. would rip through the line, throw a lightning fake, and sprint for distance like a cheetah on the run. As Buffalo Offensive Tackle Bonnie Green tells it, "Blocking for the Juice-hey man, there's no telling where he'll be. He moves so catty, moving to the left and then back to the right. I never know where the Juice is, but when I hear the roar of the crowd, I know he's gone."

O.J. himself sees it differently. "You come through the line and it's a different world," he says. "One second you're hearing and seeing people and all of a sudden you're in the secondary, moving and juking. When you're facing a linebacker you just wiggle your body, watch him go off in one direction and you take off in the other." If all the speed and twisting can be boiled down to one move, it is the "okey-doke." In the jive patter that Simpson sometimes favors, that is the split-second change of direction that makes him unique. "My game is to juke the tough guys," he says. "I put the okeydoke on them, just bounce around and look for daylight. No one is going to get me to put my head in Dick Butkus' lap."

Orenthal James Simpson, 26, has been putting the good-natured okeydoke on tough guys all his life. If nothing else, O.J. has demonstrated this year that a man can play football just the way he lives. Only twelve years ago, the odds that 14-year-old O.J. would get out of the principal's office on any given day without punishment were about as good as the odds last July that he would gain 1,800 yds. He and his roughneck buddies at Galileo High School in San Francisco were caught running a crap game in the boys' room. After the dice players had been delivered to the principal and their offense fully described, O.J. started out the door. "Where are you going?" demanded the principal. "Oh, I've got to get back to class," replied O.J. in a verbal okeydoke. "I was only helping bring these guys down to your office." With the other students unwilling to squeal, O.J. wiggled free.

Best Friends. It was on the streets of Potrero Hill, the ghetto where O.J. grew up, that he was slickest. As chief of a street gang called the Superiors, he was constantly juking himself and his followers out of trouble. "There were guys who could have taken O.J. in a fight," recalls Joe Bell, a friend from high school days. "But he had a way of manipulating people, of making them like him."

O.J. once agreed to help his best friend, Al Cowlings, repair a rocky romance with Marguerite Whitley. O.J. juked overtime on that task. When the University of Arizona offered Recruit Prospects Cowlings and Simpson the use of a rented car, Simpson ended up driving Marguerite around town. Before long, Marguerite and O.J. were married. Yet Cowlings today still considers Simpson his best friend.

But how much longer can O.J. continue to okeydoke tacklers in a game notorious for the high mortality rate among running backs? Simpson can see beyond the day the bruises take longer to heal after carrying the ball 30 times. He has already done some acting and sportscasting stints on TV and has a contract with ABC. For the moment, however, he is too busy to think about retirement. He will cover the Hula Bowl for ABC, play in the Pro Bowl and tour the chicken-and-peas circuit. "Man," says the Juice, "I got more banquets than I know what to do with."

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