Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Not up in smoke
As attitudes toward pot soften, Williams feels (somewhat) vindicated
Dave Hyde: Redemption wrapped in reefer.
Redemption? Is that the word? Is that what Ricky Williams can achieve, all these years later, when he returns to South Florida this weekend to talk in an open forum about the benefits of marijuana?
“Maybe that’s the right word,” he says. Redemption? “It’s starting to feel like that,” he says. “I can come back to South Florida, on a stage at the [Broward County] Convention Center and talk about what was so controversial and such a big deal a while ago — that’s a big deal to me. And it’s more me feeling good about the choice I made and reaffirming that we’re aware now of things everyone wasn’t back then.” Redemption. “But for me, true redemption comes when — and this will take 20 or 30 years — when hopefully I get into the Hall of Fame,” he says. “When people start to realize I was onto something and when the doctors and scientists have studies that show how to maximize the health benefits of marijuana on a large scale and know if used properly it is a positive.”
Is the Hall possible? Who thought it possible a decade ago that Williams would headline a “Pro Football, Pro Cannabis” event tonight and a Sunday panel at the Southeastern Cannabis Conference and Expo at the convention center in Fort Lauderdale?
So much has changed since Williams was suspended by the NFL twice while a
“I had this epiphany, realizing a large majority of the guys had to take pain medication to practice.” Ricky Williams
Dolphin for marijuana use and played under a stigmatizing cloud of drug use. Some states have legalized marijuana. Williams lives in Los Angeles, where marijuana has been decriminalized under state law.
Other states, including 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 nanograms. 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 thanks 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.
In college, Williams took so much Advil to quell football’s pains he got an ulcer. In the NFL, he took strong anti-inflammatories 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 were taking 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 at classes in offseasons.
“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 didn’t have the language or perspective to 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.”
He’ll talk about that tonight. 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?