June 15, 2016
Peter Solari
June 17, 1994 was a historic day in sports. Filmmaker Bret Morgen even made a documentary as part of
ESPN's 30 for 30 series.
Arnold Palmer made his final U.S. Open appearance in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. The New York Rangers celebrated their first Stanley Cup championship in 54 years with a parade up the canyon of heroes. The Knicks, who share Madison Square Garden with the Rangers, held off the Houston Rockets, 91-84, in game 5 of the NBA Finals to take a 3-2 series lead, just one win away from a championship of their own. Ken Griffey Jr. tied Babe Ruth's record by hitting his 30th home run before July. And all of that paled in comparison to a 35-mile-per-hour police chase down Interstate 405, that eventually ended at the home of football Hall-of-Famer O.J. Simpson, who was subsequently arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown, and her acquaintance Ronald Goldman.
The chase and the basketball game were happening simultaneously, with the NBA Finals taking a back seat.
NBC, who was airing the game, ran
NBC News' coverage of the chase taking up a majority of the screen, with the game 5 of the Finals in a small picture-in-picture box in the corner. However, until recently, nobody knew just how intertwined these two incidents were.
According to Jeff VanGundy, who was a Knicks assistant coach that season, and now broadcast's games for ESPN, the reason Simpson's white Ford Bronco was traveling so slowly that day, was because he wanted to hear the end of game 5 on the radio, before being taken into custody.
Van Gundy claims then-Knicks coach Pat Riley ran into Simpson's USC teammate Al "A.C." Cowlings, who was driving the Bronco that day (with Simpson in the back seat), sometime later, and Cowlings allegedly told Riley the the whole story. What's even better, is that Van Gundy revealed this to the whole country during ABC's telecast of game 4 of this year's NBA Finals, which he was broadcasting with Mike Breen.
And here's a look back at that infamous Bronco chase, which took place almost 22-years-ago to the day, on June 17, 1994.
