Two months after Richardson’s dismissal from the Patroons, the CBA board of directors officially cleared him of any wrongdoing, and he quickly landed a job coaching another CBA team—the Oklahoma Cavalry.
Operating as the Oklahoma City Cavalry, the previous incarnation of the franchise had been an expansion team in 1990 when, coached by Charley Rosen, they finished with a league-worst record of 18-38. Replaced by Henry Bibby, the team gradually earned a degree of respectability—culminating in a CBA championship in 1997.
Back then, however, pro basketball was a tough sell in Oklahoma. The most popular sport was college football with the Oklahoma Sooners garnering the vast majority of attention and support. When football wasn’t in season, the Oklahoma University hoopers dominated the headlines. One such headline quoted Billy Tubbs, the longtime basketball coach, as saying that he’d rather have his team lead the country in scoring than have them win an NCAA championship.
Another rival was the incredibly successful Oklahoma City Blazers of the Central Hockey League. In winning eight consecutive division championships (1996–2003), the Blazers routinely led all minor-league franchises in every sport by attracting one million spectators per season.
Against such an array of competitors, the CBA-champion OKC Cavalry folded shortly after the 1996–97 campaign.
Eleven years later, a group of local businessmen decided to reincarnate the OKC Cavalry. Their original plan was to join the far-flung and extremely shaky American Basketball Association and use the Abe Lemons Arena on the campus of Oklahoma City University as their home court. Their game plans fell flat when the university backed out of a previously arranged, albeit tenuous agreement. More importantly, the Oklahoma City fathers had focused their attention and their resources on trying to lure an NBA franchise to the City on the Plains. As a result, the OKC Calvary changed course, renamed their team the Oklahoma Cavalry, and moved operations to Lawton where they contracted to play at the Great Plains Coliseum.
With a population that approached 100,000 and made it the state’s fifth-largest city, Lawton was situated eighty-seven miles southwest of Oklahoma City. The mostly treeless landscape was typical of the area—large stretches of wild-grass prairie interrupted by an occasional low rolling hill. The primary source of Lawton’s economic and population stability was Fort Sill, an army base just outside the city limits. Even though the job market was abetted by a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant, Lawton’s working force generally struggled to make ends meet. Add the extremely hot, dry climate, and it was not surprising that the city had an unusually high crime rate—771.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people, as compared to a nationwide average of 403.6.
Nevertheless, Richardson would so like living and coaching in Lawton that he bought a house in town and, to this day, maintains his permanent residence there.
Along with their coach, the Oklahoma Cavalry thrived in Lawton. Indeed, the only other local competition in the sports-spectator market was Cameron University, a Division II school that had dropped its highly successful football program several years before for financial reasons. Plus, Cameron’s hoopsters had not had a winning season since 2004.
Richardson was looking forward to his return to action, but business-as-usual CBA-style had to be changed. “When I was up in Albany,” he said, “I had to do all the work. Do the contracts, go out and get the players, be the coach and the general manager. I really couldn’t concentrate on just coaching. So when I got the job in Lawton, the first person I contacted was Otis Birdsong. I knew he knew the game and I knew he was someone I could trust.”
Birdsong and Richardson had maintained their friendship since Sugar Ray’s banishment from the NBA. When Richardson called him, Birdsong was the president and general manager of the Arkansas Rimrockers and had been instrumental in his team’s winning the ABA championship. Although the Rimrockers and the ABA were perpetually on the verge of collapse, Birdsong was reluctant to accept Richardson’s offer to fulfill the same two positions in Lawton.
“Quite honestly,” said Birdsong, “I thought Micheal was just doing it for the money.”
But then Birdsong was present when his former teammate conducted a tryout camp in Dallas. “This man really knows what he’s doing,” Birdsong said, “and I was relieved to discover this.” Subsequently, Birdsong signed up to work with his buddy.
Birdsong’s new job description included renting an office, finding and signing players, hiring the dancers and the mascot, selling tickets, and once the season commenced, serving as a parking attendant at home games.
Like Richardson, Birdsong had a serious addiction to the game, that is, a Basketball Jones.
In any event, all the necessary components were assembled and Richardson coached with a manic edge. He prowled the sideline, waving his hands and yelling at the officials after virtually every play. Birdsong tried to calm his buddy: “I said, ‘Sugar, you can’t do that. You have to pick your spots.’ But the thing with Micheal is that it was hard for him to find the right balance.”
At each and every level of play, it’s the rare referee who will tolerate being criticized from tip to buzzer. However, they will usually shrug off the constant nagging if a coach refrains from cursing and/or making personal insults. Moreover, if “short” coaches are usually permitted to stand and walk about, taller coaches (such as the six-foot-five Richardson) will risk getting T’d no matter what they have to say as soon as they rise from their seats. And woe to the vertically gifted coach who approaches a ref and complains about whatever while towering over him.
Richardson’s perpetual carping certainly failed to endear him to the league’s refs. He once got tossed a minute and twenty seconds into a game. Many opposing players thought he was certifiable.
Richardson wasn’t above getting into raging locker-room arguments with his own players. During an early season game, Richardson screamed at a player for not rotating properly on defense. The player’s response was to cuss out Richardson for picking on him. Micheal Ray then proceeded to cut the player at halftime.
Despite Richardson’s routine hysteria, the expansionist Oklahoma Cavalry finished the season with a 30-18 record, second best in the Western Conference to the Yakima Sun Kings, the CBA’s defending champions. Upsetting Yakima in a best-of-five game series, the Calvary advanced to the finals against the Minot Sky Rockets. Just before the first game of the series, Richardson’s team officially changed its name to the Lawton–Fort Sill Cavalry as a way of solidifying their association with their home city, and then won the fifth and deciding game to make Sugar Ray a championship coach.
Being a hero in Lawton, Oklahoma, lacked the glamour of being a hoops icon in New York, but Richardson had achieved a sense of peace, comfort, easy living, and acceptance there that changed his life. In many ways, Oklahoma was still the Wild West—a place where a man’s past was forgotten, where even an infamous sinner like Richardson could reinvent himself. Indeed, he had been clean for so long that he no longer kept track.
During the off season he bought the house, substituted in the local school system, and even took a local girl as his latest wife. Wherever his journey might lead him, Richardson decided that he’d always return to Lawton.
However, the financial catastrophe that had threatened the CBA since its inception in 1946 finally overwhelmed the league. The NBA Development League had completed its sixth season, and an increasing number of NBA teams began to form farm-system arrangements with D-League teams; providing these affiliates with money, administrators, coaching staffs, and contracted players who needed seasoning and/or more playing time. In addition, even the most well-established NBA players were frequently sent to the appropriate D-League team to get into shape after recuperating from significant injuries.
Under increasing economic distress, the 2008–9 CBA season was suddenly terminated on February 3. In lieu of the traditional long and expensive playoff situation, the 2009 CBA championship was decided in a best-of-three game series between the two teams with the highest winning percentages—the number-two-seeded Albany Patroons versus the number-one-seeded Lawton–Fort Sill Cavalry. To further reduce costs, the entire series was played in Albany.
The Albany media was quick to remind Richardson of the sins of his past, focusing on his most recent humiliation there. But Richardson turned a deaf ear to these constant jibes. After going through “the drug stuff” and the charges of anti-Semitism, he was “able to not get involved in what people say.”
Indeed, his revenge on Jim Coyne and the Patroons was to win his second consecutive CBA championship with a thrilling 109–107 victory in overtime. Richardson’s elation as short lived, however, when the CBA ceased operations a few weeks later.
Undaunted, the owners of the Cavalry announced they would join another shaky organization, the Premier Basketball League (PBL).
The PBL began in January 2008 with nine teams all situated in the United States. The following season, the Lawton–Fort Sill Calvary was one of thirteen active teams. After compiling a record of 19-2, Richardson’s team was clearly the league’s best.
According to a rival coach, “Most of Richardson’s players were thugs, many were druggies, and some were both. As for Richardson himself, he was the biggest pussy hound in the league. One time, he benched one of his best players for dating the same stripper that he was dating. Another time, Richardson cut a player for getting pregnant another girl that he was dating.”
While NBA coaches and their players dating the same woman never seems to have happened, there is at least one instance where a player was sleeping with one of his coach’s daughters.
In any event, Richardson coached the Fort Sill Cavalry into the PBL finals. Their ultimate opponents were the Rochester RazorSharks, and the series quickly degenerated into the kind of madcap doings that often afflicted many minor-league basketball games. The owners, the referees, and the players on both sides understood that should a team lose too many games on their home court, the franchise might be in imminent danger of folding. Also, in many cases, hometown fans simply would not tolerate their heroes losing a playoff game—much less in a championship series.
Game one was played in Rochester, and Richardson loudly protested being repeatedly homered by the refs. After being warned several times, he was finally hit with a technical, which seemed to give the RazorSharks’ faithful a reason and a license to begin throwing stuff at Richardson. This occurred with 2.6 seconds left in overtime, the RazorSharks up by 110–106 and poised to increase their lead at the free throw line. When a plastic bottle bounced off the top of his head, Richardson pretended not to notice but one of his players was incensed.
This was Oliver Miller, a six-foot-nine veteran of six teams in seven NBA seasons, whose nickname was “The Big O,” not because his skill set resembled the great Oscar Robertson—but because Miller usually tipped the scales at 330 pounds and more. He could score (7.4 points per game) and rebound (5.9), but his playing time was always curtailed by his inability to keep pace with NBA action. Before signing with the Cavalry just before the playoffs, Miller had made the usual rounds—Italy, the Harlem Globetrotters, the CBA, ABA, USBL, and a summer in Puerto Rico’s Superior League. He was thirty-one when Richardson recruited him and was well aware that as his age and weight increased his playing days were numbered.
While Miller had always manifested a rather peaceful demeanor on the court, he blew his fuse when Richardson was forced to dodge the barrage from the RazorSharks’ fans. After engaging in a loud, profane argument with several fans, Miller climbed into the stands to confront his coach’s primary tormentor. Fortunately for all concerned, Miller refrained from making physical contact with the fan. Even so, Miller was not only ejected from the game but also suspended for the remainder of the series.
No surprise that this game was Miller’s last as a pro.
Yet Miller’s penchant for violence seemed to be amped up by his frustration at spending the rest of his life as a civilian. In April 2011 he was accused of pistol whipping a man during an altercation at a barbecue cookout in Arnold, Maryland. He was accused of, and pled guilty to, charges of first- and second-degree assault, illegally possessing a handgun, using a handgun in a violent crime, and disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to a year in jail and five subsequent years of probation.
In any event, after Miller was banished, Richardson was hopping mad, and the refs tagged him with his second T and automatic ejection. This was followed by some verbal skirmishing between the Rochester fans and several of the Cavalry players. To prevent the incipient riot, and with memories of the Malice in the Palace still vivid, the refs wisely terminated the game, leaving the RazorSharks victorious in the opening gambit of the best-of-three-games series. However, with their coach back on the bench, the series resumed in Oklahoma, and despite the absence of their best player, the Cavalry won the championship with a pair of blowout victories.
Added to the team’s two previous CBA championships, Richardson had now led the Cavalry to three consecutive titles. Even so, not a single NBA team contacted him about being an assistant coach or an advance or a college scout. Nothing. Not even a congratulatory phone call or email.
Richardson’s perpetual banishment is even more alarming when considering the case of Kevin Mackey.
After a few years coaching a high-school team in his native Boston, Mackey became an assistant coach at Boston University. In 1983 he made the next step when he was hired to be the head coach at Cleveland State University. His tenure there was hugely successful. Employing a “run ’n stun” game plan, Mackey’s teams earned one NCAA and two NIT appearances while averaging more than twenty wins per season. His best team was the 1985–86 edition, which won a school-record 29 wins and became the first fourteenth seed to advance into the NCAA’s Sweet Sixteen.
On the strength of that season, Mackey became a celebrity in northeastern Ohio. With the money earned from that 1986 NCAA run, Cleveland State built a new fieldhouse, and the media took to calling Mackey “the King of Cleveland.”
But Mackey’s reign proved to be precarious.
A long-time alcoholic, Mackey began snorting cocaine shortly after that glorious season.
Still, Mackey was a rising star, and on July 11, 1990, Cleveland State signed him to a two-year contract worth $300,000 (the equivalent of $541,544 in 2014).
Then, only two days after re-upping with Cleveland State, Mackey—in the company of two crack prostitutes—spent nine hours in a crack house on the corner of Eddy Road and Edmonton Avenue. Meanwhile, acting on a phone tip, the Cleveland police saw his brand-new Lincoln Town Car parked in front of the house. Since there were no reports of the car having been stolen, they staked out the address.
The police continued to track Mackey when he and his two companions left the house and climbed into the car. Their excuse to stop and arrest Mackey came when he repeatedly drove the car into oncoming traffic. A urine sample taken at the police station showed traces of cocaine. Also, Mackey (who claimed he fainted during blood tests) was discovered to have a pair of large needle pokes in his right thigh.
He subsequently pleaded no contest, was ordered to undergo a sixty-day treatment in a rehabilitation center—and was summarily fired by Cleveland State.
For the next several years, Mackey labored in pro basketball’s nether world: variously coaching the Miami Tropics, the Portland (Maine) Mountain Cats, and the Atlantic City Seagulls in the summertime USBL. There never was any doubt that Mackey was an exceptional coach—he was the only USBL coach to win three consecutive championships. Add still another title when Mackey led the Mansfield Hawks to the championship of the International Basketball Association.
Then, in 2004 Mackey was hired as a scout by Larry Bird, the president of basketball operations for the Indiana Pacers. Turned out that the early years of Bird’s active career with the Boston Celtics coincided with Mackey’s tenure at Boston College. Mackey was still with the Pacers during the 2013–14 season.
So not only was Mackey welcomed into the NBA but has become a fixture on Indiana’s scouting staff. While Micheal Richardson is still banned from the league.
Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence that Mackey is white and Richardson is a black man.
Perhaps not.