Ricky Williams retired from pro football this past summer. That may not seem all that strange to you, because professional sports athletes have been known to retire, unless they keep performing past their prime to feed their habit of inventing fat-burning grills.
But Ricky's decision to quit was odd because he'd only played five seasons in the NFL, after winning the Heisman Trophy - an overrated bauble that goes to the "best player in college football" - at Texas. After three years in New Orleans and the last two in Miami, Williams seemed ready to become the somewhat rare Heisman winner to have a successful pro career.
Then he just quit. Packed up his locker and left. The decision was, to say the least, unexpected and shocking for Miami. It was even more mystifying than Barry Sanders' decision to quit the Detroit Lions at age 31, when he was still in his prime and poised to set several NFL rushing records.
Miami took the news of Williams's retirement about as well as Napoleon took ribbings about his height. And nobody really had any solid information as to why Williams decided to up and leave, but the next thing we knew, we were hearing reports of him living out of a pup tent in Australia on $7 a day. The standard of living under a sheet in the outback does not require much in the way of expenses.
Oh, there was also the marijuana thing. Professional sports is the last remaining entertainment industry that isn't really "hip" to the "pot thing" that "young kids" often do. Well, except for televangelism, which relies much more on whiskey and amphetamines, whereas pot would slow them down. I'm not sure how one is supposed to get visions of Christ without pot, but I can understand if one's pot-influenced descriptions of seeing Christ would get somewhat long-winded and rambling.
Anyway, word leaked around the league that Williams was an unrepentant pot smoker who was about to fail the NFL's drug test for a fourth time. That's somewhat notable, because if you fail a fourth drug test in the NFL, such information becomes released to the media. I also think they call your parents.
Miami traded very high draft picks to New Orleans to get Williams for the 2001 season. It was a very big deal in Dade County at the time, described as their biggest trade in decades. Williams's 2003 season was the first of a restructured 4-year contract between him and the Dolphins.
When he retired this year, Williams forfeited the $5 million he would have received for playing with the Dolphins in 2004. But the Dolphins found an arbitrator who said Williams should refund his old team $8.5 million for breach of contract. Williams is fighting the decision. The Dolphins, on the other hand, haven't seemed like they've put up much of a fight for anything on the field this year.
Williams became the scourge of Miami, not to mention the entire sports journalism and broadcasting sectors. He's been reviled on ESPN and painted as a flake by print journalists. They simply could not figure out what would make a rich athlete with such a promising future drop out of their somewhat high-pressure occupation because he wanted to get stoned. Williams's agent, Leigh Steinberg, tried to persuade the NFL to allow the running back to come back to the game. The only problem with Steinberg's request was that Williams didn't authorize it.
What made matters more complicated is that shortly after his retirement, Williams just went away and nobody knew where he was.
But a couple of weeks ago, while watching uplifting and worthwhile programs on television, I saw a news report on where Williams had turned up. The technical term for my reaction to this report is, I believe, "laughed my hookas off."
That was because Williams is currently in Grass Valley, California.
Grass Valley is about 35 miles from suburban Sacramento, where I grew up. It shares a civic identity with Nevada City, which is right next to it. They're sort of the twin cities of the Sierra Foothills. And they are beautiful little towns. Jonathan Richman and one of the old lead singers of Supertramp used to live in Nevada City. Folk music hero Utah Phillips still does. Even I considered moving there once. Nevada City has spectacular woodsy scenery, winding little roads, a quaint old town section and a rebellious community station, KVMR (out of all the public stations I've ever visited, KVMR is the most like Olympia's KAOS). Grass Valley has more businesses, but has the same flavor. Think Santa Cruz without the bustling, hectic pace.
The important part, however, is this: Notwithstanding Santa Cruz and the Haight-Ashbury, the Nevada City/Grass Valley metro area is also Northern California's Hippie Central.
We aren't talking the slovenly, con-artist hippies who got into it so they could have sex with girls named Tempest Blue, or whose hippie era will end the second they get an office job. We are talking hippies that walk it like they talk it. Hippies who have managed to find real sustenance through their beliefs, ones who actually learn the ins and outs of their holistic lifestyle choice, who take their knowledge seriously, but don't have bricks of defensiveness stuck up their hempy asses.
To make it short, although I make fun of Grass Valley/Nevada City hippies, I have quite a measure of respect for them. At least they've stuck to their beliefs and incorporated them wholly into their lives -- give 'em this much, they're not faddish. "Everybody hates a tourist," the man once said.
One of the hippie businesses in Grass Valley is The California College of Ayurveda. Without researching too much because I'm frankly not that interested, I can tell you Ayurveda is "the traditional healing system of India." It is a healing practice that stresses "the five elements in the body and mind through the use of herbs, diet, colors, aromas, lifestyle changes, yoga, and meditation along with other five sense therapies." Which says to me, basically, that Ayurveda takes the centering aspect of yoga - one of the few strains of Eastern thought now accepted in American mainstream culture -- and kicks it up a notch, or two, or five.
The roster of students at The California College of Ayurveda includes, as one of its current enrollees, a certain former Miami Dolphin. The news report I watched showed a smiling, conversational Williams bidding goodbye to his fellow students, climbing into a car and driving off. The report also said Williams had rented a very modest cottage in the area, and paid rent for an entire year upfront. He has no long distance service in his house. The newscast said Williams had signed up for the college because he'd discovered Ayurveda in his studies, and was intrigued with being a "holistic healer."
When I saw the report, I thought, "Well, there you are - an actual happy ending." Mike Wallace of CBS's 60 Minutes didn't immediately interpret the report as I did, though.
Wallace, by all accounts a broadcast pioneer, was the first TV personality to interview Williams in depth since his move to California. Wallace is extraordinarily old. He has also interviewed thousands of people in the public spotlight, so you'd think he'd have seen everything. But he thought Williams's new, non-materialistic persona that dismisses the fame and wealth the NFL brings was "bullshit." He also called Williams a "weirdo." To his face. Try telling that to, say, Ray Lewis and see if you emerge from the incident with more than a third of your original nose.
A perpetually smiling Williams agreed with him. "Of course it is! I see now that you say it why it looks like bullshit!" Throughout the rest of the interview, Williams tried not so much to defend himself, but to explain his sudden inner revolution. Here are some quotes:
"My whole thing in life is I just want freedom. And I thought that money would give me that freedom. I was wrong, of course... when you're 21 and you're given as much money as I was given, it bound me more than it freed me. Because now, I have more things to worry about... It just seemed to create more problems."
"In my tent (in Australia), 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."
"Playing in the National Football League, you're told you know where to be, when to be there, what to wear, how to be there... and being able to step away from that, I have an opportunity to look deeper into myself and look for what's real... 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?"
"Let's look at the alternative. If I looked at it, and every day, I woke up and I said, 'God, I've got all this money to pay back. I've got all these problems...' I wouldn't be sitting here with you with a smile on my face right now, you know? Because I'm happy."
If you feel like you've heard this plotline before, it's because you have. Anyone who's ever claimed to have once "backpacked through Europe" is one example.
W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge is another. Larry Darrell (or, if you prefer, Bill Murray) is a high-ranking, F. Scott-esque society guy, who enlists in the army for World War I. When he comes back, he senses an emptiness in his life. So he dumps his well-off fiancée and hitchhikes to Paris and Tibet to get whatever scraps of wisdom he can. His decision does not sit well with his high-society friends, who think he's gone batty, or is going through one of his precious phases, or got nicked in the head by the German army.
Life certainly imitates art sometimes, including Maugham novels, but I didn't expect to find a contemporary comparison to Larry Darrell from the ranks of a professional football team, and certainly not in Florida. Professional sports don't really get literary allusions, unless it's The Natural or The Knute Rockne Story.
Ricky's heard an earful from a disgraced NFL and a condescending sports media. I get why, but the reason is funny. Teams go to "battle" every day, and there's no sport more warlike than American football. Professional players tend to devalue issues of the immortal soul, most often right around the time they pocket their first million. "Personal re-evaluation" kind of gets thrown out the window once the piggy bank gets broken.
Williams seems to be the first football player to ever flirt with introspection of this order, and I'm not surprised it took this long. But everyone else in sports and media can't get it, and it's funny to watch them quake over the whole thing. They simply cannot fathom how the National Football League can fall short of meeting one's dreams, and on paper I can almost see why they can't. Being a pro athlete is bling-heavy, you get free shoes, and if you win the championship you get to tell everybody about your forthcoming Disneyland vacation. Dream situation solved.
The sports-watching public think Williams is a jerk, too. ESPN.com users recently voted Williams the third-biggest chump in sports for 2004, trailing only Ron Artest and the New York Yankees - Williams is even ahead of (or behind, as it were) Kobe Bryant. Williams is ascribed the same kind of careening fall from grace endured by people who deserved to have hard times, like Artest and all those ballplayers who thought steroids were no more harmful than smoothies.
But I'm backing Williams on this one, wholeheartedly. For one thing, the story's hilarious. Secondly, I don't doubt Williams's sincerity. Giving up a lucrative career to become a witch doctor (okay, "holistic healer") speaks volumes about one's dedication to alternative lifestyles. And thirdly -- with the exception of an interview I once saw with Esera Tuaolo, an NFL lineman who admitted he was gay after his career - I've never seen a news story with a sports figure who seems so happy as Williams did on 60 Minutes. It wasn't the blissed-out smile of the religious cult variety, either: He seemed legitimately relieved.
He'll always be considered a flake, though - or a deserter, a quitter. And that's ridiculous on the rocks with a lime twist. This is the NFL - it's not the army. You can't easily desert the army if you have a sudden change of conscience. Going AWOL in the NFL does not necessitate a military tribunal. It just pisses people off.
Furthermore, the NFL is not charged with defending anything important, either, like the military supposedly is. Football is a game. A game I love watching, but only a game. Southern Florida did not get deluged by fire after Williams quit - the Dolphins simply had a horrible season, in which they've won only two games so far (and there's much more to blame for that than Ricky's decision). Florida did not get leprosy when he retired, they just got hurricanes, and the reason for those hurricanes likely does not have anything to do with Ricky Williams.
Williams made a decision to spend time on the marginalia of popular culture, because he came to the Einsteinesque conclusion, "Mo' money, mo' problems." And he smokes pot. For some reason that is tantamount to blasphemy in a world of sports that has problems looking outside itself. Why did Ricky Williams figure this out and not, say, Peyton Manning? Who cares?
Barry Sanders was seen, not too long after his retirement, going out to the movies with his daughter. I can't be the only person to feel the poignancy of that anecdote. I don't think they watched game films.
It's very easy to make fun of Williams, and I'm sure I'll laugh at a lot of the jokes. But the kernel of understanding shouldn't be that elusive for everyone else. I wish he'd shave his beard, but other than that, more power to him. Wouldn't you love to have that kind of freedom?
Williams isn't "selfish," as one sportswriter claimed. This isn't selfishness. No matter how silly Williams's resolution might look, it's actually kind of refreshing. And I love -- absolutely love -- that it freaks everyone's shit out. It's high comedy, it's the feel-good story of the year, and it's easily as good as anything Cheech and Chong ever came up with.
What can I tell you, Ricky? Smoke 'em if you got 'em!
