ROFL
This is some funny shiat...
From the
Palm Beach Post
Commentary: Wandering Ricky not hard to track down
By Dave George
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Slowly, unsurely, Ricky Williams approaches.
He is like a hot-air balloon, drifting wherever the wind blows.
Nick Saban is doing his best to talk the former NFL rushing leader down between now and the start of training camp. The good news is that a month remains to accomplish that task.
The bad news is that an unrepentant wanderer like this one could circle the globe a few more times in a month. Talk about your runaway bride. We may yet look back on that 1999 magazine cover photo in a wedding dress as one of Ricky's more lucid moments.
Let's try to guess the route the mystery man will take to South Florida, relying on clues from his infrequent public ramblings. It'll be a game. It'll be fun.
It'll be a service, too, to agent Leigh Steinberg. Ever since Ricky skipped out on the Dolphins last summer, his representative has been scrambling to keep up. Recently, Steinberg told reporters that Ricky was driving to South Florida from California. With the price of gas, it's no wonder he wants a new Dolphins contract.
Turns out, though, that Ricky made plans to fly to Boston instead.
Boston. Well, of course. Remember what Ricky told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes? "My whole thing in life is I just want freedom." Boston is home to the Freedom Trail, a clearly marked walk through the neighborhoods of America's original contrarians. See how this works?
Ricky isn't nearly as difficult to figure out as he pretends.
He left the game a year ago, for instance, because he didn't want it known that he was smoking grass. So he moves to a California community called Grass Valley. Really.
As for Boston, Ricky says he planned to spend Father's Day weekend there with his 6-year-old daughter. The little girl's name is Marley, a nod to Ricky's hero, reggae legend Bob Marley.
Makes you wonder. Was the name Mary Jane already taken or something?
What comes next on the road back to the NFL, where regular drug tests await and a one-year suspension comes with the next positive result?
Well, Ricky could camp out for a few nights with the other protesters on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices recently ruled that federal lawmen can prosecute patients who smoke pot on doctor's orders. If medicinal marijuana use is not allowed, how is Ricky going to advise the Dolphins training staff the next time he sprains an ankle in a goal-line pileup? I mean, the guy's a student of the holistic healing arts. He can't put just anything into his body.
There are some other obvious destinations where Ricky could lay over for a night or two on the way to training camp, like Pottstown, Pa., or maybe the little Southern California town of Weed Patch. It's a great, big beautiful world out there, particularly for a man who knows what he wants.
Check back to that 60 Minutes interview in December, when Ricky talked of living in a tent community in Australia and tearing through stacks of books by flashlight. What kind of books?
"Everything from nutrition to Buddhism to Jesus," said Ricky, "to try to figure out, you know, what am I? What am I? So I just kept reading and reading."
Saban's got something else for him to read, a dull-as-dishwater playbook.
Whether Ricky ever gets his hands on one of those again, or his expanded mind into a Dolphins helmet, is as risky to predict as ever. But, hey, that's all part of the Ricky game.
The least the Dolphins can do at this point, and the most, for that matter, is to just keep rolling the dice.
Whoa ... like, far out, dude ....
