Houston Astros: At 70, legend J.R. Richard has a hard-earned peace

At 70, the Houston Astros behemoth who intimidated before a stroke felled him has been to hell and back but embraces, not escapes, life and love.

Five decades ago it was to wonder how delicious it might have looked if 6’8″ Houston Astros pitcher J.R. Richard could have faced 6’8″ hitter Frank Howard. There was no regular-season interleague play other than the All-Star Game, and Richard didn’t make a National League All-Star team until long after Howard retired.

But picture if you will Richard, who looked as though he could reach from the mound to shake your hand without effort before piledriving you at the plate, against Howard, who looked as though he’d autograph your forehead with his bat if he didn’t hit one into orbit—around Mars. Chuck Jones himself couldn’t have sketched a better scene.

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Celebrating his 70th birthday today, Richard was once one of the two most famous Texas people going by his initials. J.R. Ewing (of television’s Dallas) was a fictitious larger-than-life scoundrel who wasn’t past anything short of murder to have his way. J.R. Richard was a real major league pitcher who looked larger than life in a Houston Astros uniform, threw like it, and sometimes, if not always comfortably, acted like it.

Between pitches, Richard looked a little like the big shy kid barely aware that the cute girl he crushed on was praying just as hard that he’d ask her to dance as he prayed for the courage to ask. Then he went into his no-windup motion, his high knee-bent kick, and delivered.

In that delivery, with his large hand almost covering the ball whole before he threw, the big shy kid turned into a behemoth who looked as though he’d crack your bat in half between two fingers if he wasn’t in the mood to throw you something one blink would make you wonder if it really came your way.

“You’d see everybody crossing themselves before they got in the batter’s box against J.R. Richard,” longtime Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey once said.

“If you beat me,” Richard once said, “I’m gonna die trying. I was willing to give my life for it.”

He damn near did give his life for it.

The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

It took a decade for Richard to harness his talent and his intimidation factor and one fateful workout to undo it completely. On the disabled list with shoulder fatigue after starting the 1980 All-Star Game (above), Richard put himself through a small workout in the Astrodome on July 30, 1980, while the Astros went on the road.

As he’d remember to WBUR’s Bill Littlefield five years ago, he heard “a lot of high-pitched ringing in my left ear,” but in the moment he thought nothing of it.

I kind of just shook it off and kept on throwing a few more. Then I threw a couple more, then I became real nauseated, and I lay down on the Astrodome floor. And the next thing I remember I was waking up in the hospital. I had been complaining to the Astros for almost a month or two about something was wrong. And if I’m such a valuable asset to the ball club, why wasn’t I immediately rushed to the doctors from Chicago when it first started? Again, if I was such a valuable asset to the company?

The stroke Richard suffered embarrassed everyone around the Astros, team and press alike, who’d speculated previously that the giant righthander was dogging things. Some of the speculations were racism-based; much of it was mere ignorance. Many of those doubting writers and broadcasters apologized publicly in the wake of the stroke, but it couldn’t help him.

Richard underwent a subsequent CAT scan that showed three separate strokes and a presence of thoracic outlet syndrome, leaving him with an artery pinch while he pitched. He was also told his shoulder muscles were overdeveloped enough to contribute. No wonder Richard looked less than himself in that All-Star Game despite striking out three and surrendering no runs in two innings.

His career was over despite a subsequent comeback bid or two. (During one fielding drill, a couple of hard-line drives shot past him . . . and he was completely unaware of their coming his way.) In an empathetic essay called “The Uneasy Ghost of J.R. Richard,” Thomas Boswell observed just how profoundly the strokes changed him:

Richard is more pleasant, more outgoing, more generous with other people than ever before in his life. Once he was the most forbidding Astro. Now he may be the least, signing autographs and seeking out chitchat. After a lifetime as the Goliath overdog, he is now everybody’s underdog, and he enjoys it. Richard may even have become the symbol of a decent, long-out-of-fashion idea: mutual tolerance.

Walking Away From the Game

Richard finally walked away from baseball in 1984. Unlike his television namesake, he wasn’t exactly made for the oil business: he lost $300,000 in an investment scam. His first divorce cost him another $669,000. A second marital failure and further business troubles wiped him out completely, costing him his home in due course and leaving him living under a Houston bridge.

Around 1994, two former Astros teammates (Jimmy Wynn, Bob Watson) reached out to the Baseball Assistance Team to help Richard start back onto his feet. His minister helped him stay there. And Richard helped himself at last, abandoning his former bull-headedness and letting God take his hand and then his spirit.

Long since then, Richard has been a minister at Mt. Pleasant Church. Among his activities have been helping the homeless help themselves, teaching baseball and other hard-earned life lessons to Houston-area children, and getting area donations to help establish youth baseball programs there.

“You see a man could eat a whole whale, but it takes one bite at a time. Or he can walk a mile, but it takes one step at a time,” Richard told Littlefield while promoting his memoir Still Throwing Heat. “So if you’re willing to take that step, [God] will make a way out of no way. See, God is the only one I know who can take a mess, go in a mess, clean up a mess and come back out and don’t be messy. Now you figure that out.”

Which is a remarkable insight from a man who once boasted that he was the only man alive could throw a baseball through a car wash without the ball getting wet.

Native to Louisiana, where he developed a lifelong passion for fishing, Richard hasn’t yet lost his laconic wit. Fans who meet him and remember how shocked they were over learning about the stroke that ended his career still get, invariably, the mischievous grin and sober reply, “I couldn’t believe it, either.”

Richard remarried for a third time in 2010. He met his wife, Lula, sharing a bus on a church trip, writing his telephone number down inside the cover of her Bible. After a steak dinner for their first date and what Richard himself called a two-year “courtship,” they married. “She helped with a lot of stability,” he said with husbandly pride, “in every way.”