Stern made a call to Kiki Vandeweghe, the Denver Nuggets’ general manager, encouraging him to hire Richardson as part of the Nuggets’ community-relations team. Five months before this, Richardson had encountered Vandeweghe at the Euroleague finals in Bologna, where he spoke about his yearning to return to the States. Having been impressed with Richardson, Vandeweghe responded quickly to Stern’s prompting, and Micheal Ray returned to the NBA and to his hometown. Richardson’s family now included his third wife (“my last one,” he vowed) and their two children.
Richardson called himself a “communications ambassador” whose duties included fundraising for local charities and delivering antidrug lectures and fundamental-skills instructions to youngsters at basketball camps, to junior-high-school and high-school teams, YMCA groups, resident homes for troubled youths, and wherever else his message would be both welcomed and useful.
“The strongest message is talking to them about what I went through. Life and drugs don’t mix. I let the kids know that I was a great basketball player, and I got in trouble being in the wrong places at the wrong times, hanging out with the wrong people. I tell them that they’ve got to pick and choose the people they hang out with and the places they go.”
Basketball fans between the ages of thirty-five and fifty remembered Richardson’s All-Star play, and according to Deb Dowling, the Nuggets’ vice president on community relations, he was “revered” by them. If most of the troubled youngsters were unaware of Richardson’s NBA career, he always managed to “inspire” them. All told, Dowling said that Sugar Ray was “unbelievable.”
After an appearance at the Excelsior Youth Center, a live-in home for at-risk girls, Richardson’s talk elicited this response from Kathy Gravely, one of the resident counselors: “His journey is and will be very inspirational to our girls because our girls are at the Center because they have hit bottom. He explained that he had also hit rock bottom, and that until you do it yourself, you can’t improve or get better. You can’t keep blaming other people.”
For a while, Richardson liked his new job: “It’s going real, real well. It’s a lot bigger and more satisfying than I thought it would be. I’m getting a lot of positive feedback. I think I’m already affecting lives. The kids I’ve spoken to are very excited. I’m already beginning to reach out and touch a lot of people.”
However, the past intruded on Sugar Ray’s idyllic existence in the person of Billy Jack Richardson, his father. When Billy Jack left his wife, Micheal Ray, and his other children, he eventually moved in with his mother “someplace” in Texas. But Billy Jack’s mother had recently died, so one of Micheal Ray’s brothers felt compelled to fetch his father and bring him to Denver.
“I see him now, once or twice a week,” Richardson said. “To tell you the truth, it feels kind of strange. My father, he wasn’t there, but he’s still my dad. . . . It is what it is.”
Perhaps the unexpected presence of his father made Richardson uncomfortable in Denver. Perhaps he got bored with making virtually the same speech so often to so many different groups. In any event, after being a civilian for one season, the lure of The Game qua game became increasing alluring.
This is a normal syndrome for ex-NBAers who because of age or injuries are no longer able to play professional-caliber basketball. They miss the drama, the camaraderie, the spotlights, the high-wire competition, the money, the groupies, the sense of being a full-fledged member of one of the world’s most exclusive fraternities. They miss exploring and decoding the secret alphabet of Xs and Os.
Life on the sidelines is repetitive, flat, meaningless, and relatively anonymous. Without it being broken down into recognizable segments of three, eight, and twenty-four seconds, along with twelve and forty-eight minutes, time seems to be too open, too casual, too obscure. Without having to deal with incompetent and/or biased referees, there are no bad guys to rail against.
That’s why Richardson longed for Vandeweghe to move him to the Nuggets’ bench as an assistant coach. “That would be fantastic,” Micheal Ray said. “I think I have a lot to offer, especially to young guards. Not only on the floor, but also off the floor.” Unfortunately, the staff of Denver’s coach Jeff Bzdelik already was stocked with experienced assistants—most notably Doug Moe, Scott Brooks, Michael Cooper, and Adrian Dantley, all NBA veterans. But Richardson was intent on having his latest dream come true.
In early February 2005, Richardson was with the Nuggets when the team arrived in New York for a game against the Knicks. He was sitting in a courtside seat watching the end of a Knicks practice when he was urgently summoned by Isiah Thomas, New York’s president. The Knicks were huddled around Thomas and Herb Williams, the interim coach who had recently replaced Lenny Wilkens.
The Knicks were suffering through a disastrous season. They had just returned from a West Coast trip that featured their inability to maintain late-game leads, thereby losing several games they should have won. After losing eighteen of their last twenty-one games, their current record was a dismal 19-31.
A bad season in New York is always a minicatastrophe for the entire NBA. Because the preseason TV schedules routinely and irrevocably planned for several broadcasts of games played by the team situated in the media capital of the world, sad-sack Knick teams translated into poor ratings. Which is why, perhaps, it was widely believed that the 1985 draft had been rigged (by way of a crease in the envelope that David Stern “blindly” picked) to ensure that Patrick Ewing wound up in New York.
Richardson was also concerned with the Knicks fortunes. “I’m a Knick at heart,” he confessed. As such, he had watched the team play whenever they appeared on national TV and carefully studied all of the box scores. His opinion was a variation of his most famous quote: “Right now, they just have their heads above water, and they’re definitely sinking.”
With Williams’s acquiescence, Thomas asked Richardson to speak to the team. Richardson, who was not so secretly itching to become an assistant coach in New York, was totally agreeable.
“What you guys have to do,” Richardson said, “is to think positively. Winning as well as losing are both contagious. When you lose so many times, you get frustrated and make little mental mistakes, mistakes that snowball and cost you games. You guys are good enough players to win, but your trouble is only mental. Just be positive and play with confidence and your season will turn around.”
Speaking for his teammates, Penny Hardaway voiced his appreciation of Richardson’s message: “Coming from a guy like that, you have to respect that, and you have to take that to heart. Nothing he said was really news to us, but it was helpful to hear it from him.”
Richardson’s encouraging words perhaps made a difference since the Knicks stepped up and played .500 ball (18-18) for the rest of the season.
And the act of just being in a team huddle and getting such a positive reaction from so many battle-hardened professional players, made Richardson finally understand that public relations was not his gig.
He’d been clean for fourteen years. If he couldn’t be an assistant coach in the NBA, then his next choice was to be a head coach someplace else. Because of his past indiscretions, it was clear that colleges would shun him. Anyway, why would he want to dumb down what he knew about basketball and spend the rest of his career coddling hooplings who could barely tell the difference between an X and an O? Not to mention the smiling and all-around sucking up that was such a vital part of recruiting.
Richardson remembered what Bobby Knight had famously said about trying to convince high-school kids to come play for him at Indiana: “The worst thing about recruiting is having a seventeen-year-old kid absolutely ruin your day.”