Phoenix pioneer reflects on Floyd
He and Richardson had shared bond over sports
Has anybody stopped to ask about George Floyd?
It’s been a week since he was killed, and the details that have come out don’t go much beyond the last 8 or 9 minutes of his life. There’s a lot more to him than that.
“It’s … painful that my last image of George is seeing him lying on a street with a knee on his neck,” Ray Richardson said on Facebook.
“That is not the way I will remember George. My memories of this good guy will always be much better than that.”
If Richardson’s name is familiar, that’s because he’s a Phoenix pioneer, widely regarded as the first African American to cover professional sports in Arizona for a mainstream outlet.
His picture is on the wall in the media center at Talking Stick Resort Arena from his days on the beat for the Phoenix Gazette in the mid-80s.
He found out about Floyd’s death the same way we all did: He saw it.
“Sure enough, when I saw his picture,” Richardson said. “I said, ‘That’s my guy. I know him.’ … It just froze me.”
‘He was determined’
It took some time to process, but eventually he had to write about it. He had to tell everyone about George Floyd. (I got in touch with him after learning about his Facebook post, and he graciously took time to share his feelings.)
“George was one of my clients in the CDL truck driving training program I helped run for two years at YWCA St. Paul. What I remember most during his time in our program was how respectful and dedicated he was to getting his Class A License.”
Floyd was close.
“He was pretty much a model guy in the program,” Richardson said by phone.
“You could tell he was determined. He kept talking about that he wanted to be a truck driver. That was one of his dreams, one of his visions when he moved to Minnesota (from Houston in 2018.) He wanted to drive a truck. He was always appreciative of his chance to be in this training program.”
Respectful. Dedicated. Determined. Appreciative.
Dead.
It’s heartbreaking for a lot of reasons. Richardson said that Floyd would have had to pass a background check and a drug screening to get into the program, which was competitive because it provided a $4,000 CDL training at no cost to participants.
Richardson was a career counselor and monitored Floyd throughout the process.
They bonded the way all strangers bond in America: over sports.
“We used to talk about basketball, that’s the first thing that drew me to him,” Richardson said. “He wasn’t really a ‘sports nut.’ But when we talked, I could tell he had a background in sports.”
Their conversations, Richardson said, were “mainly about him trying to get over this hump. … He knew that driving a truck was a good-paying job.”
‘A lot of people relate’
Richardson said drivers could earn $20 to $30 an hour if they got with the right company and that the field is in high demand.
It’s enough
to
make
one
wonder whether the career-development program could have been funded just a bit more?
Even though the training was paid for, Floyd still had to take a job. He was working as a bouncer and was up late. If not for that, he might have finished the training. All he had left was the driving test.
“It was a nighttime gig,” Richardson said. “We tell people, if you’re working overnight or late night, you can’t get up in the morning and try to do some truckdriving training because it ain’t going to work.”
Floyd never got a chance to
finish.
But the protests around the nation, including in Richardson’s old city of Phoenix, are creating an opportunity for real change.
Richardson went on to cover Timberwolves and now hosts an R&B show on KMOJ-FM Minneapolis. He also does career-development work for Urban League-Twin Cities.
He takes strength from the news that people in Phoenix care about George Floyd.
“It’s actually nice to hear,” he said. “I remember marching out there in protest of not having the Martin Luther King holiday … on the day that the country celebrated his holiday, we marched. It was a huge march. You never knew there were that many black folks in Phoenix. We would march down Washington from downtown toward the Capitol … this reminds me of that. I’m glad to hear there’s still some social consciousness in Phoenix.”
The rallies, vigils and demonstrations show that “a lot of people relate to what happened to George,” Richardson said.
“To see it swell like that around the country is a good thing to see. Just as long as it stays peaceful … just make sure it stays peaceful.”