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Jumping Jack wrote:
Is there anyone on this planet dumber than Ricky Williams?

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Jumping Jack wrote:
Is there anyone on this planet dumber than Ricky Williams?

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SKOLNICK: Williams saga goes in a sad direction

Let this not be true.

Let this be shoddy testing. Shady sources. Switched samples. Sabotage. Something.

Let this be some sort of explainable mistake, instead of the widely predicted end.

Say this won't stick, Rick.

Ricky Williams didn't fail another drug test. He didn't subject himself to another suspension, this one at least a year. He didn't prove right all the wiseguys who said he could never stay clean. He didn't jeopardize his financial health.

Did he?

Those were the disturbing reports Sunday, from Mile High to the Magic City. Those were the knowing chuckles from everyone who said this would happen. This observer had been one of those once. I was against his 2005 return, after he ditched the team just before 2004 began. I couldn't comprehend why Nick Saban WOULD open the guest room to the man who burned the last house down. I feared the distraction, the disruption.

I had been proven wrong.

Ricky Williams didn't just rebuild his reputation. He reinvented himself. He worked. He tutored his replacement, Ronnie Brown. He was Mr. Team Guy, far as anyone could tell. Heck, he was the co-winner of the media's Good Guy Award, for speaking openly and without end. Maybe he hadn't changed at his core. Who does? But he adapted. With debts over his head, and a contract below par for his ability, he did not complain. He made the best of it.

He got you to root for him, even if you had been reluctant.

And, for some of you at least, he did it with how he was acting as well as running.

So this isn't about the drugs, even though the drugs may have done him in again --again, if reports are true. You can take issue with the nation's marijuana laws and with the league's enforcement, and still believe that an employee should obey his profession's stated rules, especially with the alternative clearly known.

This is about a seemingly decent man continuing to do harm to himself.

So there is no shock or outrage at this news, as there was when he left teammates in a lurch in 2004.

Just disappointment, and just for Williams. For the Dolphins? Why? Many fans will bemoan the loss of Williams' trade value, but what was the most you could reasonably expect, considering Williams' circumstances? A conditional sixth? Is that the pick on which this franchise's fate will rest?

Williams is a wizard at what he does. He may not love football enough to protect his right to keep earning pay for it, but he sure can play it. He lost weight in the year off, not his natural gifts -- just ask the tacklers he juked in Jacksonville in the preseason. When he had his chance again near season's end, he was dynamic as ever, with 280 yards over his final two games. He finished with 743, on a healthy 4.4 average.

He is a more instinctive, more explosive runner than Ronnie Brown right now, but the Dolphins had too much invested in Brown to stay with Williams much longer anyway. So this won't hurt them much. They had prepared themselves for this prospect -- some would say inevitability -- in a way the previous regime could not. They knew they could lose this player, even if they chose to keep him.

The story here was about the person. It was a redeeming story, the sort of story we like to see in sports, even if we must strain to see it. That person had seemingly turned a better, less self-destructive direction. All season, during his fascinating postgame chats, Williams spoke of wearing white because it represented purity. It was one of countless interesting revelations from an interesting, appealing, intelligent guy who has this terrible habit of leaving us blue.

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jb wrote:
Legalize pot!!!!!

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Break The Spell wrote:


A look that says "I just learned to spell my name".

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Joey wrote:



funny !!!!!

Great Postin' !!!!

-- " He is relentless...a relentless GENIUS!!! Long may ' Break The Spell ' and his keyboard live!!!", Paul Couzzo- Posting World Magazine.

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