Every now and then a decades-old high school basketball list surfaces online and pulls you right back into the gymnasium — the squeaking sneakers, the folded programs, the recruiting letters stuffed in lockers. The 1992 Parade All-American team is one of those artifacts. It’s a roster studded with future NBA names, but the name that stops you cold is Randy Livingston, the point guard from Isidore Newman School in New Orleans who shared national Player of the Year honors with a kid from Alameda named Jason Kidd.
Livingston didn’t just share the stage with Kidd. He repeated the feat in 1993, this time splitting co-Player of the Year with Rasheed Wallace. He was ranked the No. 1 player in the 1993 class — ahead of Wallace, ahead of Jerry Stackhouse. At Isidore Newman, he walked the same hallways as Peyton Manning, whose own legend was still being written on the football field. Livingston’s No. 50 jersey eventually hung from the rafters there.
Then the knees went.
Livingston arrived at LSU in 1994 and managed just 32 games across two seasons. The knee problems that shadowed him in Baton Rouge never fully released their grip. He entered the 1996 NBA Draft and landed with the Houston Rockets in the second round, 42nd overall — a steep drop for a player once considered the finest high school guard in the country.
What followed was one of the most nomadic careers the league has seen. Livingston suited up for nine NBA franchises across parts of eleven seasons: Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Golden State, Seattle, New Orleans, the Clippers, Utah, and Chicago. He also logged extensive time in the CBA and the NBA Development League, where he won an MVP and led the Idaho Stampede to a D-League championship in 2008 before retiring. His NBA résumé totals 203 regular-season games — the fewest ever for a player with 11 or more seasons of service. The stat is less a trivia answer than a scar.
Meanwhile, the players he once stood above became fixtures. Kidd went to Cal, became the No. 2 overall pick in 1994, and compiled a Hall of Fame career — 10 All-Star selections, an NBA title with Dallas in 2011, and now the head coaching chair with the Mavericks. Wallace won a championship with the Pistons in 2004, made four All-Star teams, and played 16 seasons while accumulating a record 41 technical fouls in a single year. Stackhouse became a two-time All-Star himself.
Livingston’s second act has been steadier than his first. After coaching the Idaho Stampede and a stint scouting in Australia, he returned to Isidore Newman in 2018. He started with the middle school team — they won a city championship — and took over the varsity boys’ program the following season. One of his players was Arch Manning, Peyton’s nephew and the latest quarterback in that family’s lineage.
Under Livingston, Newman won Louisiana state titles in 2022 and 2023, the program’s first since 1993. Both were later stripped by the LHSAA following a recruitment violation, and Livingston was suspended for a calendar year. He sued the association and, in January 2024, a judge granted a preliminary injunction allowing him to continue coaching.
The 1992 Parade list is a time capsule, but Livingston’s story is the one that lingers — not because of what he became, but because of how close he came to becoming something entirely different.
