Ricky Williams Was My Favorite Athlete
Ricky Williams Was My Favorite Athlete - Deemed too weird for the NFL, Williams displayed a vulnerability and sense of emotional well-being that was ahead of his time.
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In 2002, Ricky Williams, newly drafted to the Miami Dolphins and barely 25, made a summertime appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Heart-faced and soft-spoken, Williams was a tender personality and an extraordinary running back. He’d won a Heisman Trophy four years earlier, at the University of Texas, and had just been traded from the New Orleans Saints, who’d initially given up all of their draft picks to select him, a first in NFL history. He was also — according to the press and his fellow teammates and whomever else was watching — extraordinarily weird.
On the field, he ran as if pitched from a bow; to watch him was to imagine him in a flipbook, an outlined blur. The NCAA once wrote that Williams’ power-running style was “viscous,” which read like a typo. It wasn’t: he ran as methodically as someone moving much more sluggishly. Each pedal of the knee; a hand held outward or at his side, almost delicately; the twisting and rolling, both standing and supine, dodging bodies like a dance — all of it seemed like a languid, deliberate choreography, stretched through a field-length cavity visible only to him. Play it in actual slow motion and his movements are tight, sticky, as if he were dripping his way through.
Off-field, he was tight-lipped and tense — awkward like a teenager, with the same deliberate reluctance and sense of quiet. Shoulders high with visible discomfort. “Aloof.” “Eccentric.” In a 2000 Sports Illustrated interview, John Ed Bradley wrote, “Last season he gave interviews only once a week and conducted most of them with his helmet on.” The rate was rare, in the early aughts, for a player of Williams’ stature. But he simply had no interest in Bradley’s questions.
During his 11-season career, Williams was known for debilitating anxiety, controversy (he wore a dress! he smoked many joints!), and for quitting after getting busted for smoking weed. “I’ll go from thinking I want to be the best running back ever...and tomorrow…I don’t want to play football anymore,” he admitted. He’d eventually reveal it was Social Anxiety Disorder and depression that stunted his ability to speak, that kept the helmet on post-game. Marijuana, verboten at that time in the NFL — unlike, say, abusing your spouse — soothed his tension. He violated the league’s drug policy four times and was drug-tested at least 496 more, the testers becoming “like family.” For ditching a field so inherently patriarchal, and behaving in a manner regarded as stereotypically weak, he was rendered an irresponsible kook. In 2004, facing a four-game suspension and a $650,000 fine after failing a drug test — then a second time — Williams retired. In 2018, he explained it was “to smoke weed. Well, that’s not all the way true. I retired to take better care of myself.
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