When Ricky Williams fractured his ankle during his second NFL season with the Saints, it wasn’t just his bones that were broken.
His faith in a professional career had also been shaken.
“I didn’t believe in it any more,” he now tells Mail Sport.
After a legendary college career at Texas, where he won the Heisman Trophy in 1998 before being drafted fifth overall to the pros, Williams’ “luck” in the pros came when it came to his body, as he puts it today.
His first preseason with a New Orleans team in crisis began with a high ankle sprain that marred his rookie year before the aforementioned break in November 2000 that cost him the rest of that second season.
So it didn’t matter that he was the NFC’s leading rusher when he got hurt that time. Something had changed forever in his mindset.
Ricky Williams spoke to Mail Sport via Zoom in a wide-ranging conversation this summer
He talked about how his early injury problems in the NFL made him disillusioned with football.
“So I started to realize that I couldn’t rely on this career and this job to bring me the satisfaction that it had given me up to this point,” she said in an exclusive interview. “I need to find something else.”
‘We consider ourselves warriors in the field, but from a broader perspective, we’re more like dying at a craps table.’
In a wide-ranging conversation, Williams spoke about his gradual disillusionment with football and how marijuana was the catalyst for his journey of self-discovery.
Williams, now 47 and greying, was not always so cynical about football, from which he finally retired (for good) in 2011.
It was a much-needed distraction when he was younger. His parents divorced when he was six, he had anger issues, and his father became a registered sex offender. 30 for 30 Movie ‘Run, Ricky, Run’ It was later revealed that Williams had been forced to take nude photographs of his father.
“Life was kind of hard, but there was respite… I could run and I loved hitting,” Williams says now of his youth football days. “So it was like my safe place.”
That continued throughout his childhood and into the college ranks before he began to question his path in the pros.
Williams now speaks about a concept called “identity exclusion” and the way he was conditioned to play football from an early age.
In essence, he explains, the idea refers to the act of focusing all one’s energy on thriving in a specific field, much as a budding actor might do when he is a child star.
Williams said playing in the NFL “kind of sucked,” aside from his exorbitant salary.
Williams was a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Texas.
Some people manage to have the career they always dreamed of. Others, like Williams, realize that their dreams aren’t what they wanted after all.
“It became painfully obvious that, no, the money is great, but everything else about this job (playing football) sucks to me,” Williams said.
“If I wasn’t playing football, I would think about it and imagine myself doing it. And I think that’s why I was so good… But what I paid to be good at football bankrupted me in many more important ways that I needed to have a successful and fulfilling life.”
Williams eventually got to that point, ironically, with the help of the very thing that made him the black sheep of many in the NFL.
On more than 500 occasions, as Williams would later recount, Sports Illustratedwas drug tested by the NFL.
He failed at least five of those tests for marijuana use, and a third failed test (which would have earned him a four-game suspension) came just before he decided to retire from the game in 2004.
“People will assume that I wanted to continue playing football and that I couldn’t because I was suspended,” he says now.
In fact, as Williams made clear at the time, he was ready to finish playing and that’s why he didn’t care about failing a drug test.
Williams left the NFL in 2004 while playing for the Miami Dolphins.
After five years in the pros and gradually realizing he needed to embark on a journey of self-discovery, he credits marijuana as the “trigger” that led him to leave the NFL.
Williams, who sat out the entire 2004 season, studied the ancient Indian medical system known as Ayurveda, spent time at a yoga ashram in California and even ventured to a “hippie jungle paradise” in Australia, as one of the Esquire Reporter Whoever found it remembered.
Williams eventually returned to the Dolphins in 2005, but he came back with a much different outlook.
“Before, all I could see was the end of my football career,” he says. “I couldn’t see anything beyond that, because I didn’t have any skills. I didn’t have any skills, or any real life experiences that could take me anywhere, beyond football, and that bothered me. Football is a wonderful sport, but I didn’t want to play it all my life.
“So during the year off I had the opportunity to interact with people who had no idea I was a professional football player,” he continued. “So the insights I received from other people were more helpful in helping me figure out who I am and what’s important to me. And when I came back, I had a much clearer idea of who I was and where I was going.
“Before I retired the first time, I focused on everything I had to do to adapt to the world of football. And when I came back, I focused more on how the world of football could help and support the things I would like to do in my life. That change was really important for me.”
While the running back would also be suspended for the entire 2006 season after violating the league’s substance abuse rules for a fourth time, his return to the field helped set in motion the kind of life vision he sought to establish.
Williams never considered himself an “advocate” of marijuana use while he was an active player.
But he certainly reaped the benefits, as he played another five seasons after his initial retirement and proved that his earlier detour was not the end of his time as an elite athlete.
“If you’re in the NFL, you know your life is more intense than 99 percent of other people in the world,” he said.
“So there’s more stress, more things to deal with. And I realized that if you’re going to put yourself in intense, stressful situations, the way you relax and recover has to be just as intense.”
Williams launched cannabis and lifestyle brand Highsman in 2021 and has become an advocate for marijuana use.
It wasn’t until after his second and final withdrawal that Williams really began to consider the bigger picture of his marijuana use.
He first spoke at a marijuana conference in 2015 and remembers receiving a warm reception from people afterward, who told him he inspired them.
“My mother always told me, ‘Go where you are celebrated, not where you are tolerated,'” she says. “And I realized that there are people who have been touched by my story… and that’s when I decided to say that I had to do something.”
Recalling the “zero support” he was able to find during his NFL disciplinary issues, Williams decided to launch the cannabis and lifestyle brand Highsman in 2021.
The brand website She says her goal is to “redefine wellness” and that her mission is “a movement of acceptance, understanding and overcoming boundaries.”
Williams also spent time on Capitol Hill this spring alongside former Bears Super Bowl winner Jim McMahon, pushing for looser cannabis regulations.
Like many former players, Williams contributed to the game by taking a position as a commentator on ESPN’s Texas-focused Longhorn Network and spent two years as a college coach.
But he knew that his destiny was to do something outside of football.
“It still wasn’t enough,” he said. “And I felt like I needed to do something, especially considering all the trouble I got into in the NFL because of cannabis.”
Today, perhaps in small part because of Williams, views on marijuana have changed in competitive football.
By Chiefs star Travis Kelce’s estimate, 50 to 80 percent of the league uses the drug, as he told Vanity Fair.
The effects have also been felt at the collegiate level: The NCAA removed marijuana from its list of banned substances in June.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Williams said of the decision. “…I think it’s a great gesture, right?
Twenty years after a disillusioned Williams first left the NFL, he has found satisfaction in his life. He views his winding path not as a story of missed opportunities or regrets, but of exploration.
“For me, it’s a positive story. I’ve seen a lot of people have what you might call successful careers in the NFL and now they’re doing nothing and they’re miserable,” he said.
“I went through everything, got into all the trouble, but I still got into the College Football Hall of Fame, they gave me a statue in Texas, and they named the field after me. So if you stick with it and you’re confident in who you are, everything’s going to work out.”