A score of professional athletes were allowed to resume their careers despite having committed worse transgressions than Richardson has.
On July 1, 2009, J. R. Smith was driving through a thirty-five-miles-per-hour stretch of highway near Millstone, New Jersey, and was officially clocked at sixty-seven miles per hour, when he blew a stop sign and collided with another vehicle. Smith suffered only a few minor scratches; the two passengers in the other car were hospitalized with severe injuries but survived. The most tragic result of the accident was the death of Andre Bell, a lifelong buddy of Smith, who was sitting alongside him.
Although Smith had been issued four previous speeding tickets, and had twenty-eight points on his license, a grand jury declined to issue an indictment of vehicular homicide. But Smith didn’t escape his just deserts. He was sentenced to ninety days in jail, yet served only twenty-four days.
Three years later (May 24, 2012), Smith was arrested once more for failing to appear in a Miami Beach court as a consequence of his having been charged with operating a motor scooter without a license. This time, Smith was released on bond after spending just a few hours in a jail cell.
Neither of these incidents moved the NBA to either ban or suspend Smith from playing.
Likewise has the NFL ignored the criminality of several players: Like Josh Brent, a defensive end for the Dallas Cowboys, who was convicted of intoxicated manslaughter in January 2014. Accordingly, Brent was fined $10,000, was sentenced to 180 days behind bars, 45 days in a rehabilitation center, and placed on probation for ten years.
On November 25, 2014, slightly ten months after his conviction, and after serving a ten-game suspension imposed by the Cowboys, Brent took the field against the New York Giants. Plus, Dallas subsequently signed Brent to a nonguaranteed contract for the 2015 season.
Then there’s the infamous case of Michael Vick, imprisoned for twenty-one months for running a dog-fighting operation. After his release his career resumed with the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Jets.
(In addition, from January 1, 2010, to September 1, 2014, the arrest rates of NFL, NBA, and MLB are substantial. Calculated as the number of arrests per year as per a U.S. population of 100,000, the NFL’s number is 2,446, the NBA’s is 2,151, and MLB’s is 553—virtually all of these for domestic assault or DUI. Nationally, the rate per 100,000 population for assault arrests is 241 and for DUI is 809.)
In any event, that’s at least three jailbirds whose careers (and bank accounts) were resurrected. Among NBA miscreants, players officially forgiven for either domestic assault and/or DUI arrests include the likes of Jason Kidd, Kendrick Perkins (twice), Greg Oden, Ty Lawson, Kyle Lowry, and many more.
Meanwhile, Richardson never spent any time behind bars and never harmed anybody except himself. Nor has he ever identified any of the “all-stars” he often shared a pipe with. “I don’t want to get into naming names,” he says. “For whatever reasons, they didn’t get caught and I did. It’s about how I fucked up, not them.”
Why, then, has no NBA team offered Richardson a job as scout or assistant coach? “I have no idea,” says Richardson. “I do know that if David Stern wanted to, he could have done something for me.”
Perhaps Richardson is being blackballed simply because he’s the first and perpetual example of what will happen if an NBA player accumulates three strikes. “But, hey,” he shrugs, “who says that life should be fair?”
For sure, Micheal Ray Richardson swears that he’s a happy man—and, on some level, he assuredly is. “I do some substitute teaching in the Lawton schools,” he says, “and Otis Birdsong and I do nine weeks of summer camps for kids in Palm Beach. I get my NBA pension, and I made some good money playing for thirteen years overseas. Am I rich? No. But I’m doing okay.”
Despite winning championships in three different leagues, however, Micheal Ray has had his fill of coaching in the minors. “I’ve got nothing more to prove at that level,” he says.
He’s also moved on from the anger, guilt, and shame that shadowed his life for so long. “Yes, I brought all of that shit on myself, but I’ve paid my dues. All I ask is that people don’t judge me for what I did over thirty-five years ago.”
Even David Stern believes that Richardson has paid his dues. Stern was always plagued by a modicum of guilt for having had to ban Richardson from the NBA. When Stern finally retired as the league’s commissioner in 2015, he was nevertheless instrumental in welcoming Micheal Ray back into the league’s good graces. Beginning in November 2016, Richardson was hired by the NBA to conduct basketball camps for youths in India, Indonesia, and Africa.
However, if Micheal Ray Richardson’s sins have been officially redeemed, the NBA is still suffering from its own self-created problems.
Indeed, the self-indulgence of too many modern-day players, and the increasing emphasis on flash over substance by both the league and the media, has done much to reduce the NBA to just another “product.” There’s no doubt that the overall glamorization-cum-commercialization of The Game is much more criminal than anything Micheal Ray Richardson has ever done.