RICKY WAS RIGHT?
Ricky Williams might be finding redemption regarding marijuana.
drug use. Some states have legalized marijuana. Williams lives in Los Angeles, where he can smoke legally.
Others states, like Florida, have legalized “medicinal marijuana.”
“That wasn’t even a phrase back then,” he says.
The NFL, too, has softened its stance. It changed the threshold of a failed marijuana test a few years ago from .15 nanograms of THC metabolites per milliliter to .35 nanongrams. That’s still the most stringent measure for pro sports, but … “Based on the NFL testing that way, I wouldn’t have tested positive,” Williams says. Does that change anything? Should it? Ricky left South Florida on the best of terms, a popular athlete and more popular persona in good part due to his genuineness. He was authentic, his life backing up his words, and nothing showed this more than the manner that covered him with such controversy for a while.
Dealing with pain
In college, Williams took so much Advil to quell football’s pains, he got an ulcer. In the NFL, he took strong antiinflammatories to stay on the field.
“If you don’t take them, your body feels like it’s 80 years old,” he said. “If you do, you feel like you’re 18. So there’s an incentive to take them.”
By 2002, when Williams led the league with a bodynumbing 383 carries, he looked around the game and realized how many drugs players took for short-term benefits with possible long-term concerns.
“I had this epiphany one day, realizing a large majority of the guys on the team had to take pain medication to practice,” he says. “I started to think about it, about how it wasn’t good for us, and that got me to think of alternative ways.”
Yoga. Acupuncture. Massage. Williams not only began to do those, but he studied each of them.
“Also, using marijuana along with those others, as far as managing pain,” he says. “It’s easy to say that now, in retrospect, that’s why I was doing it. But in 2002, I (couldn’t) put it exactly into that kind of perspective like I do now.
“For me, it was healing. I was dealing with physical stuff. But I also was dealing with emotional and mental stuff. Marijuana helped me work on everything I was dealing with so my internal world ran more efficiently.”
Just being able to talk openly about cannabis is another change. He remembers being asked by a reporter in the locker room after the suspensions if he ever still thought of using marijuana. He said he still did. That led to a talk with the coaching and training staffs. Now he’s free to talk. Free of the NFL. Free of public stigmas. He’s 40, too.
“I feel like I’ve acquired enough experience to speak with authority,” he said.
Experience was rarely an issue, as he experienced more than most. He’s seen the larger world start a U-turn on marijuana. Maybe, someday, the Hall of Fame? Dave Hyde is a columnist for the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)