When Ricky Williams fractured his ankle during his sophomore NFL season with the Saints, it wasn’t just his bones that had been broken.
His belief in a pro career had faltered too.
‘I didn’t trust it anymore,’ he tells Mail Sport now.
After a legendary college career at Texas, where he won the 1998 Heisman Trophy before being selected fifth overall to the pros, Williams’ ‘luck ran out’ in the pros when it comes to his body, as he puts it today.
His first preseason for a struggling New Orleans team began with him suffering a high ankle sprain, which hampered his rookie year before the aforementioned break in November 2000 cost him out the rest of that second season.
So it didn’t matter that he was the NFC’s leading rusher when he went down that time. Something had permanently shifted in his mindset.
Ricky Williams spoke to Mail Sport via Zoom in a wide-ranging conversation this summer
He spoke of how his early injury struggles in the NFL made him disillusioned with football
‘That’s why I started having the realization of, I can’t trust this career and this job to bring me the fulfillment that it had been bringing me up until this point,’ he said in an exclusive interview. ‘I need to find something else.
‘We think of ourselves as the warriors on the field, but from a larger perspective, we’re more like die on a craps table.’
In a wide-ranging conversation, Williams opened up about his gradual disillusionment with football – and how marijuana was the catalyst for his journey of self-discovery.
Williams, now 47 and grey, wasn’t always so cynical about the game of football, which he eventually retired from (for good) in 2011.
It was a much-needed distraction when he was younger. His parents divorced when he was six, he dealt with anger issues, and his father became a registered sex offender – with ESPN’s 30 for 30 film ‘Run Ricky Run’ later revealing that Williams been forced to take nude photos of his father.
‘Life was kind of difficult, but the one reprieve… I could run and I loved to hit,’ Williams says now of his youth football days. ‘And so it was like my safe place.’
That continued throughout his childhood and to the college ranks before he started questioning his path in the pros.
Williams talks now about a concept called ‘identity foreclosure,’ and the way he was conditioned to play football from a young age.
In essence, he explains, the idea refers to the act of focusing all of one’s energy towards thriving in a specific field, just like a budding actor may do as a child star.
Williams said that playing in the NFL ‘kind of suck[ed’ aside from his exorbitant salary
Williams was a Heisman Trophy winner in college at the University of Texas
Some people go on to have the careers they always dreamed of. Others, like Williams, realize 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] kind of sucks for me,’ Williams said.
‘If I wasn’t playing football, I was thinking about it and imagining myself doing it. And I think that’s why I was so good… But what I paid to be good at football created bankruptcy in a lot of more important places that I needed for a successful and fulfilling life.’
Williams got to that point eventually – ironically, with the help of the very thing that made him a black sheep to many in the NFL.
On over 500 occasions, as Williams would later tell Sports Illustrated, he was drug tested by the NFL.
He failed at least five of those for marijuana use, with a third failed test – which would have come with a four-game suspension – coming right before he decided to step away from the game in 2004.
‘People will make the assumption that I wanted to keep playing football and that I couldn’t because I got suspended,’ he says now.
In fact, as Williams clarified at the time, he was ready to be done playing, and thus didn’t mind failing a drug test.
Williams stepped away from the NFL in 2004 while he was playing for the Miami Dolphins
After five years in the pros and the gradual realization that he needed to embark on a journey of self-discovery, he credits marijuana as being the ‘trigger’ to taking the plunge out of the NFL.
Sitting out the entire 2004 season, Williams studied the ancient Indian medical system known as Ayurveda, spent time at a yoga ashram at California and even ventured to a ‘hippie jungle paradise’ in Australia, as one Esquire reporter who found him recalled.
Williams eventually returned to the Dolphins in 2005, but he came back with a much different perspective.
‘Before, all I could see was the end of my football career,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t see anything beyond it, because I didn’t have any skills. I didn’t have any skills, or really life experiences that could take me anywhere, far away from football, and that bothered me. Football is a wonderful sport, but I didn’t want to be doing it my whole life.
‘So the year off, I got a chance to interact with people who had no idea I was a professional football player,’ he continued. ‘So the reflections I got back from other people were more useful in helping me figure out who I am and what’s important to me. And so when I came back, I had a much greater sense of who I was and where I was heading.
‘…Before I retired that first time, it was about everything I had to do to myself to make myself fit in the football world. And when I came back, it was more about, how can the football world help and support the things that I would like to do in my life? And that shift was was really important for me to make.’
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 gridiron helped set in motion the sort of life vision he was aiming to establish.
Williams never saw himself as an ‘advocate’ for 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 his earlier detour wasn’t the end of his time as an elite athlete.
‘If you’re in the NFL, you know your life is more intense than 99% of the other people in the world,’ he said.
‘So there’s just more there’s just more stress, more things to deal with. And what I realized is, if you’re going to put yourself through intensive, stressful situations, then the way that you relax and recover has to be just as intense.’
Williams launched cannabis and lifestyle brand Highsman in 2021, and he’s become an advocate for marijuana use
It wasn’t until after his second and final retirement that Williams really started to consider the bigger picture of his marijuana use.
He first spoke at a marijuana conference in 2015, and remembers getting a strong reception from people afterwards, who’d told him that he inspired them.
‘My mom always used to say, ‘go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated,” he says. ‘And I realized that there are people that have been touched by my story… and that’s when I got on fire to say I need to put something out there.’
Remembering the ‘zero support’ that he was able to find during his NFL discipline troubles, Williams decided to launch cannabis and lifestyle brand Highsman in 2021.
The brand’s website says it aims to ‘redefine wellness, and that their mission is ‘a movement of acceptance, understanding, and pushing 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 ex-players, Williams did give back to the game as he held a broadcasting gig on ESPN’s Texas-centric Longhorn Network and spent two years as a college coach.
But he knew he was meant to do something outside of football.
‘It still wasn’t enough,’ he said. ‘And I felt like I needed to do something, and especially considering how much trouble and I got into the NFL around cannabis.’
Today, perhaps in small part due to Williams, opinions around marijuana have changed in competitive football.
By the estimation of Chiefs star Travis Kelce, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the league uses the drug, as he told Vanity Fair.
The effects have been felt at the college level too, with the NCAA removing marijuana from its banned substances list in June.
‘I think it’s wonderful,’ Williams said of the decision. ‘…I think it’s a great gesture, right?’
Twenty years after a disenchanted Williams left the NFL for the first time, he’s found contentment in his life. He views his winding journey not as one of missed opportunities or regrets, but of exploration.
‘For me, it’s actually a positive story. I’ve seen so many people have what people would call successful careers in the NFL, and now they’re not doing anything and they’re miserable,’ he said.
‘Everything I went through, all the trouble I got into, I still got into College Football Hall of Fame, still got a statue at Texas, they still named the field after me. So showing people, if you stick to your guns and trust who you are, everything will work out fine.’
