Twenty-five years ago today, O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles torpedoed David Hasselhoff in Atlantic City

On the afternoon of June 17, 1994, David Hasselhoff was at Trump’s Castle Hotel Casino (now Golden Nugget Atlantic City) counting down the hours before an event that promised to take his career to a new level of success.

In the U.S., he owed his success primarily to the popularity of his syndicated “jiggle-vision” TV series, Baywatch. Overseas – especially in Germany – he was an improbably successful pop star. And, he hoped to bring that musical success to these shores.

To that end, he scheduled a global pay-per-view television concert that would beam live that evening from the Castle. The concept seemed to be a slam-dunk in terms of a huge payday for Hasselhoff and the broadcast's producers and promoters, as well as for Trump's Castle, our current president's then-casino-hotel on the bay side of Atlantic City. At the very least, the event would reap the casino a branding bonanza via the program's worldwide distribution.

But as Hasselhoff hit the Castle stage, hardly anyone anywhere was watching.

That’s because on the other side of the USA, while helicopter-mounted TV cameras trained an unblinking eye on the proceedings below, a white Ford Bronco, driven on a Southern California freeway by a man named A.C. "Al" Cowlings, was being trailed by Los Angeles police vehicles.

In the back seat sat O.J. Simpson.

Tens of millions of people — among them untold numbers who might otherwise have tuned into the Hasselhoff broadcast — sat riveted as they followed the bizarre, low-speed car chase on their televisions.

The result was one of the biggest busts in pay-per-view TV history, and an effective end to Hasselhoff’s dream of musical stardom in America.