The Fan Hub

It's no secret that most athletes aren't terribly interesting individuals. Their sound bites usually consist of them muttering some profoundly simple phrases into a microphone, making us think, "Wow that wasn't scripted was it?" We constantly want the athletes we watch (or cover, in the case of the media) to be more open, less guarded, and more intriguing, but the reality is most of them simply aren't. And that's why Ricky Williams is by far one of my five favorite athletes of all time.

To me, what separated Ricky from most every athlete in the modern age is that, I don't think he really wanted to be just a football player. I’m not even sure if he really wanted to be a football at all at times. Truth be told, I've never met Ricky Williams, never had conversation with him, don't know any of his close personal friends, and couldn't tell you any substantial facts about his life other than what I've read or seen on T.V. I do know two of Ricky's former teammates from Miami, and his time in college at Texas. And when I asked them about him a couple of years ago, they both said essentially the same thing. "Rick is just a different dude man."

Ricky Williams wasn’t your average pro athlete.

The problem is that until further notice, most individuals who buck trends or challenge the status quo will always be met with contempt, vigorous criticism, and — especially in sports — insane amounts envy from anyone who can't bear to look at the situation outside the prism of what we consider “normal.”

Do you want a corollary? If I say Kanye West, what's the first thing that comes to mind? An individual with a massive ego, a womanizer, and perhaps a wacky sensationalist. I see a 34-year-old who might be really examining his relationship with women — particularly his mother — and asking more metaphysical questions about just who he is, and congruently perhaps what he is. Truthfully, the same logic is applied to Ricky Williams.

If you never watched Ricky Williams at Texas, imagine Alabama's Trent Richardson with Ahmad Bradshaw's feet. Go to YouTube, look him up and just watch. Ricky Williams was probably the first college running back that I ever saw who was literally unstoppable in every sense of the word. In four years at Texas he rushed for 6,592 yards, capping off his senior season with a total of 2,327 rushing yards, and an average of 193.9 yardsper game. Even if you're the Soonerest of Oklahoma fans, if you can't admit that Ricky was perhaps the best running back ever to lace ‘em up, your as delusional as the guy on the Bachelor who thinks that all those girls are their to frolic with you and to find true love.

Ricky's story has been told, retold, and then retold again. But if you want it in nutshell, here it is. Mike Ditka and the Saints traded every draft pick they had in the 1999 NFL Draft to move up to draft Williams with the fifth overal pick. Ricky signed a massively incentive-based contract, then never quite lived up to the hype in N.O., as he suffered from undiagnosed clinical depression and social anxiety disorder. Then he was traded to the Miami Dolphins, where he led the NFL in rushing and was probably the most impactful running back for the next two years. Then he failed several drug tests for smoking pot and retired from football, causing some fans and significant members of the media to label him selfish, a quitter and my favorite, a drug addict.¹

In some small way, Williams made us challenge every bit of conventional wisdom that we had about athletes, and did it by doing something that not many of us would have the courage to do.

The reality is that Ricky Williams, like most 26-year-olds, probably wasn't sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He most likely didn’t know if he wanted to play football — maybe he had other interests, or perhaps having his body wrapped like a mummy every day didn’t appeal to him anymore. Whatever the reasons were, he retired from the NFL at just twenty-six years-old. I think he probably enjoyed questioning his place in the world, and what he wanted to aspire to, and frankly maybe he just liked smoking the chronic, because it was probably the only drug that gave him any sense of balance. He studied Yoga, holistic medicine, and read Nietzsche. I'm going to venture way out on a limb, but I suspect most athletes (or everyday people for that matter) don't have a real fondness for the writings of Fredrick Nietzsche nor want to be trapped in a 120 degree room with twelve other people working on their downward facing dog (it's a Yoga thing).

Ricky Williams was the type of athlete of which there aren't enough. He was complex, and different; he looks at the world the way we all should, a bit cock-eyed. Yet every time he or any other athlete actually ventures off script and away from the mundane and contrived rhetoric, they end up squarely in the crosshairs of the "Hey you make a lot of money to play a game, just zip your lips and do it" crowd. (See Rashard Mendenhall for more proof of that theory) In some small way, Williams made us challenge every bit of conventional wisdom that we had about athletes, and did it by doing something that not many of us would have the courage to do.

The kicker is that every time an athlete retires, we forget that they leave their chosen sport sometime in the mid-to late-30s, and have paid phenomenal price both physically and mentally we wonder how they might adapt to the “real world”. The unfortunate reality is how many of them actually manage to have a productive life after sports? Yet I highly doubt that will be a question we have to ask about Ricky Williams.

¹ I generally like most members of the media, but I utterly despise Jay Mariotti, who doesn't have the good sense the lord gave goats. I mention this because he was the one who called Ricky Williams “a disgrace to humanity” in the documentary Run Ricky Run.