Book Richardson Is out of Prison, but He Doesn’t Feel Free
As the college sports landscape rapidly evolves, is there a path back in for a disgraced former assistant basketball coach?Book Richardson Is out of Prison, but He Doesn’t Feel Free
As the college sports landscape rapidly evolves, is there a path back in for a disgraced former assistant basketball coach?
Emanuel “Book” Richardson often huddles his eighth-grade basketball players around a whiteboard for a pre-practice lesson. In these sessions at the New York Gauchos’ grassroots basketball facility in the Bronx, New York, he doesn’t just explain strategy. He teaches work ethic and attention to detail.
“Guys,” Richardson tells his players, “you have to compete.”
When Richardson is in this mode, black dry-erase marker in hand, jotting down notes on the board, he feels most whole, most alive. Coaching, hooping, losing himself in the rhythm of a play. “He’s so passionate about what he does,” says 14-year-old Elijah Novotny, one of Richardson’s players. “I can just feel his energy.”
It’s in these moments, Richardson says, that he forgets he’s coaching middle schoolers. It’s almost as if he’s back on the Division I court, back at the University of Arizona, where he served as an assistant coach from 2009 to 2017. He was known in college basketball circles as one of the top recruiters in the country, and he regularly helped his teams land top-10 recruiting classes. While in Tucson as part of Sean Miller’s staff, Richardson helped continue the Wildcats’ winning tradition; he was part of five Sweet 16s, three Elite Eights, four Pac-12 regular-season championships, and a pair of Pac-12 tournament titles.
Sometimes, when he’s alone on the Gauchos’ court, long after his players have gone home, Richardson turns off the lights and imagines himself in another time, another place. Before the FBI investigation. Before he lost his job, his career, and his sense of identity. For a moment, his shame dissipates, and he allows himself to dream. “I find myself back on the college bench,” he says. “I find myself back in the college locker room. I find myself trying to get to a Final Four.”
But then it hits him, with piercing, painful recognition: He isn’t there. And without a pardon from President Joe Biden before the end of his presidency, and, most importantly, a change of heart from the NCAA, he fears he may never be again.
Richardson came up as a recruiter and an assistant coach in a radically different world for college basketball, one where money was frequently funneled under the table to top recruits and their families. For decades this underground network fueled the connections among college hoops programs, coaches, sneaker representatives, and financial advisers, who all hoped to influence the top players, especially NBA prospects, to sign with certain programs or agents. In this win-at-all-costs system, secretive exchanges of money—sometimes small amounts, to cover a player’s meal, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars or more—were as commonplace as a three-man weave.
“Everyone has known for a long time that college athletes were getting paid by either coaches, school boosters, whoever, to come play a sport at a specific school. It was just really under the table,” says Mit Winter, a college athletics attorney.
Though this system was rampant throughout college basketball, any sort of payment to players was against NCAA rules—and bribes were and are against the law. The NCAA, from its inception more than a century ago till recently, maintained that paying players would ruin “amateurism,” even though it profited to the tune of millions from the labor of athletes and the income they generated with big-time TV contracts, cash-generating bowl games, and March Madness. In that system, athletes weren’t given a cent for the use of their own likenesses. Such prohibitions fueled a black market that could be foundational to a program’s success—or failure.
“There wasn’t a symposium that told you how to do it,” Richardson says. “There wasn’t someone saying, ‘Well, listen, young fella, you do this, this, this, and this to get that.’ What you did was you would try to compete to win a national championship at all costs.
“This ecosystem, everything is under the table, but everyone knows,” Richardson says. “For so long, [the system] ran itself.”
Until that system was put under scrutiny. In 2015, the FBI launched an investigation into what Joon H. Kim, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, described at the time as the “dark underbelly of college basketball.” The resulting investigation into fraud and corruption in the sport implicated a number of associate head coaches, assistant coaches, sneaker executives, financial advisers, and players and parents to some degree. The investigation found that certain assistant coaches took cash bribes from agents and advisers, essentially operating as middlemen. When announcing the results of the investigation in 2017, Kim described recruiting coaches as “circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes.”
At its core, recruiting is about relationships. Associate head coaches and assistants are sometimes on the road for weeks or even months at a time, especially during the summer AAU season. They spend hours meeting with families, players, and club and high school coaches. Given how close an assistant coach could become with a recruit during this process, they were the ones that financial advisers, agents, and sneaker executives came to rely on to secure a player’s future services. Apartment rent for a cousin here, a stipend for a mother and sibling there. Each exchange was unique, but they were all geared toward getting a recruit to sign with a university or agent.
FBI investigators found that Richardson had accepted $20,000 in exchange for steering Arizona players to aspiring sports agent Christian Dawkins and financial adviser Munish Sood, and they had a wiretapped phone conversation to prove it. According to the investigation, Richardson “repeatedly assured Dawkins and Sood that Richardson would use his influence over players … to direct them to Dawkins and Sood.” Richardson maintained that he could do that because the players trusted him.
Another wiretap recorded Richardson telling Dawkins that Miller “bought” former U of A star Deandre Ayton. On yet another recording, Dawkins said that Miller had “fronted [a] deal” for a player later identified as Ayton. ESPN reported in February 2018 that Miller and Dawkins were recorded on a wiretap discussing a $100,000 payment to Ayton. (Miller coached three more seasons in Tucson and was fired in 2021 after the NCAA hit the school with five Level 1 recruiting violations.) According to the evidence uncovered in the FBI investigation, Richardson gave a portion of that $20,000 bribe to at least one recruit to steer that player to Arizona. The wiretaps also recorded Richardson saying that, even though he was bringing in a $250,000 salary at Arizona, he went broke because he was continuing to give a portion of his own salary to land recruits at the school.
“I really was trying to help,” Richardson says now. “And it wasn’t just, ‘Well, Book, you’re helping yourself now.’ I was really trying to help the university. I was trying to help kids. I was trying to help because, again, I just felt like this is par for the course of the business that we’re in, whether it’s right or wrong.”
These wiretapped calls, played in court during the federal trial of Dawkins and codefendant Merl Code, were a stark revelation, a reminder of how deep the web of exchange went in this black-market system, how even those without ultimate power on a coaching staff—the assistants—might empty their own pockets not to get left behind in a system where they believed players could simply secure more money elsewhere. “Everyone’s going to say they’re not doing it,” Richardson says, adding later: “No one’s going to tell you how to get this McDonald’s All American. No one’s telling you that.”
Many just saw it as part of the competition, even though these exchanges and arrangements were clearly illegal and also violated NCAA rules that prohibited athletes from receiving compensation or benefits from prospective agents or sponsors. Richardson and the three other college assistants who were arrested following the FBI’s investigation—Lamont Evans of Oklahoma State, Tony Bland of USC, and Chuck Person of Auburn—faced multiple felony charges related to bribery and fraud.
Richardson eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to commit bribery. He served a 90-day sentence at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in New York, and now he feels he is forever marked as a felon and bad-actor rep in college hoops. After his arrest, he was fired and, because of a 10-year ban in the form of a show-cause penalty from the NCAA, effectively blacklisted from college basketball.
“Careers got ruined,” says Evans, who is a longtime friend of Richardson’s. Evans was sentenced to three months in prison and, like Richardson, received a 10-year NCAA ban.
But Richardson’s story—and the stories of the other assistant coaches—still matters now. The punishment continues to follow them years later and makes it difficult for Richardson to move forward. Most days, he isn’t sure how to. He feels as if he’s sprinting toward an unknown destination—a destination that may never let him in again. He tries to find solace and satisfaction in mentoring his current middle school players. But he grows tired from running—from trying to repeatedly prove that he is remorseful and deserving of a second chance in college coaching, especially as he watches the college sports landscape shift dramatically.
The FBI’s college hoops investigation and Richardson’s arrest came just four years before a policy on name, image, and likeness (NIL) radically transformed the college sports scene in June 2021, eventually ushering in a legal pay-for-play system across college sports. For the first time, college athletes were allowed to make money from their personal brands, and plenty of them have cashed in. For example, Caitlin Clark became the highest-paid women’s college basketball player, amassing NIL deals of about $3.1 million, including partnerships with Nike and Gatorade, and former Kentucky men’s basketball star Rob Dillingham netted $1 million in endorsement deals from the likes of NerdWallet, Skims, and Topps. Athletes across the college sports landscape, from Heisman-winning quarterbacks to gymnasts, are getting paid.
In May, the NCAA and its power conferences agreed on a deal that would allow schools, with funding from boosters (individually or through collectives), to directly pay players for the first time in the organization’s 100-plus-year history. The NCAA also agreed to move forward with a multibillion-dollar agreement to settle three federal antitrust cases (House v. NCAA, Hubbard v. NCAA, and Carter v. NCAA).
In July, a court filing revealed the terms of the settlements, specifically outlining how past athletes will share $2.8 billion in damages and setting up a new system for revenue sharing for future athletes. “Relatively recently,” says Gabe Feldman, director of the Tulane Sports Law Program and an expert on the intersection of college sports and law, “there has been a shift in the view of the public and many courts among legislators and governmental agencies that the system is unfair and that college athletes deserve some share of the revenue they are generating.”
Among the biggest changes under the new system is the legalized influx of agents into the college sports scene. It used to be forbidden for players to have any sort of representation while playing collegiate sports—and that’s why assistant coaches, the people on a college staff who often had the closest relationships with pro prospects, could influence whom student-athletes would sign with to represent them in their contracts and business deals.
Now, with the new NIL policy, agents are able to link up with players while they’re still in high school. It’s a major shift for teenagers and has drastically changed the recruiting process for coaches. These agents, some of them certified to work in pro sports, facilitate NIL offers that are essentially salary negotiations—and are now part of the recruiting process for athletes as they graduate high school or navigate the transfer portal.
“Where we are right now is not the end, but it is the beginning of a new model for college students,” Feldman says. “And I don’t think anyone knows where we will land. But one thing is for sure, and that is that college athletes will have significantly more rights in this new model than they had under the old model.”
Yet the NIL world remains incredibly murky—and difficult to regulate—and it will likely remain so until players are deemed employees and can sign employment contracts. Recently, the messiness of the new NIL world became even more apparent when, in a stunning announcement, the starting quarterback of UNLV’s undefeated football team, Matthew Sluka, said that he won’t play for the remainder of the 2024 season. His reason? He wrote on social media that he committed to UNLV based on “certain representations that were made to me, which were not upheld after I enrolled.” His agent told ESPN that Sluka was “verbally promised a minimum of $100,000” by an assistant coach if he transferred to UNLV; Yahoo Sports reported that UNLV’s collective never agreed to a $100,000 deal with the quarterback.
For all that’s changed in recent years, the constants in college sports recruiting are still money and the relationships between players and coaches. Until student-athletes are truly classified as employees and there are consistent standards for contracts and negotiations in place across college sports, the NCAA seems ill equipped to regulate the system.
“Even under the proposed new system, which would allow athletes to receive compensation for ‘legitimate’ NIL deals and allow schools to share a percentage of revenue with athletes, there will still be limits on the amount of compensation that athletes can receive,” Feldman says. “These limits may reduce the incentive or the need to pay athletes ‘under the table,’ but it won’t necessarily eliminate it. Instead, the table will just be higher. But it’s still possible that agents and others will try to find additional ways to compensate athletes that will violate NCAA rules and potentially expose them to legal liability.”
And in such an uncertain, shifting world, it is unclear where traditional coaches and ace recruiters like Richardson stand. They did the heavy lifting in recruiting—spending hours on the road visiting high school gyms, scouting top prospects, and then doing whatever it took, sometimes even exchanges of money, to land the best recruits. In some cases, as for Richardson and other subjects of the FBI’s investigation, that meant accepting cash themselves. Now, money from NIL collectives, individual donors, and businesses has as much—if not more—influence on recruits and where they choose to play as depth charts and NBA pipelines.
Richardson says that he knows he broke the rules—and he has publicly acknowledged his wrongdoing. He accepts that he willingly participated in a broken system and has faced the consequences as a result. All he wants now is a second chance to return to the game he loves.
“I fully own what I’ve done,” Richardson says, adding later: “I made a mistake. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.”
The NCAA is finally evolving in major ways, but one way it hasn’t is in its refusal to reconsider lengthy bans for coaches who were caught breaking rules that existed before players could get paid—even if they’ve apologized, spent years out of the sport, and have been punished by the criminal justice system, as Richardson has. (A spokesperson for the NCAA declined to answer questions from The Ringer about Richardson’s show-cause penalty.)
Richardson carries what he calls a “scarlet letter.” Unless the NCAA’s show-cause penalty is lifted, Richardson, now 51, will be nearly 60 by the time he’s allowed to return to college coaching. The weight of the letter, and of still being some sort of pariah in the eyes of the NCAA, gnaws at him.
“The industry has forgotten and forsaken us,” Richardson says.
“There’ll never be another case after; there was never another case before,” he says. “We are the true alpha and omega. And that’s why that scarlet letter hurts more, because there’s never going to be anyone else. [Schools are] paying kids openly. It’s not even a conversation that you have at the back end; it’s on the front end.”
Richardson enjoys coaching top middle schoolers and future college prospects. He was recently hired as head coach at the Pro Development Institute, an athletics-focused prep school in Ohio. “I’ve got these eight incredible kids with me who believe in me,” he says. “I believe in them, and we’re starting to build this program out.” He is grateful for the opportunity, but it hurts—being there, instead of where he truly wants to be. The college court. Starting over. Proving that he can still steer a program. “When you have this opportunity,” he says about his job at PDI, “sometimes you don’t look at it as an opportunity, because you’re still, in a way—you’re hurting.”
He still remains the director of the Gauchos but will juggle both opportunities, high school and AAU. He says he needs the money from both jobs to survive. Some days, he is barely doing just that. Last week, he found himself in tears, pondering his uncertain future. He sat in his car, shaking, unable to drive, lost in thought. But then he remembered why he continues to show up and pursue the love he has for the game. For his teams. He has no choice but to keep going.
“The thing you hold on to the most, the thing you covet the most … is your team,” he says. Still, he feels as if he has lost everything. His reputation, his college coaching prospects. He says he struggles with depression. Coaching is more than his job; it’s his identity and his calling. “I never realized that as a player—I was a coach, that’s what made me good,” he says.
Good. Wanted. Successful. It was how he felt valued in the world—and how he felt he could give value to others. He can’t control his fate when it comes to the NCAA show-cause penalty, so he often does the one thing he can control: chastise himself. Shame swells. “I’m such a fucking failure,” he says, his voice trailing off.
He does this often, even though those around him, his fellow coaches, friends, and players, remind him that he is anything but that. They tell him that he is valuable and loved, and they remind him that he may ultimately get a second chance. But he isn’t so sure. Richardson replays his mistakes again and again in his mind. The FBI coming to his door early in the morning. The wiretapped phone calls, the trial. The feds and the NCAA saw only what he had done, and not who he is or who he can become. Sometimes, he allows himself to do the same. “Because society has punished me,” he says, “I’m saying, ‘Well, you know what? Obviously they’re right.’”
At least, that is what a relentless voice inside tells him when he is at his lowest. Twice, he says, he has tried to end his life. “I know I have incredible grace,” he says. “I would be dead.”
Still trapped, even years after his release from prison, he fears he is running out of time to get back into college coaching.
“You can be out of a cell but still be in jail,” Richardson says.
Richardson started his coaching career in 1999 at his alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and held various roles at colleges, in AAU basketball, and for Team USA before, in 2009, landing the job with Arizona that would really put him on the map. He quickly developed a reputation as a sharp recruiter. The first line of Richardson’s archived bio on Arizona’s website touts him as “one of the finest recruiters in college basketball.” During his time on Miller’s staff, he helped Arizona land five top-five classes. “It almost felt like it was Book against the blue bloods, North Carolinas, the Kentuckys, the Dukes,” says Jamar Betz, a friend who has known Richardson since his early days on the AAU scene.
Richardson believes he thrived in the cutthroat world of college recruiting in part because of the way he related to the teenage players and their families and created relationships. He was, and still is, affectionately referred to as “Unc” by dozens of players. He was more than an assistant coach; players came to him, he says, when they had problems at home or just needed an extra ear.
“Uncle Book is one of the most genuine human beings I’ve ever come into contact with,” says TJ McConnell, a former Arizona player who’s now on the Pacers. “He cares about the players he coaches like they’re his own. He would always ask me, basketball aside, ‘How are you doing as a person?’ And I’ll never forget that because he genuinely cares about relationships. That’s a big reason why me and him are still close to this day.”
While the show-cause penalty is currently the biggest impediment to Richardson’s return to college hoops, recently he’s also thought about the fact that of the 10 men arrested after the FBI’s probe, only one was white. “The emotion is raw,” he says. “No one’s ever asked, like, Damn, was it by coincidence that it was four Black coaches?” He wasn’t surprised by the outcome, either. For any of them. “As soon as they took the case on, I’m guilty,” he says. “And especially a Black man in America dealing with it. No, I didn’t have a chance.”
Black assistant coaches often did the groundwork of relationship building that was crucial to a program’s success, spending long hours recruiting prospects and getting to know their families.
“I believed at the time [the FBI investigation] was unmerited,” says Jay Bilas, an ESPN college basketball analyst and practicing attorney in North Carolina. “I didn’t think it was worth the time of the Southern District and the U.S. attorney’s office. It was a small-time matter that was a violation of a private organization’s rules and not worthy of prosecution.”
Kim, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, did not reply to a request for comment from The Ringer about the college hoops investigation.
As for Richardson’s show-cause ruling that remains in place, preventing him from getting back into college coaching? “Show-cause rulings are absurd, in my view,” Bilas says, “because it’s just too long, it’s arbitrary, and there’s really no consistency to it.” Bilas mentions former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel, who had a show-cause penalty of five years for lying to the NCAA about student-athletes who received tattoos and cash in exchange for signed memorabilia. While Tressel wasn’t allowed to return to coaching during that time, he was allowed to become the university president at Youngstown State, and he held that position for nine years. “That tells you everything you need to know about how ridiculous these rules are,” Bilas says.
But those rules still dictate many parts of Richardson’s life. Forget coaching in the NCAA; Richardson couldn’t start watching college hoops again until about two years ago. It had been too painful. Even now, when he attends local AAU games or even college games, he sees his former college-coaching peers thriving. He’s happy for them but says that inside he’s gutted. “Before,” he says, “I used to sit with them. Now I sit away from them. I had a guy that said, ‘Book, man, we’re really praying for you.’”
There is little solace in knowing that people understand that the NCAA doesn’t seem to want to change its policy for him, despite evolving on other matters. Here, in this moment, he’s not the coach from those transcripts or the man in news stories. He’s a real person, struggling to make ends meet, unable to shake the stigma.
Felon.
Although Richardson feels trapped, he’s clinging to a newfound glimmer of hope that one of the barriers he believes is blocking him from a return to college sports could be lifted. NYU professors David Cooper and David Hollander and a class of six graduate students submitted a request for executive clemency to the White House on his behalf in June, and they plan to resubmit the application on October 15, the day before Richardson formally becomes eligible to have a pardon granted. “Book Richardson was a severe casualty of a subsequently invalidated system,” Hollander says. “He shouldn’t be forgotten. He should be forgiven.”
A pardon wouldn’t erase Richardson’s felony conviction, but it would be a formal expression of forgiveness—and Richardson and his lawyers hope it would help alleviate concerns that college programs might have about hiring him in the future, whenever the NCAA allows him to return. In addition to potentially helping with his future employment, a pardon would restore some of Richardson’s civil rights—like the ability to vote—and help remove some of the stigma he’s been carrying since his incarceration.
“We felt that Book Richardson’s case is exactly the kind of case where federal forgiveness is justified,” Hollander says, “because though he pled guilty, and in the pardon application readily admits what he did was wrong, all he asks is that his public professional epitaph be modified so that it no longer reads, ‘Book Richardson, once a Division I college basketball coach, convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery,’ period, end of sentence. Now it’s ‘Book Richardson, former Division I basketball coach, convicted of bribery, later pardoned by the president of the United States.’ And that lets him walk this earth with a very different sense of self.”
Yet as the months have passed since the initial pardon request was submitted in June, Richardson can feel the distance widening between where he is and where he yearns to be. He tries to believe that he will get another opportunity, like Tony Bland, who was recently hired as an assistant coach at the University of Washington. (Bland was fired by USC following his arrest in 2017. He received two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, and, importantly, only a three-year NCAA ban.)
“There’s no reason why Book doesn’t deserve another chance,” says Kimani Young, UConn’s associate head coach, who has known Richardson since the two were kids growing up in New York City. “I mirrored my career after him,” Young says, finding it “inspiring” how Richardson climbed from grassroots AAU to low-level then mid-major then high-major Division I using his biggest strength: relationship building.
“He made a mistake. He’s admitted to his mistake,” Young continues. “He paid the price. He’s lost a ton over what’s happened. … His decision-makers should have just some empathy for that and realize that somebody that has done so much leading up to that critical mistake does deserve a second chance.”
While Richardson awaits that second chance, he tries to place himself firmly in the present with his middle school players; he encourages them to follow their NBA dreams while cautioning them about how difficult it will be to get there. He likes to tell them about how hard it is to make the NBA, reminding them that they’re about as likely to become billionaires as pro basketball players. This is the part that Richardson has always loved best: teaching. He calls his own Gauchos staff the construction crew. “We fix you,” he says jokingly.
“I want to make sure that those guys have everything that’s going to be needed to sustain success when they get to wherever they want to get to,” Richardson says. This gives him some sort of peace—however fleeting. “Helping someone else,” Richardson says, “helps you.”
LaMarr Ellis, father of 14-year-old Gauchos player Aaron Ellis, says that Richardson treats the middle schooler as if he were his own child. He notices the way Richardson quietly pulls players aside and raises his hand, “like he’s in school,” LaMarr says, as if to say: “Can I just share something with you?” Lenox Nickles, another of Richardson’s players, says the coach has “added a sense of IQ to my game, making reads that most eighth graders can’t make at this age. … Especially just being unselfish, I think he nailed that into me, too.”
Richardson says he tries to come to the gym with a positive attitude and not let his players see his pain. “They don’t understand everything that I’m holding on to,” he says. Some nights, he stays late at the facility. At the gym, it’s harder to dwell on the memories of the day he was arrested and his life changed. Many times in the days and years since, he’s scanned the internet to see what people are saying about him and his arrest. He remembers reading one post on social media: “Book Richardson should be dead.” It still hurts. And he feels further stigmatized: “Because now to the average person,” he says, “I’m this Black criminal.”
It isn’t glamorous, showing up and coaching at the AAU level these days. He pulls out a Snickers for lunch one afternoon in between Gauchos practices. It isn’t the healthiest option, but it’s what he can afford on some of his busiest days, between the cost of living and therapy, which he attends on Saturday mornings. “I’m surviving,” he says. At the very least, he wishes he had health care.
He thinks of the popular allegory of a drowning man who will reach for the blade of a sword to survive. But his therapist reminds him that he is more than surviving; he’s living. His players on the Gauchos and at PDI count on him to show up, day after day, and that matters. He still matters.
Sometimes it’s difficult for Richardson to take that in. In his darkest moments, he says he feels as if he is nothing. He often asks himself something he asks his players: “Who are you?” He tries to make a joke at first: “I’m the fat dude that shows up to this gym every day. You can give me that.”
In Richardson’s eyes, the question “Who are you?” translates into: “Where are you?” This gym. Coaching youth basketball.
He loves these kids but fears AAU and prep basketball will be his final coaching stop. “I don’t think I’ll ever coach college basketball,” he says, pausing, cupping his hands into his face, letting a tear fall. “I just want to coach. I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry. No matter how many times he says it, most days it feels like no one can hear him.
Hollander and Cooper, the NYU sports business professors, are hoping that people in and out of the basketball world will share the personal statement Richardson submitted as part of his pardon request.
“With this pardon, these young people can know that mistakes can be made, but they don’t always have to be who you are for the rest of their life. You can make a mistake—a big one. And you can learn, return and do good. And be a person who becomes more than your mistake,” he wrote.
Outgoing presidents have been known to grant more pardons during their final days in office, Hollander says. If the president can forgive Richardson, it may free other governing bodies, such as the NCAA, to do the same. While it’s far from a guarantee that he’d be hired again to coach in college, ending his show-cause penalty would address the heart of the matter: The ban continues to stifle his deepest hopes and dreams. “Second chances,” Hollander says, “are federally allowed, and they should then trickle down to other professional and societal areas of that pardoned person’s life.”
Richardson is trying to make the best of his new coaching gig at the Ohio prep school. It means something to him when players call him “Coach.” He feels gratified in a way he can’t even explain. But then that other voice inside him returns. “But man, you know what? I never got to a Final Four. I would love to get to a Final Four,” he says. The negative thoughts begin again: “You’re not going to get there,” he tells himself. Then he starts doing the math. If the show-cause penalty stays in place … it’ll be one more year, and another year, and another.
Even Dawkins has found his way back into college sports. According to Sportico, after serving 18 months in prison, Dawkins earlier this year founded a sports and entertainment agency called Seros Partners with former NBA player Trevor Booker and Booker’s college teammate turned business partner, Jonah Baize. Just last month, Dawkins accompanied a star high school recruit on a campus visit to Louisville. How the tides have changed. “It shows what happened in 2017 was all a crock of shit, basically,” Dawkins told Sportico. The irony is not lost on Richardson.
Right now, though, this evolving world of college sports is one that doesn’t seem to include Richardson or most of the other coaches who were arrested in 2017. “Usually the way the NCAA operates,” says Mit Winter, the college athletics attorney, “they’re like, ‘Well, this was the rule at the time. You violated it, and so we’re not going to reduce or take away the penalties we gave you for you violating those rules at that time.’ So, I haven’t heard anything about [the NCAA reconsidering show-cause rulings]. Obviously, that would be the right thing to do from my perspective.”
Still, on his good days, Richardson does allow himself to hope. To wonder what it would feel like to finally take off the scarlet letter, to be free of its glare, its heft. To be back on the college bench, staring out onto the pristine court.
In this vision, there is still time to show that he has so much more to give.
