The Knicks made the playoffs in Richardson’s third season, 1980-81, under Coach Red Holzman, although they lost to the Chicago Bulls in the first round. The next year, the Knicks got off to a rough start and, after a particularly dispiriting game in December, Richardson spun off one of the most quoted remarks in league history:
“What do you think is happening to this team?” one reporter asked him.
“The ship be sinking,” Richardson replied.
“How far can it sink?” another reporter asked.
“The sky’s the limit,” Richardson responded.
Things got worse. Coach Hubie Brown, a future Hall of Fame inductee, took over the reins in 1982, and he and the star guard clashed repeatedly. “Did he give me a chance?” Richardson wrote in his memoir. “No. But at the time, I wasn’t giving myself a chance, either.”
As a young star athlete in a particularly hedonistic era in New York, he began mingling with celebrities at the disco club Studio 54. Drugs were everywhere. “The very first time I tried cocaine, it didn’t even get me high,” he wrote. Then he tried it again. And again.
Eventually, he wrote, “I was no longer the next Walt Frazier. I was becoming the next famous burnout.”
Richardson was born on April 11, 1955, in Lubbock, Texas, the third of seven children of Billy Jack and Luddie (Hicks) Richardson. Lubbock “was a horrible place to live if you were Black,” he wrote. His father was in the military and rarely around, and his mother eventually moved the family to Denver to find a better life.