After staying up all Saturday night freebasing cocaine, Michael Ray Richardson suddenly remembered he had a Sunday afternoon game against the Houston Rockets at Madison Square Garden. With no time for sleep, he took a long, hot shower and swallowed a quart of orange juice.
Upon reaching the venue, he showered again before gulping down two bacon and egg sandwiches, all the while promising his dishevelled self if he got through this nightmare he’d never touch another drug. Then he posted a triple-double for the New York Knicks and celebrated the win by heading out on another 24-hour binge.
Nicknamed “Sugar” because he was so sweet with ball in hand, Richardson was someone a young Michael Jordan hated matching up against. Magic Johnson described him as the peer he most enjoyed watching, and Larry Bird once reckoned him “the best basketball player on the planet”. As an All-Star guard with the Knicks in the early 1980s, he was the last of the species to wear Converse All Stars in an NBA game and once dunked on the great Julius Erving.
Starring for the Knicks came with perks. Regularly rocking up to the curb and parking his Mercedes 450SL (“Sugar” engraved in gold on the gear stick) outside the fabled Studio 54, his fame gained him immediate entry past the hundreds of wannabes queuing outside. When he bolted up the stairs of trap houses in less salubrious parts of town to buy bags of coke from star-struck Uzi-toting dealers, his celebrity earned him special treatment there too.
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Following his death at 70 from prostate cancer last week, every obituary cited the fact he was in 1986 the first active player to be banned from the league for life for three positive drug tests. An unfortunate footnote in history, he turned pro at a dark time in the NBA when crowds were down, recreational drugs were so rampant teams had private eyes tailing stars, and, in a possibly related issue, the quality of the fare on offer was often patchy.
According to newspaper reports, an estimated 75 per cent of players were dabbling with cocaine and when a friend introduced Richardson to the practice of freebasing in 1981, his career quickly became one of those infuriating tales of what might have been.
“Michael Ray Richardson is an unguided missile, a force of pure libido on the court (and off), immensely gifted, naive, selfish and kind,” wrote Joe Klein in New York magazine. “He seems thoroughly confused by the embarrassment of riches that has engulfed him ... With his combination of great ability and little discipline, Richardson may well personify the current malaise of professional basketball, a game that can be a gorgeous spectacle when played well, but a chaotic monstrosity when played selfishly.”
That was written in March 1982 and Richardson was by then struggling with the unique demands placed upon the best player in New York. A self-styled country bumpkin whose mother gave birth to him on a kitchen table in Lubbock, Texas, he had a pronounced stutter (which somehow didn’t inhibit his trash-talking), and friends suggested his drug use was a way of coping with the stress of the unforgiving spotlight in the media capital.
Following repeated trips to rehab, one unsympathetic tabloid columnist began referring to him mockingly in print as Snowy Ray Richardson. For all his preternatural gifts on the court, he wasn’t ready for prime time off it. Witness an exchange with a reporter that became part of the city’s sporting lore.
Reporter: What do you think is happening to this team?
Richardson: The ship be sinking.
Reporter: How far can it sink?
Richardson: The sky’s the limit.
Before the league made an example of him with the ultimate banishment, he had spells with the Golden State Warriors and the New Jersey Nets, whose coach declared him “a 30-year-old man chronologically, but a 15-year-old in terms of responsibility”. Not an accusation somebody who regularly went AWOL on the team to do coke could ever deny.
“When you get like that, you lose all sense of yourself,” he wrote in his memoir, Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption. “You become a zombie. Your only thoughts are when you’ll be getting high next and for how long. It’s a parasite and you don’t care about anything but pacifying it. That’s what happens when the devil has you.”
Decamping to Europe, he eventually got sober, rediscovered his mojo and sang a lengthy redemption song. He enjoyed hugely successful stints in Italy and Croatia where his wondrous performances often caused sporadic outbreaks of what the local media dubbed “Sugarmania”. In the way of somebody who perhaps knew well he had wasted too many of his golden years, he was still playing professionally in the French league at the age of 47, his time there also yielding a son, Amir Richardson, who plays football for Fiorentina and Morocco.
In a development many might have considered implausible during his sybaritic pomp, Richardson returned to the US, became a very successful coach across the minor leagues, and spent his spare time organising camps for kids in underserved communities. Although his lifetime ban had been rescinded, the closest he came to a return to the NBA was two years’ working as a community ambassador for the Denver Nuggets.
“He talked plenty of trash,” said Magic Johnson, “but he was always able to back it up.”
As epitaphs go ...
