Jerry Richardson, the self-made millionaire who brought the NFL to Charlotte and founded the Carolina Panthers, died Wednesday. He was 86.
Deeply rooted in both Carolinas and once a wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, Richardson persuaded the NFL to put an expansion team in Charlotte in 1993. The Panthers began playing in 1995 and Richardson owned them until 2018, when he sold the team under pressure to current owner David Tepper.
The family did not list a cause of death. A family spokesman said Thursday that Richardson “died peacefully last night at his Charlotte home.”
“I will always remember him, as will millions in his beloved Carolinas, as the father of NFL football in these sister states,” said Max Muhleman, a public-relations specialist who worked closely with Richardson for years.
Richardson built a food empire from scratch, starting the Hardee’s hamburger chain with $4,864 in 1961 with playoff bonus money he earned for playing on the Baltimore Colts’ 1959 NFL championship team.
After he had a heart transplant in Charlotte in 2009, Richardson lived for 14 more years. His survivors include his wife Rosalind and two of their three children — Mark and Ashley. His other son, Jon, died in 2013 at age 53 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Funeral services will be private. A public celebration of his life will be held at a later date, with details to follow.
In 23 NFL seasons with Richardson as owner, the Panthers qualified for two Super Bowls, in the 2003 and 2015 postseason, although they lost both games. The team also became embedded in the sports culture of the Carolinas, producing stars like Cam Newton, Steve Smith and Luke Kuechly and routinely selling out 73,000-seat Bank of America Stadium.
Once a fixture at tailgate parties with random Panthers fans before home games — he liked to show up unannounced via golf cart — Richardson was rarely seen in public in his final years. A 13-foot, 4500-pound statue of Richardson, given to him by his ownership partners in 2016 and placed outside Bank of America Stadium, was removed in June 2020 by the Panthers.
The team called the statue a public safety hazard at the time, citing the nightly social justice marches then occurring in Charlotte.
The statue had become controversial following the workplace misconduct scandal that served to oust Richardson from his ownership of the Panthers and complicate his legacy. The statue now resides in an undisclosed storage facility. Sources have told The Observer it will never return to the stadium.
The sale of the Panthers — for a reported $2.275 billion — followed the scandal that was uncovered by Sports Illustrated magazine in December 2017.
The magazine’s investigation portrayed Richardson as an owner who acted inappropriately with a number of his female employees and also directed a racial slur at an African-American scout employed by the Panthers. Within hours of the Sports Illustrated report, Richardson announced that he would sell the Panthers.
The NFL would independently investigate and substantiate many of the allegations raised by the magazine article while also uncovering “similar matters that have not been the subject of public discussion,” according to a 2018 NFL press release. The NFL fined Richardson a league-record $2.75 million after its probe concluded, nearly tripling the amount of its previous record fine of $1 million.
Richardson’s legacy also includes the birth of the Panthers and the development of a restaurant empire that made him a rich enough man to join one of America’s most exclusive clubs — the league’s 32 NFL owners. He loved the NFL so much that he kept the league’s logo — a shield — painted on the 50-yard line at Bank of America Stadium, rather than a team logo like nearly every other team in the league.
Tepper has said several times in interviews that the business side of the Panthers organization was in disarray when he bought the team in 2018. He fired a number of Richardson-era employees after his purchase and also quickly changed the 50-yard line symbol to the Panthers’ logo. Tepper and his wife, Nicole Tepper, issued a statement Thursday that said in part that Richardson’s “contributions to professional football in the Carolinas are historic.... He was incredibly gracious to me when I purchased the team, and for that I am thankful.”
Muhleman noted the drive that Richardson exhibited in his relentless pursuit of making Carolina the NFL’s 29th franchise.
“He visited every owner in the league — all 28 of them — at least once,” Muhleman said, “and sought out the brilliant retired NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle at his California home. In every case he had one purpose: asking for advice and learning what it was that was wanted from member teams and owners.”
Born ‘with a streak of lightning’
Richardson was born in his family’s home in Spring Hope, in the eastern part of North Carolina, on July 18, 1936. Richardson’s mother, Mary, told The Observer in 1993 that her son was born after 17 hours of labor during a thunderstorm.
“It was a stormy night,” she said then. “About the time he came into this world, thunder burst and lightning flashed. I’ve always told him he came into the world with a streak of lightning.”
An only child, Richardson had a modest upbringing. His father was a barber. His mother worked as a sales clerk at a women’s dress shop. Their country home had no indoor plumbing. The family did not own a car until Jerry Richardson was 16.
The family moved to Fayetteville when Richardson was in elementary school. He played football at Fayetteville High — 6-3, 150-pound receiver known as “Stick” for his slender frame who won the team’s Competitor Trophy.
Wofford offered Richardson a partial scholarship worth less than $300, and he took it. Richardson teamed with quarterback and future business partner Charlie Bradshaw to become one of the top passing tandems among small colleges.
Richardson had 241 yards receiving in a game against Newberry in 1956, and he was named an Associated Press Little All-American in ‘57 and ‘58.
Richardson would set several Wofford receiving records on his way to a career that led the school to retire his football number. At Wofford, Richardson majored in psychology, worked as a dormitory hall manager and joined the ROTC.
While hitchhiking with some Wofford friends at Pawleys Island, S.C., during the summer of 1957, he met a Winthrop student and former Florence High cheerleader named Rosalind Sallenger.
They played miniature golf in Myrtle Beach on their first date. They would later marry and have three children.
A brief NFL career
After the Baltimore Colts drafted Richardson in the 13th round, he showed up for training camp in 1959 as one of 19 receivers fighting for three spots on the 36-man roster. Given that two of the receivers were established stars and future Hall of Famers Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore, Richardson did not like his chances.
“Let’s just say I wasn’t bursting with optimism,” Richardson told The Observer in a 1995 story. “I sweated it out every day. It was a very stressful time.”
Entering the last preseason game before final cuts, Richardson and Michigan State’s John Lewis were battling for the final receiver spot. After a bad first half, Richardson caught several passes in the second half from Johnny Unitas and made the team.
Richardson and Rosalind moved into an apartment close to Memorial Stadium in Baltimore with their infant son, Jon. Unitas took a personal interest in Richardson, picking up the young receiver every morning on his way to practice and bringing him home at the end of the day.
Richardson pulled down an 8-yard pass from Unitas for his first NFL touchdown in a 38-31 loss to Cleveland on Nov. 1, 1959. Playing for the Browns that day was offensive tackle Mike McCormack, whom Richardson would later hire as the Panthers’ first president.
Richardson ended the ‘59 regular season with seven receptions and three touchdowns, but saved his most memorable play for the title game against the New York Giants (the Super Bowl did not yet exist).
Richardson didn’t play much for Baltimore. But his fourth-quarter, 12-yard TD catch from Unitas gave the Colts a 21-9 lead in a game they would win 31-16. Richardson’s catch came in the horseshoe end of Memorial Stadium, where the rowdier Colts fans congregated.
“How could you ever forget that?” Richardson said in the 1995 interview with The Observer. “Scoring in a world championship game is about the ultimate as far as a player is concerned.”
Richardson kept a game ball from the championship game and a pair of Unitas’ cleats in the basement of his Charlotte home.
Richardson’s playing career lasted only two seasons when he walked away from the game at 25 following a dispute over $250. Richardson wanted $10,000 for the ‘61 season; the Colts offered $9,750.
Richardson packed up, left the Colts’ training camp and pointed his Oldsmobile station wagon toward the Carolinas.
“I don’t know whether you’d call it stubbornness or not,” Richardson later told the Observer. “I’d call it sticking to your convictions.”
But Richardson still had the $4,864 bonus he earned from the Colts’ 1959 championship. That would serve as the seed money for a hugely successful fast-food franchise that would lead to Richardson bringing an NFL franchise to the Carolinas.
The first Hardee’s
Richardson took that playoff bonus money and invested it into the restaurant business. He and Bradshaw — Richardson’s former quarterback at Wofford — opened their first Hardee’s restaurant in 1961 in Spartanburg.
The concept was simple — cheap hamburgers, served to the masses — and wildly successful. They kept opening more and more Hardee’s, with Richardson — before long a multi-millionaire — taking a hands-on approach to the business many times. A 1987 Observer story noted that Richardson’s Spartan Food Systems restaurant colossus at that point included 2,000 Hardee’s, Quincy’s and Denny’s restaurants.
Still, Richardson often began his days at that point, at age 51, by showing up unannounced at one of the Hardee’s in Spartanburg, and either making biscuits, pouring coffee or taking orders at the drive-thru. Richardson knew that his physical presence inside a store had a way of motivating his employees.
“You can’t get to all 2,000 of them,” he said then of the company’s restaurants. “But when you get to some of them, the word moves fast to the rest of them.”
Avoiding ‘real boring’
In 1987, Richardson heard on the radio that businessman George Shinn had won his bid to bring an NBA franchise to Charlotte. That got Richardson seriously thinking about trying to bring an NFL team to Charlotte. If he succeeded, he would become only the second NFL owner ever to both play in the league and own a team — the other being George Halas.
“We wouldn’t go into this if I didn’t think we could do it,” Richardson said at a Charlotte news conference on Dec. 15, 1987, when he officially announced his bid for an NFL expansion franchise.
The plan to finance the stadium largely with his own money was the part that carried the biggest risk, but Richardson told The Observer in 1987 that would be part of the fun.
“A lot of times people get to some level and they don’t like to take a risk,” he said. “That would be real boring.”
The NFL expansion process was painstaking. It ultimately took eight years from Richardson beginning the effort to the Panthers actually beginning play.
“If we’d known then how long it would take, we never would have done it,” Richardson said in 1995, on the eve of the Panthers’ first game. “Too grueling. Too brutal.”
Richardson’s bid for an NFL team had to at first beat out a competing bid for a Charlotte team from Shinn. He did so with lots of help, including the necessary financial backing from close friend and Charlotte mega-banker Hugh McColl Jr. Richardson’s son Mark was also instrumental in the effort.
Richardson remained confident throughout the process, getting a license plate that read “PNTHERS” in 1989 — four years before his ownership group would actually be awarded a team.
Beating 50-1 odds
Richardson beat long odds to earn the right to land a franchise. All the other competitors at the time — St. Louis, Baltimore, Jacksonville and Memphis — had in place a rent-free stadium to be paid for by public funds. Richardson was insistent on his stadium being financed privately. That concept was iffy enough that well-known oddsmaker Danny Sheridan gave Charlotte 50-1 odds of getting an NFL team in 1989.
The financing plan got an enormous boost, however, due to the permanent-seat license (PSL) concept created by public relations guru Muhleman (who had also helped birth the Hornets). The Panthers decided to charge for the right to buy season tickets in their proposed new stadium — a radical idea that later helped build many other stadiums around the country. A PSL would cost anywhere from $600 to $5400 per ticket and could later be re-sold or handed down in the right-holder’s will. That concept contributed more than $100 million to the stadium’s eventual cost of around $187 million.
When Richardson heard the news in Chicago on Oct. 26, 1993, that his bid had been accepted to own the NFL’s 29th franchise, he pointed to television cameras from the Carolinas at a press conference and yelled: “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
The following day Richardson would tell a pep rally of thousands of fans in Charlotte that the Panthers would not only get to but win a Super Bowl within their first 10 years — an unfulfilled promise that he was often reminded of in later years.
Super Bowl in 2003
The promise came close to coming true during the 2003 season. By then, the Panthers were playing their ninth NFL season. Richardson had hired and fired two coaches — Dom Capers, who got Carolina to the NFC championship game in Year 2 but could not repeat the success; and George Seifert, who went 16-32 in three desultory seasons in Carolina.
The third head coach Richardson hired was John Fox in 2002, who would last for nine years before Richardson fired him and hired Ron Rivera following the 2010 season. Fox’s greatest success came in 2003, when a team with Jake Delhomme at quarterback and young stars like Steve Smith at wide receiver and Julius Peppers at defensive end made an unlikely run to the Super Bowl before losing on a last-second field goal to the New England Patriots, 32-29.
By then, Richardson had become a generally popular owner with his players and was doing the Panthers’ job full-time, having left the day-to-day restaurant business in 1995. The braver players — like linebacker Kevin Greene and Delhomme — would call him “Big Cat.” He was “Mister Richardson” to nearly everyone else in the building at Bank of America Stadium, with many shortening that name to simply “Mister” when referring to the team owner.
Because of his imposing build and status as a former NFL player, Richardson engendered a level of respect not often accorded to NFL owners.
When Greene was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016, he mentioned Richardson and his deep love for his Panthers players in his speech. “We all felt his love, all felt his commitment,” Greene said of Richardson.
A heart transplant
Richardson survived a series of serious health-related issues in his later years. He overcame prostate cancer and underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 2002.
Richardson had a pacemaker/defibrillator inserted in his heart in 2008, and doctors told him he would need a heart transplant.
Two months after going on the donor waiting list, Richardson, then 72, received his transplant on Super Bowl Sunday in 2009 during a five-hour procedure at Carolinas Medical Center. The heart donor has never been identified.
“It was a miracle. One of our dear friends said, ‘God does not give out hearts lightly,’” Rosalind Richardson told The Observer two weeks after the surgery.
While Richardson seldom held press conferences even during the early seasons of the Panthers franchise, his public appearances became far less frequent in his later years.
During the year in which Richardson waited for and later recovered from his heart transplants, his two sons led the organization. Mark Richardson was the team president and the heir apparent to his father, while the more laid-back Jon Richardson oversaw the stadium during its construction and operation.
But underlying differences in how the team should be run made the owner ask his sons to resign in late August of 2009, about six months after Jerry Richardson’s heart transplant. The resignations were a shocking development that left Richardson as the only family member involved in the team’s day-to-day operations.
In a two-sentence statement at the time that didn’t explain the mysterious parting, Richardson cited the “great contributions” his sons had made, but expressed confidence in the remaining members of the leadership team. He never publicly explained the rift with his sons.
The Sports Illustrated report
Richardson’s legacy was forever changed when Sports Illustrated magazine published an investigative report just minutes before kickoff on a Sunday the Panthers were hosting the Green Bay Packers — Dec. 17, 2017.
The report alleged that Richardson had committed numerous instances of workplace misconduct, including sexual harassment, uttering a racial slur and asking some of his female employees if he could “personally shave their legs.”
The report, which was substantiated by the NFL’s ensuing probe, revealed that at least four former Panthers employees had received significant financial settlements from Richardson following his inappropriate behavior “in exchange for what amounted to a vow of silence.” It also noted that Fridays were “Jeans Day” at the Panthers’ offices, and that became fodder for many inappropriate comments by Richardson. It revealed that Richardson’s assistant would escort female employees to Richardson’s office and then leave. One former female employee recalled Richardson “arriving barefoot and asking for a foot massage.”
Within hours of the report, Richardson announced his decision to sell the team.
Relationships with players
Following his heart transplant, Richardson remained active in league business. He chaired the labor committee during the 2011 lockout before owners and players agreed on a 10-year collective bargaining agreement that ended the longest work stoppage in NFL history.
Richardson delivered an impassioned speech at the 2010 annual meetings, imploring owners to “take back our league.” But his hard-line tactics didn’t sit well with all players, particularly after he was said to have spoken condescendingly toward Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Drew Brees during a negotiating session.
Richardson called Archie Manning, Peyton’s father, to clear the air and believed the situation was overblown. Giants co-owner John Mara once told Richardson during the intense labor talks, according to the MMQB website: “I don’t know whose heart you got, but that had to be a tough son of a bitch.”
Richardson developed a friendship with some of his Panthers players — some, like former wide receiver Muhsin Muhammad, would approach him for business advice when their career were over.
When players would get into trouble, Richardson would invite them to his home and make them sit in a formal room listening to the minutes tick away on a grandfather clock before Richardson was ready to see them.
But Richardson also showed compassion for his players.
He made his private plane available to tight end Greg Olsen before Olsen’s wife delivered a son who was born with a congenital heart defect. Richardson then accompanied the Olsens to Boston for a medical consultation. The Olsens honored Richardson by naming their son T.J., short for Trent Jerry.
‘I have the ultimate American dream’
While fans saw a stoic Richardson sitting expressionless in his end-zone suite at Bank of America Stadium on Sundays, he was not afraid to cut up with his players. After the Panthers clinched the NFC South during their second Super Bowl season in 2015, quarterback Cam Newton got Richardson to dab during a raucous locker-room celebration in New Orleans.
That team went 15-1 in the regular season but would eventually lose to Denver in the Super Bowl, 24-10, as the championship Richardson wanted the most barely eluded him again.
Richardson took a lower public profile in later years as his gait and speech slowed – he went nine years between press conferences at one point. He would still make his rounds on his golf cart before many home games, however, greeting fans, players and coaches and shaking their hands. Pictures of Richardson holding babies or showing up at pre-game tailgates made their rounds on social media before most games. Even in his later years, Richardson’s posture showcased what Muhleman called “a flawless vertical carriage that made him the tallest 6-foot-3 on the planet.”
The Panthers were the Carolinas’ team, but for many years, they belonged to Richardson. He made millions in the business world in the food business, but it was football that made him happy.
A year after Carolina was awarded a franchise, in 1994, Richardson spoke to The Observer about what it was like to be an NFL owner.
“I’m 58 years old, and I don’t hunt, I don’t fish, and I don’t play golf. I don’t have any hobbies. I work, I go home,” he said. “Now, to know ... I have the ultimate American dream, it couldn’t be better for me. There’s nothing I’d rather do with my time than be supportive of the Carolina Panthers.”
It was widely assumed Richardson would hold onto the team until his death. But the workplace misconduct scandal changed that timetable, and Richardson spent the last five years of his life without owning the team that had defined a large part of his business career.
