The Hall of Fame isn't calling, but 'Bad Moon' Rison left a different kind of legacy

Every year the call didn’t come, the tears would.

So would the disbelief. The anger. The nights of lost sleep.

For Andre Rison it was like a knife in the side, his annual rejection from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Hadn’t he done enough? Wasn’t he one of the best of his era? He came to dwell on the disrespect, convinced he belonged, convinced there had to be some reason why he wasn’t getting in.

“There’s nothing Jerry Rice could do that I couldn’t,” Rison has said more than once over the years.

Deep down, he believes that.

But Rice has the records, the gold jacket resting on his shoulders, the GOAT chain dangling from his neck. Rison has the notoriety that lingers after a chaotic career, then fades. Maybe this was payback, he figured. Maybe it was punishment. He played loud. He lived loud. Andre “Bad Moon” Rison was the NFL’s most outspoken receiver before the NFL was awash in outspoken receivers.

That’s gotta be it, he kept telling himself as the years passed and the call from Canton never came. It wasn’t football — it couldn’t just be football. It was everything else.

It had to be.

Still, the man wasn’t about to apologize. Not for the climb and not for the fall. Not for lashing out at coaches, quarterbacks, even an entire city. Not for brawling with Deion Sanders at the 20-yard line of the Georgia Dome. Not for the touchdown dances that earned him racist letters from fans. Not for dating the pop star who burned down his mansion. Not for partying with Tupac.

Not for any of the baggage that trailed him for most of his seven-city, 11-year NFL odyssey.

This man was never going to fit neatly into a box.

“When I played,” Rison says now, “the thinking was, if you was African-American, then you could only be great at one thing: football. That was it.

“I said, leave that lane for somebody else.”

His ambitions ran deeper. He was one of the first pro athletes to fuse sports and hip-hop — “I changed the culture,” Rison boasts. He started record labels. He opened businesses. He carried his community with him.

The ride was rocky, littered with mistakes. The arrests. The drama. The millions he burned through — Rison once bought a Ferrari Testarossa without knowing the sticker price and admits to owning 34 different Mercedes-Benzes over the years. A night out in his younger days set him back $15,000.

He courted the spotlight even when it was the last thing he needed. When a reporter once asked if he was the Dennis Rodman of the NFL, Rison nodded, taking it as a compliment.

In some ways, he was ahead of his time. Before Keyshawn Johnson was screaming “Give me the damn ball!” and Terrell Owens was doing crunches in his driveway for the TV cameras and Chad Johnson was slipping on a homemade Hall of Fame jacket on the sideline, Rison was blowing up the tired old narrative that said receivers need only run their routes, catch the ball and keep quiet.

Three decades later, the 57-year-old is asked if the tumult that often trailed him ever got in the way of football. Rison scoffs. He’s offended. This is a man who once bought a T-shirt that read, “When God made me, he was just showing off.”

“You remember when Michael Jordan went gambling the night before a playoff game and everyone killed him for it, and the next night he lit their ass up?” Rison asks. “Ain’t no distractions when you different. Mike’s different. I’m different. I been different.

“This is Bad Moon we’re talking about.”

It was ESPN’s Chris Berman who tapped him with the nickname, inspired by the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. In 1989, at the tail end of Rison’s rookie year with the Colts, he was pulled over for driving 128 miles per hour in a 55-mph zone. He told the cops he was only going 95.

I see the bad moon a-rising

I see trouble on the way

“The nickname changed my life forever,” Rison wrote in his book, “Wide Open.” For better or worse, he came to embrace it, getting “Bad Moon Rison” tattooed on his bicep.

The song was right: trouble followed. But so did a scintillating career.

Rison played with a fire first lit on the hardscrabble streets of Flint, Mich., where, as a high school star, a local mobster — Rison calls him Mafia Sal — would slip him wads of cash from time to time, urging him to pick a particular college and sign with a particular agent. Rison says he ignored him. He was going to make it his way.

He did. At Michigan State, he played basketball, made All-Big Ten in track and field and was an All-American wide receiver. “Could’ve made $3 million a year in NIL deals today,” Rison says. A first-round pick of the Colts in 1989, he finished second in Offensive Rookie of the Year voting to Barry Sanders. The Colts missed the playoffs by a game. The future felt bright, and Rison was one of the biggest reasons why.

He was gone a few months later, shipped to Atlanta in a trade that gave the Colts the chance to draft quarterback Jeff George first overall. Rison was crushed. His teammates were, too.

“Heartbroken,” says former Colts linebacker Jeff Herrod. “He had some Marvin Harrison in him. Without Rison, our team went in the craps.”

In Atlanta, Rison grew into one of the best wideouts in the game, earning four straight trips to the Pro Bowl. At 6-feet, 188 pounds, he was undersized but unafraid, lethal between the numbers, quick as a cat. “Nobody could separate like he could,” says his coach with the Falcons, Jerry Glanville. “He had the best change-of-direction I’ve ever seen.”

There wasn’t a cornerback in football who scared him, and after every catch, Rison welcomed the contact that came his way. He was once walloped so hard in a game that Glanville wondered for a solid minute if he’d ever get up. “I thought he could be dead,” the coach remembers. But Rison always came back for more.

“I’d like to think I was one of the greatest to go over the middle,” he says. “If not the greatest.”

There was a swagger to his game, a style that fit the Falcons and a city coming into its own. Atlanta was becoming a hotbed of hip-hop, and Rison — along with Deion Sanders, his teammate and the league’s best defensive back — were two of the biggest catalysts. The pair became the faces of the hungry upstart.

And they did it different.

“We football players were told we couldn’t get no endorsements, those were for the basketball and baseball players,” Rison says. “They said we couldn’t get commercials, we couldn’t get involved with music. Deion and I didn’t listen.”

They signed with Nike. They starred in commercials. They popped up in MC Hammer’s music videos. They spoke their minds to the media, consequences be damned.

And they backed it up on Sundays.

GO DEEPER

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By 1993, Rison had more catches in his first five seasons than any receiver in history. Glanville’s rule was simple: Whenever the Falcons advanced inside the red zone, get the ball to No. 80. Period. “I’d tell my QBs, ‘I don’t care if he busts a route and you don’t know where the hell he’s going, just find Rison,’” the coach says. “He’d run over the entire defense to get in the end zone.”

The numbers piled up. The wins didn’t. Sanders bolted for San Francisco before the 1994 season and put on a show a few months later in his return to the Georgia Dome, throwing punches at Rison — punches Rison returned — before taking an interception back 93 yards and high-stepping into the end zone.

Rison was gone a year later, signing a five-year $17 million deal with the Browns, at the time the richest ever for a wide receiver. But he never lived up to it. He showed up to training camp out of shape, grew frustrated with the scheme and clashed with coach Bill Belichick.

Late that year, while rumors of the Browns’ move to Baltimore swirled, Rison lashed out at the fans after a loss to Green Bay in which he was repeatedly booed. “Baltimore here we come,” were his infamous words in front of the TV cameras. Rison says in the weeks that followed, he received death threats. Most in Cleveland never forgave him.

Rison flamed out in Jacksonville after failing to mesh with quarterback Mark Brunell, whom Rison took shots at in the media after his exit. A few months later, he was helping the Packers win Super Bowl XXXI, snagging a 54-yard touchdown from Brett Favre on the team’s second offensive snap. It was so loud in the New Orleans Superdome that night that Rison couldn’t even hear Favre’s audible at the line of scrimmage. No matter. He snuck behind the defense and went untouched for the score.

He was a world champion.

Andre Rison takes a reception in for a score during the Packers’ Super Bowl XXXI victory at the Superdome. (Brian Bahr, Peter Brouillet / Getty Images)

In the days leading up to the game, he ran into Belichick before practice. “Hey pipsqueak,” the coach blurted out, “why didn’t you play like this for me?” Rison’s response: “Because you didn’t have an offensive coordinator.” Both laughed.

In Kansas City, Rison earned a fifth Pro Bowl nod and a new nickname, “Spiderman,” for his acrobatic catches in the end zone. But his time in the league was winding down, and after spending the 2000 season with the Raiders, Rison was out. One last triumph came in 2004 when he helped the Toronto Argonauts to a CFL Grey Cup.

Football was finished. Nothing in Rison’s life was about to get any easier.

After his girlfriend burned down his house, Rison hopped on his motorcycle, sped out of his subdivision and considered killing himself.

“I can’t take it!” he screamed.

The rain poured.

“All I had to do was wiggle the bike, just one good time, and I was headed straight into the median,” he wrote in “Wide Open.” “It would all be over in an instant.”

The relationship was volatile, the drama unending. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes — one-third of the Grammy-winning group TLC — had returned to Rison’s Atlanta home one night in June 1994 and found him with another woman. She collected dozens of pairs of his shoes, piled them up in the bathtub, then lit them on fire.

His $2 million mansion was torched. The incident made national news. Lopes was charged with first-degree arson.

The scene Rison has never been able to push from his mind: seeing Lopes climb into a car and drive off with Tupac Shakur, a close friend of his at the time — Shakur actually filmed his music video with MC Breed, “Gotta get mine,” at one of Rison’s homes.

A week later, Rison was holding Lopes’ hand during her court hearing. They planned to marry until she was killed in a car accident in Honduras in 2002.

By then Rison’s NFL career was over. He stumbled trying to find what was next. His estimated $19 million in career earnings? Mostly gone. “Some guys had a gambling problem,” Rison said in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, “Broke.” “Well, I had a spending problem.” Over the years, in addition to the 34 Benzes, he bought 14 BMWs, several Ferraris and too many trucks to count. He claims to have spent over $1 million on jewelry. He once lent a friend $30,000 to open a frozen drink café, then never saw a penny of profit.

The partying caught up to him. Rison’s inner circle ballooned to 20, 30, even 40 people. He paid for everything. He remembers lying in bed after a night out with $10,000 in cash sprawled out on the floor, $5,000 tucked in his pocket and $7,500 more stashed in his coat. He spread himself too thin. Eventually, the money ran out.

“Everybody used to say, and still does, that all Dre ever did away from the game was give, give, give,” Rison says. He says he picked it up from his grandmother back in Flint, who’d welcome strangers into her house on Christmas just so she could cook them a warm meal.

A coach left him with a warning early in his career, words Rison never forgot: “You keep messing up, and one day I’m gonna pull up in my shiny white Cadillac and ask, ‘Hey Dre, how about a wash?’”

Rison pledged he wouldn’t let that happen.

It never did. But his finances were a mess. His legal issues piled up — over the years, he’s been arrested for felony theft and disorderly conduct, and in 2022 he was charged with failing to pay child support. (Rison has four sons.) He avoided jail time by pleading down. Finally, he filed for bankruptcy.

He started coaching. He opened a business training young athletes. Then he met the woman who would offer him the type of stability he’d always needed. He helped her beat breast cancer, and together, they’re raising four daughters in his home state of Michigan.

Her name? Lisa Lopez.

He feels the remnants of all those trips over the middle every morning when he wakes up.

Rison says he has Arthritis in 18 different places. He has bone spurs in his neck. He’s had his jaw dislocated, his teeth knocked out, all 10 of his fingers broken at one point or another.

“You have to learn how to deal with depression,” Rison says, “and how to fight it.”

And he had to learn to move on, to stop obsessing over the Hall of Fame. He’s been a finalist several times, and for years, the rejection ate at him. He’d watch cornerbacks he used to embarrass make it in, and he’d steam. He’d tell a reporter he was “the best receiver to ever play the game” and vow to start his own Hall of Fame, Canton be damned. He’d belittle Rice’s gaudy numbers, claiming they were merely a product of him playing with Joe Montana and Steve Young.

What would he have done, Rison asked, if he’d played with one of those QBs instead of Chris Miller and Bobby Hebert?

Rison’s old teammate, Herrod, has wondered the same thing. “Put Andre Rison on the Cowboys or 49ers back in the day and it would’ve been a whole different story,” he says.

Rison believes that to his core. When he grabbed a photo with Randy Moss a few years back, this was the caption he wrote: “THE TWO GREATEST OF ALL TIME IN MY EYES.” When he was inducted into Michigan State’s Hall of Fame in 2022, Rison began his speech with this: “I never dreamed of being in the MSU Hall of Fame, but I always dreamed of being in the damn NFL Hall of Fame.”

It’s tormented him for years. It probably always will.

The numbers aren’t there, not after the offensive eruption of the 2000s, when 1,200-yard receiving seasons became routine. Rison currently sits 22nd all-time in touchdowns (84), tied for 48th in career catches (743) and 52nd in yards (10,205).

His chance at Canton came and went. He says he’s let it go. He says the bitterness is gone. He says he’s done losing sleep over it. He knows what he did on the field.

And if the way he did it — the hip-hop connections and the partying, the rapper girlfriend and the off-the-field headlines — cost him in the voters’ eyes, fine. Rison paved a path, he says, that athletes have been following ever since. That’s a different kind of legacy.

“I opened doors,” Rison says. “Everybody wasn’t willing to indulge in entertainment and hip-hop back then. When my teammates were on the golf course, I was meeting with Sony Records.”

These days, he pours himself into his passions. He wrote “Wide Open” and produced a movie about his life by the same name. He was recently promoted to interim head coach at University Liggett, a high school outside of Detroit. He shuttles his daughters to school and practices. He popped up on “Celebrity Family Feud” and announced the Falcons’ second-round pick at the draft in April.

“I’m living an even better life off the field than when I played,” Rison says. “I’d always prefer the way it went. And I damn sure wouldn’t change anything about where I’m at right now.”

Rison claims — along with Sanders, his close friend and the coach at Colorado — that both “are just as relevant as we were when we played.” Sanders, perhaps the most controversial figure in college football, might even be more relevant. Bad Moon Rison sees himself in the same vein, even if he’s the only one who still does.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Al Bello / Allsport, Otto Greule / Allsport, Robert Seale / Sporting News/Icon SMI)