VOL. 11 | NO. 3 | Saturday, January 20, 2018

It was early November, not really Christmas season yet, but Billy Richmond didn’t want to wait. So he’d wake up and start his day with his favorite Christmas music.

Johnny Gill’s “Give Love on Christmas Day,” Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas,” or maybe “Christmas with the O’Jays.”

“I turn it all the way up,” Richmond said. “That gets me going.”

Soon he’d be going to work, running The Wing Guru on Mount Moriah Road and serving up his award-winning honey suicide sauce and maybe talking a little hoops with customers who remember Richmond from his Hamilton High and University of Memphis playing days.

Those days have been in the rear-view mirror for a while now. Richmond is 35 years old. And though he played professionally in Serbia and Mexico for several years and wisely uses his basketball connections today to further his business interests, he identifies as an entrepreneur.

Talk to him in his restaurant and he doesn’t first offer up glory days stories from the hardwood. Rather, he volunteers that winning hot wing contests in California and Florida are what helped him get started.

Of course, it’s also true the sauce was in his blood. His father, Billy Richmond Sr., has been cooking in Memphis wing places for years.

“I’d go in there as a little kid, making 40, 50 bucks a day shaking wings,” Richmond said. “I started at like 9, 10 years old.”

He kept cooking for teammates when he got to the University of Memphis. From Chris Massie to Anthony Rice to Antonio Burks, the Tigers liked what the future wing guru was cooking.

“I was gonna cook for myself anyway,” he said. “So they would buy the food and I would cook. That’s how that went.”

In the years since, some former Tigers have fallen on tough times. Ended up on the wrong side of the law when their dreams of long NBA careers fizzled or never really got started.

Richmond has children and he says he knew he had to save what he earned playing abroad to provide for them and give himself a start in business one day.

“I can relate to what those guys are going through and why they made the decisions they made,” he said.

But only to a point.

“Those guys feel that getting a job, working at FedEx, that’s beneath them,” Richmond said. “So they have to go do anything possible to have some kind of money circulating around where they’re keeping their, so to say, relevance as a big-time D1 player or ex-NBA player, or whatever the case may be.

“The thinking is off. You are who you are. Like when I was playing at the University of Memphis, I was back there at my dad’s shop shaking wings. I’ve never been, ‘I’m Billy Richmond, I got to have the nicest car, have the nicest house.’ I can’t have that stuff unless I work to get it. Me doing something illegal, my dad showed me that ain’t the route. (Some players) gambled on who they were or who they’re trying to stay to be – their name – versus ‘go get a job, you got a family, do it the right way.’

“It’s unfortunate, but that’s why a lot of those guys get into drugs,” he said. “They’re trying to make some money just to keep their name relevant. It’s sad, but that’s the honest to God’s truth.”

Although Richmond got sideways with John Calipari while playing for him at Memphis and was dismissed from the team, that’s now ancient history.

Calipari has brought his team to Richmond for wings and so have other coaches, including former SMU coach Larry Brown and current Tigers coach Tubby Smith.

“I was glad me and Cal resolved any issue we had,” Richmond said. “We fed Kentucky when they came to town (for the NCAA Regional).”

Richmond also just got his degree from Memphis. He says Smith helped him get into a program for former athletes that want to come back and graduate.

“I’m impressed,” Smith said of Richmond and his business. “Very hospitable. Very gracious.”

Richmond’s Wing Guru, which he said soon will be expanding to a second location in Bartlett, has a partnership with the U of M and has advertised on the two main sports talk radio stations in town.

He says the business is involved with feeding kids playing youth basketball as part of its relationship with the U of M; the kids also attend a Tigers game. And Richmond says wing Guru also is involved with the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Memphis.

Richmond’s son, Billy Richmond III, who is in sixth grade, is quite the basketball player, too: “Really good, left-handed, in a size 13 shoe already.”

So, the Richmond basketball dream lives on.

As for the business dream …

“This is not considered labor for me,” Richmond said one day after working in the kitchen, where burns and cuts are occupational hazards the way sprained ankles and twisted knees used to be. “I can come in here every day with no problem and do it with a smile because it’s something I’m passionate about.

“I’m hoping to have 10 of these before I’m 40,” he said, adding that Dallas and Nashville in 2019 are on his radar. “That’s my championship.”