ESPNews: Ricky Williams to be Reinstated!

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Too bad. I would have liked to seen Ricky play on the Raiders. Up next for the upcoming season, Edgerrin James. They could use his gold toothed ass.

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I saw Andrea Kramer and ESPN do a piece on him yesterday. Ricky's changed, and I actually respect the man quite a bit.

 

Apparently my post earlier in this thread got no-sold, but let me reinforce it and summarize basically what it said: That all these people yabbering about Ricky unretiring and being reinstated into the NFL are speaking for Ricky, but Williams hasn't gone on record personally saying he wants to come back. The talk is coming from sports agents and teams who want him to come back, but Ricky, this according to Andrea Kramer, doesn't want to be seen as a football player any longer, but now as a student. Gone are the dreadlocks in favor of a shaved head and a beard, as he spends his weekly routine taking classes 5 days a week, twice a week playing basketball against other students, and doing yoga. Crazy hippie shit, I know, but even funnier was that Kramer had told Williams if he does indeed decide to come back to the NFL, he'll be drug tested immediately. Williams then actually replied with laughter and said that he still loves and will continue to smoke marijuana regardless of what the NFL wants, and he has no plans of unretiring in the future at all.

 

If he does stay retired, I'll have respect for the man. I still don't think it's right leaving the Dolphins at the time they did, but I have a feeling the media's giving off more of a "took them by surprise" feel to this than it is in reality.

[Guest Vitamin X]

Oh, and as silly as the logos I've placed in my sig are, the guy who writes for that site writes absolutely terrific articles, much better than MMQB and Pasqueralli's load of bull every week at ESPN. He wrote a really good piece on the whole Williams debacle in this week's article:

http://www.packerpalace.com/blog/meandmrwalker13.html

Run Ricky Run

 

Following up on my sports punditry of last week about the Pacers-Pistons fight, this week in the guise of sports pundit we consider the case of Ricky Williams.  A small ocean of ink and a small hurricane of breath has been spent covering Williams in the sports world recently.  Nearly every story takes a slightly pejorative or suspicious angle.  One pundit will portray Williams as a freaky hippy hiding out in California.  Another will say that he only retired because he was facing league suspension.  Len Pasquarelli at ESPN.com went out of his way to mock Williams for his ganja smoking in a piece full of condescending puns.  Nobody I have heard or read, however, has considered that maybe Ricky Williams means precisely what he says.  He loved playing football for many years and now wants to move on with his life to do other things.  When the lead singer in the best local rock band arrives at the far side of his twenties and decides to become a schoolteacher or a lawyer, nobody finds that particularly surprising.  But when a professional football player does the same thing sportswriters find it impossible to believe that anyone could give up the life that so many sportswriters wish could be theirs.

 

We find it particularly hypocritical that so many people writing about Williams focus so heavily on his ganja smoking to explain his behavior.  The NFL imposes brutal fines and suspensions for players caught smoking pot or using other recreational drugs, while hypocritically allowing teams to shoot players full of all manner of dangerous drugs to keep them in uniform on Sunday.  Packer fans in particular remember the Favre's vicodin addiction--just by bumming painkillers off of teammates he managed to get himself a serious, 5-10 pill per day habit.  That dependency was on a highly addictive schedule B narcotic, not on a misdemeanor possession drug like marijuana.  To its credit, the NFL has been the second most aggressive sport in stamping out steroid use (the first being track and field), but at the same time de facto encourages players to put on demonstrably lethal amounts of weight to compete with the Ted Washingtons of the NFL.

 

In addition, Williams was diagnosed with a social anxiety disorder that was treated with Paxil, a drug for which he was briefly a spokesman.  Paxil is the brand name for one version of a group of anti-depressant drugs that modify the way serotonin works in the brain.  Without getting too geeky, serotonin is a brain chemical that is believed to be partially responsible for feelings of depression or elation, sleep patterns, anxiety, and sex drive.  Drugs like Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft change the way the brain produces and consumes serotonin in order to treat depression, anxiety, or obsessive compulsive behavior.  Some people find serotonin modifying drugs to be extremely effective and live much better lives after taking them, while other experience little therapeutic benefit with serious side effects ranging from greater depression to drastically lowered sex drive to stomach problems.  Ricky Williams was one of the latter group, and found that for him smoking pot managed his anxiety at least as well as the serotonin drugs and produced far fewer side effects.  In fact, he once said that pot was "ten times better for me than Paxil" as a treatment for anxiety and a lack of social confidence.  If a player were to come to the league with an unorthodox but seemingly effective treatment for torn knee ligaments, I'm sure they would be all ears.  But when a player with a diagnosed mental illness says that smoking pot helps him get through the day he is a pariah, a junkie, a weirdo, and a freak. Stick to percocets and cortisone shots and you're one of us, rip a bong hit and you're one of them.

 

Of course the NFL has the right to decide under their collective bargaining agreement what chemicals their players can and cannot take.  The league has always placed a premium on showing a wholesome, clean living face to the US public, and that is their undeniable right.  Our criticism is of the coverage of Ricky Williams as a player and a human being.  This is, after all, a player who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a wedding dress, posing with his new coach Mike Ditka.  When his eccentricities make for good copy and good press, everyone loves him, but when his eccentricities pitch an image slightly off with what the NFL wants to think it is he's sent off to the freak farm or the laugh factory.  Again, having read much of his web site and seen the recent reports about what he is doing, we think Williams might just be what he says he is--an inquisitive, sensitive, gentle, self reflective soul unfit for celebrity and professional sports.  It takes more bravery to walk away from fame and a few million dollars than it does to run at Ray Lewis and Ed Reed.  He should be neither mocked nor pitied.