The Reluctant Gladiator

Rather than face the music and the media about his failed drug test, he quit football and ran away to Australia, where he lived in a tent community that cost him just $7 a day.

"In my tent, I had about 30 books. And every morning, I'd wake up at about 5 a.m. And I'd take my flashlight and I'd read for a couple of hours. Everything from nutrition to Buddhism, to Jesus, to try to figure out, you know, what am I? What am I? So, I just kept reading and reading. And couldn’t figure out what I was. But I learned a lot."

-- CBS "60 Minutes" Interview

A poster of Ricky Williams hangs on my 4-year-old son's bedroom wall.

The Uber-figure in the aqua and orange Miami Dolphins #34 jersey stands alone within the Circus Maximus of an ancient Roman battleground, the photoshopped columns of the colisseum mirrored in the sunshade covering his facemask.

"GLADIATOR," it reads, boldly, as if Ricky were some dreadlocked Roman god.

This is the striking, mythical image so many of us want to see: Ricky running furiously and fearlessly in brutal, modern-day gladiatorial combat.

What we saw Dec. 19, the "60 Minutes" interview obliterated that myth, shattered the mask that hid the eyes of a man who was anything but the god we all wanted him to be. A man who knew that already.

Ricky would wear his helmet as he talked to the media after a game, his visor providing him refuge. He was socially challenged, yet far from misanthropic. He didn't necessarily want you to be his friend, though he cared sincerely that you thought good of yourself.

Now he lives in a one-bedroom house in California with few amenities, studying holistic medicine, in debt $8 million dollars that the Dolphins say he has to pay back.

So many of us don't like that. Too bad.

Let's be direct, as brutally honest as Ricky was as he sat in front of an incredulous Mike Wallace in what he knew would be a stage for a million eyes hungry to pass swift summary judgment: Being a football player in America is to be something of a slave.

A slave to money and order. A slave to the expectation of people desperate for you to validate their lives. It is slavery in the sense that you are allowed to be only what you are expected to be.

The only freedom you are afforded is the one you seize by not being afraid to leave it all behind.

The middle-aged, horseshoe-hairdo guys seated in their recliners with a beer propped on their pot bellies only win in their lives if you win. Perhaps it is the only thing they can win at.

They buy the tickets. They buy the jersey. They own you.

"Flake." "Pothead." "Loser."

They can't bear that Ricky doesn't live his life to validate their lives.

"How could he quit at 27, in the prime of his career, leaving millions behind? How could he waste the talent that God gave him? If I were given that talent, I would ..."

What? What would they do? They would do what they -- each individual ruled by his own desires, weaknesses, life experiences and, perhaps, destiny -- would do. Only a few of us are ever blessed with Ricky's natural talent.

That isn't his problem.

On the field, he gave all of his passion.



He always showed up to pre-season workouts in prime physical condition. In 2002, he won the MVP of the Pro Bowl, an All-Star game of sorts notorious for players who don't bother to play.

Is it his fault our myopic worship of professional athletes is the reason they make millions of dollars? Unlike baseball and basketball, an NFL contract is not guaranteed. At any time, a team can cut a player, and the money he signs for is gone.

We knew he wasn't "normal," so why did we expect any different? Afterall, this is the Heisman Trophy winner who posed in a wedding dress with a coach who gave away the farm to ordain him the savior of the woeful New Orleans Saints.

So now Ricky got popped for the third time smoking marijuana. He didn't want to face the cacophony of public condemnation. You could say he was a coward. Or you could say he was brave. Probably somewhere in between.

Pervasive in pro sports, especially in football, is a blind, stifling culture of conformity. To be different is to be "different." An outcast.

Rather than offer himself to the mindless protocol of mea culpa, he simply walked away.

Wallace asks Ricky in the interview if he wants to apologize to his teammates:

"If they want me to apologize just to apologize, then I will apologize. But it doesn’t mean anything unless I understand what I’m apologizing for," Ricky says.

"You're apologizing for letting them down," Wallace says. "The Dolphins thought with you, and mainly with you, that they had a chance at the Super Bowl."

"What if I disagree?" Williams says. "Do I still have to apologize, that I cost them their season?"

Wallace offers a dismissive grimace, as if it were a foregone conclusion that with Ricky, the Dolphins would be at or near the top, as they have been for decades. It's puzzling how easy a target Ricky is.

"I played my butt off. I played as hard as I could whenever I put that
uniform on. But I’m not doing that anymore, you know?

I moved on. So when is it OK for me to stop playing football? When would it have been OK for me to stop playing football? When my knees went out? When my shoulders went out? When I had too many concussions? Like what? When is it OK?

I'm just curious, because I don't understand. When is it OK to not play football anymore? I didn't know ahead of time. Or I would have given them a clue. Happened in the course of two days. Boom, boom, boom, boom."

To be sure, it would have helped if he had decided to quit sooner, before the eve of training camp, giving the Dolphins enough time to secure a capable running back for an offense centered around his running abilities.

But here is the immediate future he faced: Public derision for smoking a plant that in some cultures is considered a holy act; more orders about where to be, when, and what to wear in exchange for fame and money he didn't worship; the prospect of being asked to run the ball an ungodly number of times in an offense overdependent on him in a brutal sport he had lost his passion for and, as he hinted subtly in the interview, for a team that wasn't going to be good anyway (and they weren't going to be).

No one ever believed in the coach. Ricky mentioned once that players often poked fun at Mike Wannstedt and his ridiculous power 'stache.



The guy was the captain of his own sinking ship, and he was using Ricky as his lifeboat. It's not Ricky's fault the Dolphins never bothered to draft a quarterback to share the load.

Ricky owed the Dolphins as much as they owed him. Nothing. Except, perhaps, the money. And he'll face those consequences, a byproduct of the economic system he subjected himself to and reaped the material rewards for.

He cares for his three kids. He has devoted himself to educating children, setting up the Ricky Williams Foundation for that expressed purpose. He laments (like Jim Brown, another shining star who quit before the supernova consumed him) that professional athletes do so little good with the spotlight they are afforded.

Yet: He smoked marijuana; he talked to the media with his helmet on; he didn't care for social situations, a symptom of his professed social-anxiety disorder.

Marijuana is simply a symbol of the disobedience that a culture of conformity fears and hates. There is infinite ignorance and irrationality in fear:

"So you still smoke marijuana," Wallace says. Anything worse than that?"

"Worse? What do you mean by worse?" Williams says. "Sometimes I have sweets."

Wallace looks puzzled, as if that's some new term for an exotic, evil street drug.

"Sugar," Ricky says. "Sometimes I have a glass of wine. But that's about it."

"And steroids?"

"No, thank God, never needed to have. I was gifted. I've been very blessed that I never needed anything to help me play football."

To Ricky, sweets are worse. They are what leads a man to show up at training camp fat and slow, like so many players are apt to do (but not him).

Ricky tells Wallace he was painfully afraid of the public's reaction to his failed drug test, a test that a team can use, by the way, to diminish a player's trade stock when his leverage is at its peak.

How convenient.

Ricky doesn't seem to know who he is yet. A good trait. Yet so many seem to have him pegged. Wallace reads Ricky one of the countless treatises condemning him:

"Ricky’s always been one of the most selfish, unpredictable, purposely bizarre, and more than slightly off-kilter athletes," Sporting News columnist Paul Atner writes. "He doesn’t care his behavior might effect anyone around him. It has always been about Ricky."

Ricky responds. Notice the use of the word "admits" in the CBS transcript. Even the pencil pusher can't resist assigning Ricky's critics more due than they deserve and assuming that he's obligated to repent.

"Half of it is accurate," admits Williams. "But how could I expect him, if I
don't even know who he is, to know anything, really, about me? ... Well, I am
unpredictable, but who's supposed to be predictable?"

Throughout the interview, Ricky is calm, resolved. He's playful with Wallace. Self-effacing. His mannerisms are child-like and somewhat effeminate.

Perhaps the most telling part of the interview is when Ricky, in the same breath, both accepts others' views of him and rejects them. He says he understands that people feel he deserted them, because in their eyes he did. And that's OK with him.

Wallace continues:

Here's more of what Atner said: "You know the type that fancy themselves as shining lights in a dull world. They try too hard to be unique. Instead of looking brave, they look foolish."

"I look very foolish," Ricky says. "That's definitely accurate. To a lot of people, I look very foolish in what I'm doing. And I understand that. Because the only thing that matters is how I feel. And if I let what they feel affect me, then it changes how I feel."

Ricky is narcissistic. He is. But there is worse to be.

A hypocrite is one.

Dan Marino, my childhood idol (and still is), condemned Ricky on national television. He says Ricky wrongly let his team down. As Ricky himself would say, Marino is entitled to that opinion.

But this is the same Dan Marino who at the beginning of 2004 accepted a job as vice president of operations for the Dolphins. Then, he suddenly backed out. Why? Because he changed his mind. "A lifestyle decision," he said at the time. He chose his family.

Is Ricky wrong because he chose himself?

Is it OK for Dan to desert his team as long as he's headed back to his wholesome nuclear family, but not for Ricky, who would rather live in a tent alone in the Australian Outback?

It should be said that Marino's decision wasn't quite as critical to the team's immediate success.

But is that the threshhold for judging a man? How successful he can make you?

Larry Czonka left the Dolphins after the 1974 season -- having won Super Bowls in 1972 and 1973 -- for the World Football League, and the Dolphins haven't won a Super Bowl since. Where is the hue and cry?

Or Barry Sanders, arguably the most-talented running back in NFL history. He abandoned the Lions in similar fashion, the NFL's all-time rushing record very much within his reach. But he's not smoking pot with Lenny Kravitz and growing a bushy beard and chanting with pretentious New Age healers. That he didn't "flake out" makes Sanders OK, a man of admirable self-actualization.

Yet, all are cases, equally, of men making choices. No one will "get" Ricky. No one needs to "get" anybody. As Jimi Hendrix would say, "I'm the one who's gotta die when it's time for me to die."

Ricky says that at age 50 he simply hopes he's alive. We should all wish the same for each other, no matter what it is that we want from others or ourselves.

Personally, I hope that Ricky's life includes running again somewhere in a football uniform, if he wants to. He's a graceful figure. And it's likely that if he doesn't return to the NFL, the only way we will keep up with him is in the occassional report of this man told through a prism of pity and scorn.

The poster of #34 will hang in my son's room as long as he wants it to.

If he asks, I'll tell him Ricky Williams was a man who broke the chains that bound him and dared to live his own life on his own terms.