Jerry Richardson, the founder of the Carolina Panthers, died last week at 86. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his On My Mind commentary, looks at Richardson’s complicated legacy.
We kind of have to start with the statue.
In 2016, the Carolina Panthers erected a statue of owner Jerry Richardson outside Bank of America Stadium. It was 12 feet, 10 inches high — twice as tall as the man himself, who went 6 foot 5.
Supposedly it was a surprise gift for his 80th birthday. I’ve always had a hard time believing anything that major involving the Panthers back then happened without Richardson knowing well in advance. Either way, it turned out to be another example of a hard truth: Don’t put up statues of people who are still alive.
Jerry Richardson died last Wednesday at 86. The only way to understand him is to get a sense of why that statue went up, and why it eventually had to come down.
When Richardson landed the Panthers, it was the final piece that made Charlotte feel like a major American city. When the NFL made the announcement, in 1993, I went down to the site where they were already scraping dirt for the stadium. Fans rode up and down Mint Street, honking their horns, pulling over to take pictures of the place where the dream would be made real. The dream came from Richardson’s work.
He grew up in a house without electric lights or running water. But he was good enough at football to play at Wofford, and then in the NFL for the Baltimore Colts. He caught a touchdown in the Colts’ win in the 1959 title game, before they called it the Super Bowl. He took his bonus check from that game — $4,674 — and went in with a buddy to buy a Hardee’s franchise back in Spartanburg. He parlayed that investment into an empire of restaurants led by Denny’s. All those Grand Slam meals made him millions, and eventually, billions.
He used that money to buy the Panthers, and under his ownership, the team went to two Super Bowls and brought in stars from Sam Mills to Steve Smith to Cam Newton to Luke Kuechly. Even in the off years — and the last few years have been off years — the Panthers are ours. Lots of other places can’t say that.
But there were signs that Richardson didn’t always treat others with respect. In the early ‘90s, a slew of Black customers filed two class-action suits against Denny’s, saying the restaurants had denied them service or made white customers a priority. Richardson’s company, Flagstar, eventually paid $54 million to settle the claims.
The last scandal came in 2017, a year after his statue went up. Sports Illustrated broke the story that several women who worked for the Panthers had been paid in confidential settlements stemming from Richardson’s sexual misconduct. The details were sleazy and pathetic. Richardson would have “Jeans Days” at the office where he would have women parade around as he looked at their rear ends. Or he would come around to let a woman into his car, then reach across her to buckle her seat belt, brushing up against her breasts.
The day the story came out, Richardson put the team up for sale. About three years later, the statue came down.
I often wondered what it was like for him these last few years, to know that the thing he built ended up in someone else’s hands. It’s not right to tell the story of Charlotte without him. But it’s not right to tell his story without telling all of it.
Jerry Richardson wasn’t a hunk of stone to be revered. He was a man who did some very big things, and also showed his feet of clay.
Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
