Bob Richardson, 1960s Husky Tackle Who Left Big Impression, Dies

He was a three-year UW football starter who had an impact as a youth basketball coach.

Bob Richardson was a UW football player who coached grade-schoolers in basketball. | Dan Raley

The ragtag bunch of 11- and 12-year-old boys showed up at Laurelhurst Recreation Center to play basketball and were more than a little surprised to learn their coach would be a University of Washington football player.

And not just any player, but the largest one on the Husky roster and someone so talented he was in the midst of becoming a three-year starting offensive tackle.

Some of these kids might have wanted to ask Bob Richardson for his autograph. He quelled any notion of possible hero worship by making them run lines.

This past week, Richardson passed away suddenly at 79. He was remembered as a successful businessman, a devoted family man and a gentle soul who, even as a Husky football standout, felt the need to share himself with those boys so long ago.

Nearly half of his basketball players, even in that affluent neighborhood, came from father-less or broken homes.

Just three of them would become high school players and only one, Peter Nielsen, would experience his own level of athletic greatness, instrumental in guiding Roosevelt High School to a state championship and briefly playing UW basketball.

Richardson often was spotted as this giant of a man jogging from the Husky athletic facilities to Laurelhurst, lumbering up steep Northeast 45th Street.

He grew up in Hawaii and shared his background with his basketball players in bits and pieces. To set up plays, he had them call out a different island community name such as "Kailua," his hometown on the island of Oahu.

He tried to teach them attention to detail, which was what he was all about as an athlete. That meant these boys had to quit wearing black socks in practice. The team would win more games than it lost that winter.

Nearly 20 years ago, one of his players, one of those kids without a father, one who never forgot this coach and his generosity, reached out to him and they reconnected after four decades.

This one-time Laurelhurst basketball player was now a Seattle Post-Intelligencer sports writer. He wanted to write a "Where Are They Now" profile on him, a weekly feature in the newspaper, and this was an easy way for him to get some time again with one of his heroes.

Richardson was nearly 50 pounds lighter than in his Husky football playing days, no longer the commanding physical presence, Yet he was that same well-meaning person, one curious to see and hear how this former player of his had turned out over and above typing out sports narratives.

They talked about him growing up in Hawaii and picking pineapples.

About his football career, when he and the Huskies played against USC and O.J. Simpson.

How so many of his teammates, so eager to face the most talked about college football player in the country, they painted Simpson's No. 32 on their foreheads before the Juice broke their spirit with an 86-yard touchdown run in Husky Stadium.

Richardson was a ninth-round NFL draft pick who played in the East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl. His pro football career, however, was blunted by the ongoing Vietnam War.

He joined a reserve unit and trained troops headed for Southeast Asia.

In his business life, he was an executive recruiter in the food industry.

Always, it seemed, Bob Richardson was coaching people all around him, soldiers, those pre-teen basketball players. And he was good at it, too. I can vouch for that.

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