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. He was 73 when he died on Feb. 23, 2024.
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.