Murder Victim Called Free Spirit and Caring Friend : Recollections: Associates say Ronald Goldman was a magnetic personality whose life was a roller coaster of different experiences. He loved tennis and enjoyed working with children.

He had model good looks, a body sculpted by weightlifting and tennis, and a magnetic personality that made friends want to hang around him just to see what he would be up to next.

On the surface, it seemed that Ronald Lyle Goldman was living the exciting celebrity-centered life that draws good-looking young people to Los Angeles from across the country to hover at the fringes of Hollywood as waiters, tennis coaches and fitness trainers.

But friends portray Goldman, 25, as a nice guy willing to go out of his way to help a friend rather than as a hanger-on entranced by the magic of celebrity. And they speculate that it was Goldman’s innate helpfulness that drew him into his final encounter with fame.

The bodies of Goldman and 35-year-old Nicole Brown Simpson were found outside her Brentwood townhouse early Monday. Although the two were friends and occasionally were seen meeting for coffee, police said they have no evidence that Goldman was romantically linked to Simpson.

Goldman’s friends believe he was merely returning a pair of sunglasses Simpson had left at the nearby restaurant where he worked as a waiter.

“He definitely would have told me if he was seeing O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife,” said Mike Pincus, 25, of Agoura Hills, who had known Goldman since they were in kindergarten together in Chicago. “That’s just the kind of guy Ron was. Whenever he was dating someone, we all knew about it.”

Pincus and others said Goldman, an aspiring model, often dated beautiful women who were drawn to his dark good looks.

“From the minute I came out here, life with Ron was a big roller coaster ride,” Pincus said. “You never knew what you would be doing the next day, but you always knew it would be fun.”

But friends and family members also said there was another, more down-to-earth side to Goldman. They said that his true love was tennis and that his great talent was working with children--teaching them to play the game he loved or helping out at a center for children with cerebral palsy.

“To pay the rent he worked as a waiter,” friend Peter Argyris said in an interview with a local television station. “But he loved teaching kids.”

Alexandra De Furio lived in the same group of modest apartments as Goldman on Gorham Avenue in Brentwood, 1 1/2 blocks off busy San Vicente Boulevard. She said he moved there about a year ago with a girlfriend with whom he shared a tempestuous relationship.

“She’d move out and then she’d come back” to the one-bedroom apartment, De Furio said. The neighbor added that she and Goldman would sometimes “sit on the stoop and talk about his problems with his girlfriend.” When the girlfriend moved out for good, Goldman was working at the California Pizza Kitchen and De Furio said he seemed to be struggling financially.

Then, she said, three months ago “he got the job at Mezzaluna and he was happy, he was making more money.”

Co-workers at the Mezzaluna restaurant on San Vicente described Goldman as a popular employee with a positive outlook.

“He was clean-cut, very polite,” said Karim Souki, one of the restaurant owners. “You have waiters sometimes who feel they’re doing the customer a favor. He was never like that. When he handled a table, you never got complaints.”

Goldman’s close friends and family described him as a free spirit who had worked as a tennis coach, employment headhunter and occasionally as a model. When he was younger he had been a camp counselor and had volunteered to help disabled children.

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He reportedly had become licensed recently as an emergency medical technician but that could not be confirmed. Eventually, he wanted to own a bar or restaurant in the Brentwood area.

“He did a lot of different things, but the one thing you could say about him is that he loved people,” said his sister, Kim, a student at San Francisco State University. “It’s what made him a good waiter. He’s really good with people. People are just drawn to him.”

She said the two moved from Chicago to Agoura Hills in 1987 when their father remarried. He had completed a year of college in Chicago before they moved and later took college classes here.

Kim Goldman, 22, said she and her brother had been extremely close since the move to Agoura Hills. “My brother basically raised me,” she said. “It was a hard time for us and for my father and he took care of me. He was very loving. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

Her brother moved to Brentwood 18 months ago, she said, after he was hired as a waiter at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant.

But tennis was his passion. “He loved tennis,” said Eric Ross, 24, a close friend. “He was really into it. And he loved being out on the court with people, especially the little kids.”

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Times staff writers Richard Lee Colvin and John Hurst contributed to this story.