Golden Richards was a NFL glamour boy with a glittery name and the look to match. A blonde mane flowed from beneath his helmet when he streaked down the field. As columnist Jim Murray noted, “He’s so golden from his hair on down that he glows in the daylight. He’s perfect for the part of Sir Galahad.”
Richards could play, too. Few were faster than he was. A Dallas Cowboys receiver, Richards had sure hands, the strength to catch in a crowd and the ability to haul in long passes over the shoulder.
He got both his first NFL reception and first touchdown catch against the St. Louis Cardinals. Later, as an established starter, Richards made a game-winning touchdown grab at St. Louis. For his career, the foe he had the most catches against (19) were the Cardinals.
In his first five seasons with Dallas, Richards took part in nine playoff games, including two Super Bowls. The glory came at a terrible price. Richards suffered injuries, became addicted to prescription painkillers and struggled with alcohol abuse.
Burnishing bright
John Golden Richards was born on Dec. 31, 1950, in Salt Lake City. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, his parents gave him the distinctive middle name because they thought a baby born on New Year’s Eve must be extra special. Everyone called him Golden.
Richards’ specialness came through in athletics. He participated in five sports _ baseball, basketball, football, tennis and track _ at Granite High School in Salt Lake City. As a senior in 1969, Richards ran the 100-yard dash in 9.4 seconds and cleared 24 feet in the long jump at the Golden West Invitational in Sacramento.
Colleges recruited him for track, but Richards preferred football. The only football offers he got were from Air Force, Brigham Young University (BYU), Utah, Utah State and Westminster College, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Richards, a Mormon, planned to bypass BYU and go with Utah because of the football program’s strong passing game. “Next thing, I was called into my bishop’s office, and he told me he wanted me to go to BYU, or else he would call me on (a Latter-day Saints) mission,” Richards said to the Tribune.
Richards did what he was told and found he was right about BYU’s quarterback situation. None could get the ball to him consistently. In his two varsity seasons (1970-71), Richards caught a total of two touchdown passes.
He made up for it with punt and kickoff returns. As a junior in 1971, he was the NCAA’s top punt returner, with 624 yards and four touchdowns.
Richards didn’t put the same kind of effort into his studies. He was declared academically ineligible for his senior season at BYU. “It was my fault,” he told the Deseret News. “The situation arose simply because of my own laziness.”
He transferred to the University of Hawaii for the 1972 season and snared five touchdown passes in five games before he tore ligaments in his right knee.
Seeing stars
Before the injury, Cowboys scout Bob Griffin twice tested Richards in the 40-yard dash and both times he clocked 4.4 seconds. Impressed, the Cowboys took Richards in the second round of the 1973 NFL draft. “We haven’t had anybody this quick on our team since we picked up (two-time Olympic gold medalist) Bobby Hayes,” Cowboys head coach Tom Landry said to the Honolulu Advertiser.
As a teen, the Cowboys were the team Richards dreamed of playing for someday. When he walked into their locker room for the first time at training camp in 1973, “I was standing there next to Bob Lilly, Jethro Pugh and Roger Staubach,” Richards said to the Salt Lake Tribune. “I wanted to get everybody’s autograph.”
(Before a 1975 game against the New York Jets at Shea Stadium, Richards “stuck a pen and paper in his uniform pants and ran over to Joe Namath, begging for his signature right at the 50-yard line. Namath told Richards it was an honor and sent him a signed glossy photo the following the week,” the Tribune reported.)
On Sept. 30, 1973, the Cowboys were routing the Cardinals at Texas Stadium. In the fourth quarter, Landry began putting in his reserves, including the rookie Richards and quarterback Craig Morton. Soon after, Richards caught his first NFL pass, a five-yard toss from Morton. “I just broke out smiling and was just about laughing all the way to the huddle,” Richards said to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Two plays later, Morton called for Richards to go deep. “I thought it might be a touchdown pass when it (the play) was called,” Richards told the Star-Telegram. “That’s what the play was designed for _ six points.”
Sure enough, Richards broke free and Morton connected with him on a 53-yard scoring pass. Game stats
Big playmaker
More good times followed. Richards returned a punt 63 yards for a score in a 1973 playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings and caught touchdown passes in playoff wins against the Los Angeles Rams (1976) and Vikings (1978).
Richards averaged 17.5 yards a catch in the NFL. Of his 17 regular-season touchdown receptions, 11 were of 40 yards or more.
On Oct. 9, 1977, Richards made the play that beat the Cardinals.
With 6:53 remaining and St. Louis ahead, 24-23, the Cowboys were at the Cardinals’ 17-yard line. Quarterback Roger Staubach called an audible but Richards couldn’t hear him above the din at Busch Memorial Stadium.
“I was able to read Roger’s lips and pick it up, though,” Richards told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
As Richards dashed to the goal line down the right side, covered by cornerback Lee Nelson, Staubach floated a pass. “It was a little bit underthrown,” Richards said to the Fort Worth newspaper. “So I just kept going like it was coming. Then, at the last second, I stopped and tipped it back to me with one hand. Then I got a hold of it and just went sliding in to score.”
Nelson, filling in for injured Perry Smith, told the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, “The guy made a hell of a catch. He caught it with one hand, one arm. I batted one of his arms away.”
The Cowboys won, 30-24. Game stats They would lose only twice all season (to the Cardinals at Dallas and to the Steelers at Pittsburgh) and rolled to the Super Bowl for a matchup against the Denver Broncos.
Richards was one of the game’s stars, catching a 29-yard touchdown pass from fullback Robert Newhouse to highlight a 27-10 Cowboys victory. Game stats and video
Troubled times
Richards was popular. His first wife, Barbara, said at his peak he got 1,000 pieces of fan mail a week. At the Super Bowl in Miami in 1976, Richards was “chased up and down the streets by the females, some handing him their telephone numbers, others just wanting to touch him,” the Associated Press reported.
Richards told the wire service, “It’s kind of overwhelming. I mean, they walk right up with my wife standing next to me.”
He hobnobbed with celebrities such as Olivia Newton-John and model Jerry Hall. “It was glamorous,” Richards told the Salt Lake Tribune.
The glamour masked a dark side. Richards was hurting. He took a pounding in the games. A hit from the Steelers’ Mel Blount broke five of Richards’ ribs. His back ached all the time and so did his teeth from getting belted under the face mask.
Seven times, dentists did root canals to repair damage from hits to Richards’ face, the Dallas Morning News reported. He was prescribed Percodan. Codeine was another. Richards became addicted and “depended on painkillers to play,” according to the Dallas newspaper.
“I never took drugs to get high,” he told reporter Barry Horn. “I took drugs because I couldn’t stand the pain.”
His craving for painkillers spun out of control. “In the bleakest moments,” Gordon Monson of the Salt Lake Tribune reported, “he fished through his own vomit in a toilet for unabsorbed painkillers so he could taken them again.”
Richards told Monson, “There were times when I lived through the darkest dark you can imagine. With the painkillers, you fight and struggle to get up to ground zero, but then you discover you’re still 150 miles below the surface of the earth.”
In April 1978, three months after he scored his Super Bowl touchdown, Richards was rushed to a hospital when it was feared he had overdosed. Five months later, the Cowboys traded him to the Chicago Bears for two draft picks.
Richards spent two seasons with Chicago, got released and was done as a player at 29. His third wife, Amy, told the Salt Lake Tribune, “He got hooked on the narcotics in the NFL. When the NFL was taken away, he no longer had football but he still had the narcotics.”
His problems expanded. Richards turned to booze. “I was living in an alcohol fog,” he said to the Tribune.
He was in and out of treatment centers multiple times.
In December 1992, Richards was arrested on charges he forged his father’s signature on nearly $700 in checks to pay for painkillers. He pleaded guilty.
“This has been a horrible, horrible way of life,” Richards told the Dallas Morning News in January 1993. “Like any addict, I have been deceitful, manipulative and cunning. People who suffer from my kind of addiction can lose everything that means everything to you. I know. I have.”
Richards was sober for the last decade of his life, his brother, Doug, told the Deseret News.
RetroSimba 
It’s a shot in the dark, but I bet that Golden West Invitational in Sacramento took place at Hughes Stadium where the Sacramento Solons and the Sacramento Surge used to play.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t even imagine dreaming of playing for the Cowboys, :)
Man, it must be a complete mind-f*ck to be so popular that women are chasing you down the street and then a few years later sitting at home broken, disregarded, and high as a kite. Life just isn’t fair sometimes I suppose. RIP, buddy.
Great one as always. Mark. Good read on a mellow Friday morning.
Gary, yes, the June 14, 1969, Golden West Invitational, in which Golden Richards competed, was held at Hughes Stadium in Sacramento. According to the Sacramento Bee, a crowd of 5,500 saw schoolboy Casey Carrigan set a national pole vault record of 17 feet, 4 3/4 inches. Another teen, Steve Prefontaine, won the mile in 4 minutes, 6 seconds.
In a 2001 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Golden Richards said he blamed the Cowboys and their doctors for allowing his addiction to painkillers to expand. “I was in trouble, and they knew it,” Richards told the newspaper.
It’s incredible to think that already at the peak of his career Golden Richards was dealing with addiction. Remembering some of those epic battles between the Cardiac Cardinals and the Cowboys, who would have thought? Reading a little about his struggles in his personal life just leave me speechless. To end my comment however on a bright note, what an incredible wide receiver Golden Richards was. He had an uncanny knack not only for making over the head catches but he was also good at getting his hands on passes from Roger Staubach that maybe were either overthrown or underthrown. As good as his winning TD reception was against the Big Red his performance against the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football was the stuff of legends. Just as a note of interest. The Big Red had the 45th pick in the second round of the 1973 draft. Golden Richards was there for the taking. They ended up drafting quarterback Gary Keithley.
Thanks, Phillip. Regarding Roger Staubach, Golden Richards said to the Salt Lake Tribune in 2001, “I have five great brothers, but if I could pick another, it would be Roger. What a competitor. He didn’t know how to lose. One thing I never wanted was Staubach’s wrath in the huddle. I had that much respect for him.”
Gary Keithley completed 57 percent of his passes his senior season at Texas-El Paso, but in the NFL he may have been a better punter than he was a quarterback. In the Cardinals’ final exhibition game in 1973, against the Kansas City Chiefs, Keithley threw five passes _ four were incomplete and one was intercepted _ and the fans at Busch Memorial Stadium booed him, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
I know it wasn’t based on him, but there’s a lot of “North Dallas Forty” in Richards’ career.
Yes, quite true. Golden Richards’ hometown Salt Lake Tribune noted, “He would find himself wrapped in the glory and whirlwind of a Cowboys ’70s vibe even more overpowering than portrayed in the book ‘North Dallas Forty.’ ”
According to the Tribune, when Richards was introduced to model Jerry Hall, she asked him if he would “like to see some nude pictures of me” and be listed by name by a Playboy magazine playmate in her spread as one of her “favorites sports.”
The image of him “fishing through his own vomit in a toilet for unabsorbed painkillers so he could taken them again” hammers home the reality of addiction. It’s almost heroic that he remained sober the last decade of his life. I’m glad that he made it to 73.
The talk of pain killers reminds me of Bret Favre who was apparently hooked on vicodin when he led the Packers to a Super Bowl win.
Agree with your comment, Steve, about the reality of addiction. In 1993, Golden Richards told the Dallas Morning News about his addiction, “I’ve been in hell, and it’s not pretty, but I made my own hell.”
In February 2024, the Associated Press had this about Brett Favre:
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi’s state auditor filed court papers Monday renewing his call for Brett Favre to repay the state for welfare money that the auditor says was improperly spent on projects backed by the retired NFL quarterback.
Auditor Shad White’s demand of nearly $730,000 from Favre is the latest twist in a long-running legal battle over money that was supposed to help some of the poorest people in one of the poorest states in the nation.
White said in 2020 that Favre had improperly received $1.1 million in speaking fees from a nonprofit organization.
Favre repaid $500,000 to the state in May 2020 and $600,000 in October 2021, but the new court filing said he still owes $729,790 because interest caused growth in the original amount he owed.
“It boggles the mind that Mr. Favre could imagine he is entitled to the equivalent of an interest-free loan of $1.1 million in taxpayer money, especially money intended for the benefit of the poor,” White said in a statement Monday.
I had no idea about Favre’s use of money meant for the poor. I wonder what it’s like to have millions of dollars, how much it changes a person’s perspective. In some cases, players give back to communities which I think is a great thing and maybe should be a requirement for professional athletes considering how much money they make compared to so many other professions.
Unfortunately, some people of privilege have a twisted sense of entitlement.