This wiki bio indicateshe never practiced yet he is considered of the great drummers of all time. How was this possible? Is practice always necessary to be a great musician or not?
Because band-style drumming really isn’t that complicated. You’re not doing a lot of different things. In most songs, you are doing approximately the same thing. It just doesn’t take as much practice once you’ve gotten proficient.
That’s the reason why most musicians I know who play drums don’t only play drums.
Because he wasn’t a musician; he was a drummer. 
And a jazz drummer at that. 
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It isn’t just Buddy Rich- I’ve heard a lot of great drummers say similar things.
Hal Blaine, one of the all time great session drummers, used to say, “I don’t practice- I play.” As far as he was concerrned, being in the studio playing the drums all day WAS his practice.
The person who does that kind of job in a classical orchestra is called a percussionist: they play triangle, drums, bongos, and even the occasional cannon. There are drummers who play a one-handed flute at the same time; those in rock groups normally don’t play just drums but an assembly of drums and cymbals. One of my classmates was completely tone-deaf, but it turns out he did have a sense of rythm: at one point he got assigned the triangle for a school show and while playing with it realized it made different sounds depending on how he played it (zooming the bar back and forth against it vs hitting it with the bar); he begged the teacher to assign him any percussion parts so he’d be able to play around with those instruments. I don’t know what’s he doing now, but he used to work as a studio percussionist. And while I have no idea whether he practices in the “take out the instruments and bang on them” sense or not, I can tell you he’s one of those people whose fingers seem to be having a conversation with any tabletop.
Because he had a gift from Og. You don’t. Go practice.
But I’ve also noticed that a hell of a lot of drummers drum when they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Countertops, steering wheels, tables…put any vaguely stationary surface in front of them and they’ll start tap-tap-tapatapatapping without even noticing they’re doing it. That’s practice, it’s just not Practice.
I don’t consider him one of the great drummers of all time. He was fast, certainly, and he was loud, and he spent most of his time on the snare and cymbals. But he lacked finesse and innovation, IMO. And I thought he was an asshole, for whatever that’s worth. He didn’t practice, he played, and it showed. He was good at what he did, but never progressed past that.
Define practice? Sit in a garage and play to yourself? As a drummer I can tell you that every time you play you are essentially practicing. And when the whole band is playing (to no one) it is a rehearsal for the live show. This is the time to learn the song, the beat and the changes etc.
I’m very skeptical any time a major musician claims to be entirely self-taught, unable to read music and/or never practiced - that may be what Buddy Rich (in this case) wanted us to believe, but I doubt it’s the objective truth.
What do the people he grew up with say? What do his first bandmates say? What, in his definition, is the precise difference between ‘play’ and ‘practice’? That, to me, is the answer to this.
I have no difficulty believing he was self-taught or unable to read music. That’s not really a big deal, in my opinion.
The practicing claim is the one I would dispute, depending on what was meant. I can believe he reached a point of proficiency where practice wasn’t necessary in that his actual playing kept his chops intact. But no-one is born with the muscle memory to rattle off perfect paradiddles, one handed drum rolls, swiss army triplets, etc., right off the bat at high bpms. He would have had to have built up to that.
The inability to read music is not a deal-breaker for a rock or jazz musician, though it’s hard to imagine that one could go far in classical without it. Ziegfeld Follies songwriter Dave Stamper never learned to read or write music using traditional notation, using his own numeric notation - which nearly got him hanged as a spy.
My favorite Buddy Rich quote:
“You can do anything with one bass drum that you can do with two, if you’re a bitch. And I’m a bitch.”
My favorite rock drummer is Neil Peart of Rush. I’m not sure if he was entirely self-taught or if he had lessons in his youth, but I thought it was impressive that, in his 40s, when he was already acknowledged as one of the all-time great drummers, he sought out a teacher and took some lessons in order to get even better.
Yep. It’s cool to claim you never practice just like supermodels claim to never work out. He was too brilliant to have not busted his ass. Please.
In the 1980 Modern Drummer interview, he discussed drummers who influenced him. I found it because he mentioned Kevin Ellman of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia for showing him what could be done with concert toms:
About practice:
What I can see is Buddy Rich saying that “he doesn’t practice” (present tense.) I can absolutely believe that if by “practice” he means “formal solo practice sessions”. If you play enough, rehearse enough with the band, that’s a form of practice, no matter what you call it. But, clearly, there was a point in time in his development as a drummer he was working on his muscular memory and working out drum lines. Maybe he didn’t think of it as formal “practice,” but that’s what it was.
My favorite drummer I worked with did not practice and took a sabbatical of about 5-7 years away from the drums. In the meantime, he was too cash strapped to afford drums, so he only played on borrowed kits during rehearsals and gigs. He came up to speed within a rehearsal or two. He didn’t need to practice, but he had thousands of hours of practice as a kid, so the muscle memory came back to him pretty quickly. I’m guessing that’s what Buddy Rich meant by he didn’t practice. He was at a point where he had the done enough woodshedding that it was “in his blood.” He could probably have walked away from drumming for a decade and gotten back to it within a couple of weeks. But all that muscular training had already been hard-wired with all the practice he had done in the many years past.
Well, the claim is he never “practiced.” I’m sure he “rehearsed,” though. I personally think rehearsal contains the element of practice in it, but it’s different enough that I could see someone maintaining a technical distinction.