Working in the financial services industry for a few companies now, I’ve seen the phenomenon first hand. An employee realizes that the life is getting sucked out of them through their eyeballs. Overtime is out of the question, as every single moment they have to sit at that computer and repeat the same function over and over it’s as if there’s a clicking down of their life and the meter is right in front of their face the whole time moving ominously with each passing work item. Then one day almost out of the blue, they don’t show up, or they do and at one point in the day stand up and verbally sever their ties with the company and walk out the door. I’ve seen it happen to managers as well, a few months after the epiphany, in a way that lets them know flat out that no matter how hard they work and no matter how diplomatic they’ve attempted to be, the people in charge are grossly incompetent and that their career is essentially going nowhere. Speaking to one of these folks in the weeks following their departure it’s as if they’d suddenly found God and the high authority had granted them everlasting bliss for what they had done. Others regret the choice over time. Some leave in a blaze of glory, others simply get up and quietly walk out the door. Either way, they’re gone. I have a feeling that the life of Ricky Williams was wrought with anxiety over these exact same things, and the joy he now feels may be proof of it.
Sports media has taken its cue from the political talking heads lately in this episode of American sports, as rather than making an attempt to consider all possibilities, Ricky hanging up the helmet was grasped as a way to literally stir the pot. They say it was not super bowl rings but marijuana that he craved day and night, and that it’s most definitely the reason why he quit after only five years. It’s repeatedly reported that the displeasure of having to consume masking agents to cover up his seemingly never ending soul shakedown party ended up being too much for this man. The sporting press would have you believe that this football player, who every year made it through training camp in the blistering Miami heat; who took over four hundred plus hits to his body every year from a never ending line of muscle-bound crazed behemoths, would up and quit because of a beverage. Luckily this is not politics, its sports, and in football especially, the numbers rarely lie. So instead of reading in to quotes, I’m going to recount a number of known facts instead.
In each of the previous five years before the arrival of Ricky, the Dolphins made the playoffs. Lamar Smith, JJ Johnson, Bernie Parmalee and Karim Abdul-Jabbar ran the ball for those teams and none of them ever eclipsed 315 carries in a season. Ricky had yet to eclipse that number himself until he went to Miami, and in the two years he was there ran the ball 383 times in his first season and 392 in his second. The number that jumps out at you though is that while in his first season he was able to accumulate 1853 yards, yet in his second year, with more carries, he was only able to run for 1372. Safe to say, the ‘X’s and O’s’ had caught up with coach Wannstedt. Meanwhile Jamal Lewis runs it five less times for over two thousand yards, and makes the playoffs as Ricky watches from home, and the Patriots win their second super bowl in three years with Antowain Smith as their lead running back.
Dan Marino retired before the start of the 2000 season, and his predecessor Jay Fiedler has been the starting quarterback ever since. The best thing you could say about Fiedler is that he doesn’t make mistakes, or in other words, he won’t give the game away. This fact alone was enough to vault the 00-01 and 01-02 Dolphins to the playoffs under the watch of Dave Wannstedt, who at the time served as head coach and general manager. Up until and throughout these two years, the Dolphins were able to field some of the deepest teams in football. After Ricky arrived though, kinks in the armor of this once mighty franchise began to show, and facts began to surface concerning not only the inability of Fiedler to put the team on his back late in games, but also the inability of Wannstedt to manage the team both on and off the field.
The emergence of both Bill Belichek and Herman Edwards within the division exposed Wannstedt’s ineptitude when it came to play calling and game management. Weaknesses in his leadership ability began to show in 02-03 as he badly mismanaged the final quarters of three second-half losses to the Jets, Patriots and Vikings. Along with Wannstedt’s mistakes, the reality of Fiedler’s inability to put together drives in the clutch was badly exposed. The amount of talent the Dolphins put on the field was unquestioned, but following this disappointing season it was obvious that in spite of their running back having a truly historic season, something was still missing.
So in the tradition of mentally overmatched general managers and owners in sports, to cover up this failure, the Dolphins made an off season splash in the signing of Junior Seau who was brought in to bolster an already feared defense. A top-notch quarterback was neither drafted, signed, or traded for in the off-season. Instead Wannstedt’s plan was to attempt beating a square peg in a round hole once more by running Ricky Williams again for over 380 carries, only this time for nearly 500 less yards, while the depth his team had enjoyed over the years was deteriorating. Jay Fiedler was again the starting quarterback in a year that saw the division playoff round featuring the names of Favre, McNabb, Delhomme, Bulger, Manning, McNair, Green and Brady. While two of those names (Delhomme and Bulger) hadn’t played as many years as Fiedler, by the end of the playoffs each one of these quarterbacks would not only be considered high end, but each of them were able to put together fourth quarter drives when their teams needed it. What was the Miami offense of predictability, these offenses in the second round of the playoffs were anything but. Four years had passed and the Miami head coach had been obviously overmatched and their quarterback was not good enough to make the jump to the next level.
Following this second disappointing season with Ricky, the organization again attempted to masque their failure by making a splash in hiring Dan Marino to take over the general manager duties from Wannstedt, only to see him quit a week after accepting the job. As a replacement splash they signed notoriously troubled wide receiver David Boston. While the Patriots were proving the theory of depth and well-distributed salary cap money to be a winning strategy, Miami continued to flounder by bringing in yet another big money free agent at a position far more secure than the one they were clearly lacking talent at. Quarterbacks Mark Brunell and Jeff Garcia were available, but the Dolphins were only able to come up with an unproven Jay Feeley from the Falcons. After two straight unsuccessful seasons, the team apparently planned to continue beating a dead horse by once again running Ricky into the ground and praying that it would work.
It’s not spoken about that much in the sporting press for obvious reasons, but the toll each season takes on these athletes is something that most of us could not begin to appreciate without having felt it ourselves. There isn’t a player out there who’s not aware of the horror stories accompanying the legacies of players like “Iron Mike” Webster, Reuben Davis, Curt Marsh, Dan Hampton and countless others whose lives serve as a debilitating reality to what lies ahead for many NFL players after retirement. The most common conditions ex-players face are severe arthritis, heart disease, post concussion syndrome and nerve damage. Several surgeries to the same area sometimes leave ex-players hobbled, needing crutches to move around. In spite of this it would be unlikely to find even one of them with a super bowl ring would trade it back in for what they’d lost, and here’s where the story of Ricky Williams starts to make a lot of sense.
During his first two years in Miami he carried the ball nearly a hundred more times than any other back in the NFL. Equaling out to well more than fifty extra hits to his body in a season than his peers. While this may not have bothered a player of his talent as much at the end of this past year, to see the same face on the sideline along with the same face throwing the ball, he had to assume that the plan was to run him in to the ground once more. Confidence in an organization’s ability to actually win a championship plays more into the decision making of players these days than one might think. With the toll the game takes on the body, who has the life to spare for the sake of what appears to have become a lost cause? How many years would Ricky have had to put himself through this before the organization finally got a quarterback or a coach who could actually win a Lombardi trophy?
These questions seem to escape the analysis of his abrupt retirement, and instead are covered up with an aspect of his personal life that reporters can only hypothesize about. Not a single writer or talking head actually ‘knows’ Ricky Williams well enough to distinguish the rumors from the truth, yet his pot smoking or general strangeness is all anyone seems to talk about. I happen to think that he has more in common with the financial services employees I described above than anyone would like to admit. Gross incompetence is simply intolerable to some people, and Miami’s incompetence was most likely cutting years off the man’s life. That he refrained from the all so typical temper tantrum athletes too often subject us to these days on their way out the door, didn’t mean that he was high. It was just so rare that one of these mega-stars actually showed the kind of class it takes to leave a frustrating situation peacefully, that nobody knew how to react when it actually happened. The talking heads figure he must have been deranged or motivated by one of the plots of various conspiracy theories surfacing still to this day, some of which assume that he must have been brainwashed by others. There appears to be a belief that an individual could not be capable of making the decision that Ricky did with a clear head. In a purely defensive manner, the sporting press spins this story daily until the spin inevitably becomes the truth, and politics prevail.
Perhaps it didn’t truly dawn on Ricky until he looked at the faces in mini camp and realized that he was reliving the same season, over and over and over again. Perhaps it wasn’t the inconvenience of having to consume a beverage, but the inconvenience of having to sacrifice his health for yet another voyage with captain Ahab and his magic-less first mate. Perhaps he felt the life being sucked out of him through his eyeballs, got up from his desk, and simply walked out.