Panthers founder Jerry Richardson was —for better or worse — in a league of his own

Jerry Richardson, who founded the Carolina Panthers, could have put them anywhere in the Carolinas and chose Charlotte, passed away Wednesday at the age of 86.

Richardson was a friend. Saw him several times at his house. Pull up and a man tells you where to park. Go to the door and a woman tells you where to sit. They were nice about it.

We ate lunch together. Was often entertaining. Wasn’t always easy. He once talked 45 minutes straight. Richardson was accustomed to being heard.

He could be loose and funny. Ran into him accidentally at the NFL owners meeting in Atlanta about the sixth time I tried. He was with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Asked if I could buy them a drink.

Goodell said, essentially, you have to be kidding. Richardson quietly said he’d meet me later. Met him in his room. Asked if Joe Person, then of The Charlotte Observer, now of The Athletic, could meet with us. Sure. Richardson had to leave the room and asked me to order him a drink from room service, margarita without salt, I think, and to also order a drink for Joe and me.

He returned, and we talked. Then Richardson called Charlie Dayton, the superb Panthers’ PR director. It’s fair to say that Charlie tended to worry. Charlie asked Richardson what he was doing, and Richardson said not much, he was in his room having a drink with Joe and me. Richardson began to laugh because he knew what was coming.

What was coming was Charlie at the door five minutes later, with Panthers team president Danny Morrison, Charlie wired tight.

Richardson loved attention, loved the Carolinas, loved picking up fans on his game-day golf cart and driving them into the stadium, and loved mingling at restaurants he favored, mainly Upstream and Art’s Barbecue.

He’d drive to one of the restaurants he owned, and before going in he’d look for trash in the parking lot, pick it up and put it away. Richardson told me that he tried to memorize the orders of his regulars. He said that even when he was wrong, they were flattered that he cared enough to try.

He didn’t have email. When he wanted to lobby his peers, often to support the league’s long-time owners, he didn’t email or text. He flew.

Richardson could be entertaining and gracious, angry and resentful. Asked him once, in a restaurant, when he was in a resentful mood, how he could be so damn mad. Resentment immediately became fury. Then his anger expired and he apologized. One of us thought my question was good.

Richardson was born in eastern N.C., near Rocky Mount. His family didn’t have much. On the wall of his Charlotte home was a picture of the house in which he was born, and one afternoon he looked at it and began to cry, wondering how he’d made the journey from where he’d been to where he was.

Richardson was undone by racist and sexist comments he made at Bank of America Stadium, comments to women, comments about a Black scout. These were comments from which you don’t come back, and he didn’t. He sold the team in 2018.

Some of the people who grew up when he did, with a different set of values than we now hold, or should hold, evolved. Based on what I saw and what players Black and white told me, Richardson had evolved. The players he talked about most were Thomas Davis and the late Sam Mills. So, yeah, he liked talented, Black, former Panthers linebackers.

His evolution sometimes ended at Bank of America Stadium. The place was his fiefdom, and he said what he wanted, when he wanted, and to whom. He was demanding, and when he knocked on the door of a coach or an executive they often winced because they didn’t know what was coming.

He, um, occasionally assisted with football decisions. The Panthers had the second pick in the 2002 draft. Richardson saw a decision-maker looking at film of Texas cornerback Quentin Jammer, and said: “I don’t know why you’re looking at him. We’re taking Julius Peppers.”

They took North Carolina’s Peppers. Good pick.

Richardson cared deeply about how he was perceived. He was angry once about something a local TV sports anchor said about him, no more than a sentence or two. Asked him why he cared.

“I just do!” he said.

Inconsequential little story, but I gave Richardson a ride to his gated community once in my less-than-new Infiniti. From the cup holder he picked up a quarter, the back of which he’d never seen. He turned it around in his long fingers, smiled and asked if he could have it.

Sure. All that he had and he was excited, the way a little kid might be, about the quarter. It probably would have meant something to him long ago. Maybe that was it.

There’s no simple way to tell Richardson’s story, no single facet on which to hang it.

I liked him and respected him and, hell, he’s the best owner the Panthers ever had.

Tom Sorensen retired as a Charlotte Observer sports columnist in 2015.

This story was originally published March 5, 2023 at 5:00 AM.