The endless comebacks of Ricky Williams

WHY HAS THE MIAMI DOLPHIN FAILED MORE DRUG TESTS, SUFFERED SO MANY INJURIES AND BEEN SUSPENDED MORE OFTEN

THAN ANY OTHER NFL PLAYER?

THE GOLDEN BOY HIMSELF EXPLAINS IT ALL

Errick Lynne "Ricky" Williams Jr. was a beautiful bride. He posed for a wedding photograph in a white satin wedding gown and a lace illusion veil. The wedding gown was a size 20 that had to be taken in at the waist. The white of the satin and lace con­trasted beautifully with Ricky's chocolate-colored skin, his assorted tattoos and his cascading black dreadlocks. The bride­groom, posed beside him, was more conser­vatively dressed, in a classic black tuxedo. His name was Mike Ditka, the coach of the New Orleans Saints, the football team that had just signed Ricky to a $68 million con­tract in 1999. At the time, Ricky said, "I feel like I married the Saints."

The "marriage" didn't last long, not much longer than the honeymoon, actu­ally, when the recriminations began, the accusations of betrayal, the almost imme­diate dying of a once passionate love. But

like most failed marriages, this one didn't expire traumatically with a gunshot, a bloody corpse on the marriage bed, a long trial and an even longer prison term. It just withered away over the years, three to be exact, as if it had been afflicted with a terminal disease even before the marriage, a disease that neither party wanted to acknowledge in the throes of passion but that existed all the same and doomed their marriage from the start.

Ricky is a romantic, a serial matri-monialist. He falls in love quickly, com­pletely, and then just as quickly falls out of love. It's the process of courtship that appeals to him, the seduction, the woo­ing, the undying protestations, the accru­ing of love, which is why he has had so many quickie marriages over the past 10 years—to women, teams, cities, coaches, players, agents, journalists—and just as

many quickie divorces. The drudgery of a long-term relationship has always bored him, in part because it would preclude him from collecting more conquests (which is why he has rarely lived with, much less actually married, any of the three women who have borne his four children) and, even more important, would preclude so many others, as yet unknown, from hav­ing the privilege, the joy, the bliss even, of knowing and then loving Ricky Williams. Ricky himself once said, "If you don't like me, then you don't know me." When 1 ask him if it is possible people don't like him because they do know him, he says, "No. If you know me, you've got to like me."

When Ricky was a senior at Patrick Henry Prep in San Diego, in 1995, he was considered one of the best high school run­ning backs in the country and a baseball player of such talent and potential that the

Philadelphia Phillies gave him a $129,000 bonus. Ricky loved both baseball and foot­ball, and over the years he played one off the other. When one sport disappointed him, he made overtures to the other. Ricky loved women in the same way. One of his class­mates says of him, "He was a good-hearted guy, the kind every woman was looking for. He dated four or five girls at once." Ricky says of women, "The first week they think I'm a gentleman, and by the third week they start thinking I might not like them. Women think too much."

When it came time for Ricky to choose from an abundance of college football schol­arships, he flew first to Austin, home of the University of Texas Longhorns. Ricky imme­diately "fell in love" with Austin, a coun­terculture city in the conservative heart of Texas. It was the perfect city for Ricky, with his tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks and penchant for long philosophical raps on the meaning of life, the meaning of Ricky. "People who understand me," he says, "look at me in a more spiritual way."

Ricky's marriage to the Longhorns would be his only really successful one for the next 12 years. Possibly that is because neither party had enough time to grow disenchanted with the other, and besides, Ricky's suc­cess with the Longhorns was so total that it precluded anything from coming between them. In four years with the Longhorns

Ricky set an all-time NCAA career rushing record (6,279 yards) and a career rushing touchdown record (72). He was the first player ever voted the best college running back two years in a row, and in 1998 he was awarded the Heisman Trophy as the best college football player in the country. A newspaper reporter wrote of Ricky, "He is no doubt college football's best player, and he also just might be its best human being."

Ricky was beloved in Austin not only for his football successes but because of the kind of young man he was. He was polite, respectful and personable to everyone.

That was the last time Ricky would be so loved. From the day he was drafted by the Saints, in 1999, until the present when he has rekindled a love affair with the Miami Dolphins (sort of like divorced spouses dat-

ing again), Ricky Williams has been argu­ably one of the most criticized, reviled and analyzed athletes in America. He has been called selfish, eccentric, moody, contrary, a malcontent, spoiled, a quitter, a cancer, a coach killer, a drug addict and a self-destructive underachiever who has system­atically and willfully destroyed what should have been a Hall of Fame career.

The Saints began to fall out of love with Ricky even before he arrived at his first train­ing camp. "The New Orleans media didn't like me," says Ricky, "and my teammates didn't like me much." Three years later the Saints "divorced" Ricky, trading him to the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins and Ricky had a brief honeymoon in 2002 and then began to fall out of love the following year. They have been estranged, separated, rec­onciled, separated again and reconciled one more time in good part because of Ricky's willfully self-destructive behavior.

From 2002 to the present Williams has been fined and/or suspended by the NFL five times for failing drug tests. His drug of choice is marijuana. In fact, Ricky was the most famous pothead in America, which should surprise no one who knows that his body is adorned with a tattoo of Bob Marley, the ganja-smoking reggae singer. In south Florida, Ricky was known as Stoney.

When Ricky failed his fourth drug test, in December 2005, he was suspended from the NFL for the (continued on page 168)

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{continued from page 80) entire 2006 season. He applied for rein­statement in April 2007. While NFL com­missioner Roger Goodell was considering his request, Ricky failed his fifth drug test, in May. That failure elicited less con­demnation, despair and sadness than it did laughter, for by now Ricky was seen as a character not in a Greek tragedy but in a French farce.

Unbelievably, almost immediately after his failed 2007 drug test was made public Ricky applied again for reinstatement to the NFL. VVhile he waited for that day. he spent his time in a small apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts with two of his children and their mother, Kristin Barnes. He awoke around six a.m., had a breakfast of fruits and nuts (he's a vegetarian), meditated, did some yoga, went to a nearby high school field to work out alone and then drove into Boston, where Ricky Williams was psycho­analyzed by a psychiatrist.

I courted Ricky for two years, through his agent, Leigh Steinberg; the Dolphins' media director, Harvey Greene; and Ricky's girlfriend, Kristin. Ricky is reclusive and self-protective. He never sleeps too often in the same bed.

Ricky doesn't answer his calls or return messages. He avoids reporters until, inex­plicably, on a whim he summons them for a chat. Even then, he may show up at the appointed time and place hours late or maybe not at all.

The voice on the phone in early July 2007 was as soft and light as a girl's. "This is Ricky." I flew to Boston.

Ricky is driving us to an Italian restaurant in Waltham. Kristin, in the backseat, gives him directions. Usually she drives. Kristin is a small, slightly built woman of 38. A Joan Allen type, she is an understated beauty without artifice, her face all angular planes. An Okie face. She was born and raised in Arkansas and still, to her embarrassment, has a Southern drawl. Ricky is wearing a baggy T-shirt and baggy slacks that can't hide his bulk. He is just shy of six feet tall and weighs maybe 230 pounds. He has a stubble of a beard on his handsome face, but his dreads are gone, his head shaved. "I don't need them anymore," he says. "I'm more of Ricky Williams without my dreads."

Ricky once said he didn't value money because "I've always had money. I couldn't imagine worrying about money; it's just not my style." When he played for the Saints and Dolphins, he had all the toys: expen­sive homes, expensive cars, Ferraris, Hum­mers, Mercedeses. But now he's sold them all, most at a considerable loss, to help pay for his living expenses with Kristin and their two children and the $IOO,OOO-a-year child support he pays to the other two mothers of his children. Soon, he says, he will have to worry about money. He tells me if he doesn't return to the NFL, at least for a veteran's $500,000-plus minimum sal­ary, he'll be broke in a year. Then, for the first time in his life, he will have "to work

for a living." Ricky has avoided the lunch-bucket brigade by signing first a $730,000 contract with the Dolphins and then a con­tract extension that could net him $2.2 mil­lion. Although none of it is guaranteed, the 31-year-old hopes it will keep him with the Dolphins for the rest of his career.

The waitress stands over us. Kristin and I order. Ricky studies his menu. He leans toward Kristin and points at something on the menu. Kristin looks up at the waitress and says, "He"ll have the sauteed vegetables." I ask them how long they've been together.

Ricky says, "Seven years. Two good years, three bad ones and two good ones."

Kristin says, "I worry about the seven-year itch."

They met when Kristin was a Delta flight attendant based in Baton Rouge and Ricky was with the Saints. Kristin worked a Saints charter flight one day, and Ricky went to the galley to help her clean up. "I was like, 'Okay.'" Kristin's eyes get wide. "But it wasn't a come-on. It was just Ricky being nice." After they started dating Ricky took Kristin to San Diego to show her all the plants and flowers he had grown at each of the houses he had lived in as a boy. She says she found this sensitivity to beauty "intriguing."

When Ricky was traded to the Dolphins he bought a $1.3 million condo in South Beach and a $2.3 million house on Las

Olas Isles in Fort Lauderdale. He asked Kristin to move into the Las Olas house with him and their son. Prince, now six. "I thought that signified something," says Kristin. "It signified something to me. But not to Ricky." He stayed with her and Prince sometimes, and sometimes he stayed alone at his condo.

"I wanted to be single and married at the same lime," says Ricky. "You know, do the family thing and then get away from it in South Beach. Kristin was patient, though. She let me get it out of my system." Kristin says, "I didn't have a choice." Ricky says he's "a very sensitive, intro­spective person who overly expects every­one to see what's inside me." When they don't, he's very sensitive "to being hurt." He calls this his feminine side, the result of growing up in a house with three women—his mother, younger sister and twin sister—and no father. When I ask him what he learned growing up around women, he says, "I learned to stay away from them." Ricky is a walking contradic­tion. A perfect solipsist, he sees the world in relation to himself and his hurts, not the hurts he inflicts on others. He is proud of his "feminine side" because it reinforces his view of himself as a "sensitive" man, but he can be totally insensitive in his treatment of women. Ricky doesn't see it that way, though. He always has a very

good reason for doing what he does. That reason is always about Ricky.

The next morning Ricky and Kristin pick me up in front of my hotel in a cold, driz­zling rain. Ricky is on time, as he will be each of the four times we meet during my four-day stay in Waltham. Kristin drives us back to their new apartment. They have just moved in after living in a hotel room. Their apartment is in a small nondescript complex. Bags are strewn around the living room. Kristin's mother, Jane, a small woman with a shy, sweet smile, is emptying the bags and putting things in drawers while at the same time babysitting for their children. Prince and Asha, one and a half years old. They are beautiful children with cafe-au-lait skin and sandy-colored hair. When Ricky enters the room, Prince does not go running to his father. Ricky barely acknowledges him or Asha. They have not always lived with their father. Ricky sits on a sofa as Kristin and her mother gather up the children and go out to buy groceries in the rain.

Alone with Ricky, I ask him about New Orleans. What went wrong? He begins talking in his light, reedy voice about what, fortunately for him, will not be the end of his NFL career.

When the Saints gave up eight draft choices to be able to draft Ricky fifth overall

in the first round, their fans and the media complained they were giving up too much to get him. Ricky says, "That put pressure on me almost immediately to be the savior of the team." Then he posed in a wedding dress for ESPN the Magazine before he went to his first training camp. "In the ninth grade I dressed as a cheerleader on Halloween," Ricky says. "It was my idea to wear the wed­ding dress. I didn't think it'd offend anyone. I just wanted to show my relationship with Ditka. I was looking at myself not as a foot­ball player but as an open, interesting per­son. The reaction from reporters and fans was shocking. I didn't see why it was such a big deal for a football player not to be afraid to be in touch with that side of himself. It doesn't make sense that a football player is supposed to be fearless but should be afraid

to be in touch with his feminine side."

All would have been forgiven by the Saints, their fans and the media if Ricky had performed up to their expecta­tions over the next three seasons. But he didn't. He was injured a lot his first year and never proved himself much more than an adequate running back for the Saints. He missed 10 of 48 games with the team, and even when he did play he averaged fewer than four yards a carry and fewer than 100 rushing yards a game. He was a pow­erful bruising runner off tackle but not an exceptionally speedy and elusive runner in the open field. He seldom ripped off huge, eye-catching gains that would have the fans on their feet. He was a plodder who needed to carry the ball a lot, 35, 36 times, to wear down defenses in the last

quarter (not unlike O.J. Simpson). He was more a blue-collar workhorse than a derby thoroughbred. What he did on the field for his team was not as obvious to fans as it was to knowledgeable football people.

It didn't take long for Ricky to feel unloved by the fans, the media and his coaches, whom he accused of treating him like "a piece of meat." His own teammates, he says, didn't even help him up off the turf after a tackle. The media disparaged his efforts, so he began to avoid the media. When he couldn't, he conducted interviews wearing his football helmet with the visor covering his eyes. He began to have trou­ble looking people in the eye when they talked to him. In New Orleans he became a recluse, seldom leaving his French Quar­ter condominium. Finally, in 2001, he was

diagnosed with a social anxiety disorder. He was prescribed the mood-leveling drug Paxil. (Today Ricky says, as if embarrassed, "I didn't have any social anxiety disorder. I was just a little depressed, that's all." He was also not diagnosed as bipolar. His problems have always been less medical and more psychological: Ricky thinks too much.)

It was also at about this time that Ricky began to self-medicate his anxieties by smoking pot. He had smoked pot, he says, "maybe six times at Texas," but in New Orleans he began smoking more often.

By his third year the Saints let Ricky know how disenchanted they were with him by drafting running back Deuce McAllister. Ricky let the Saints know his feelings by mut­tering out loud how much he disliked what he called "this dark city" and how he'd pre-

fer to play in a city of sunlight, like Miami.

"There was nothing I wanted more than to be a Texas Longhorn," says Ricky. "I wanted to be a star because I loved college football traditions. At Texas I was treated like a kid, with a support system that allowed me to be myself. But in New Orleans, Ditka was old-school. He didn't believe in sup­port. He expected you to do things on your own. Then I got hurt in my first and sec­ond games and played hurt most of my first year. I dislocated my elbow and had a bad ankle. I didn't have the courage to tell Ditka I couldn't play. But the pain caught up with me, and my confidence went down. Every­thing that could go wrong did. And I had no one to turn to. There was all this per­sonal stuff I had to deal with. The wedding dress, baseball, my trashing New Orleans,

my coaches and teammates not liking me. There was always some controversy. So I began smoking pot maybe three days a week when I came home from practice, just like you'd have a drink after work. I know now I was using pot as a tool to sabotage myself."

Ricky deliberately played himself out of New Orleans with his petulant, childish behavior, which he describes as passive-aggressive. He sulked, came late to meetings, seemed always to be photographed during games sitting alone on a bench far from his teammates. He was fined for such ridiculous things as "uniform infractions." In fact, he was fined so often at New Orleans that one year it was reported he pocketed only $ 100,000 of a $500,000 salary. Finally the Saints had had enough, and in 2002 Ricky got his wish and was traded to the Dolphins.

Ricky's first year in Miami was an idyllic loneymoon in the mn, with pina coladas )n the beach, candlelit dinners, whispered erms of endearment. He rushed for 1,853 /ards, an average )f 116 yards a game ind 4.8 yards a carry, vhich led the NFL ind set a Dolphins ecord. He also scored 16 touchdowns. His eammates called lim intelligent and a good person," and lis coaches called him >ne of the hardest-vorking players on he team. But Ricky vasn't able to sustain hat marriage much leyond its first-year loneymoon. By his econd season he omplained of being iverworked and inderpaid.

What really hap-lened to Ricky in 1003 was he lost his nthusiasm for his tew marriage, the >attern of his life. A

honeymoon isn't a marriage. You can drink only so many pina coladas on the beach, eat only so many stone crabs at Joe's, hit only so many late-night dance clubs in South Beach, and that sunlight, once warm and comforting, can become blinding, disori­enting and oppressive day after day. So you stay inside, out of that blinding sun, and work on those small details of a relationship that bring the kind of ordinary satisfactions most people cherish in a marriage. But Ricky is not satisfied with small pleasures. His life has always been a succession of big explosive pleasures.

"At Texas, after I won the Heisman and set the NCAA rushing record, I crashed and burned without any more goals," he says. He also says that if he wasn't constant­ly on the move, going to new places and

trying new things, his life would stagnate and so would he.

"That first year with Miami," he says, "everything was wide-open. The guys were happy and supportive. I thought, Whoa! I have an opportunity here to be the best. I had a great, great year. I felt I could build on that in 2003. But then we got no new offensive linemen, no new receivers, and our quarter­backs didn't play well. So the coach was afraid to pass the ball, and he just handed it off to me. My linemen couldn't block for me, and I got hammered. I broke my shoulder, my col­larbone. It was all so out of control. And then, when I asked the Dolphins to renegotiate my contract, they insulted me with their offer. I thought, The things 1 thought were going to make me happy aren't, so why am I doing this? So I began to look for a way out."

On Memorial Day 2004, at his South Beach condo, Ricky claims, he had an epiphany. "That's when football began to fall apart for me," he says. "I wanted to move on from football. I was done with this. You know, life is like a dance. If you stop, you get your toes stepped on. If you go too fast, you're out of rhythm. But when you go with the flow, you're content." But Ricky wasn't content, and, he says, "I didn't have the balls to say that. So I let marijuana serve as a way to get me out without my having to say or do anything. I'm convinced I don't have a drug problem. I never took painkillers for injuries like 95 percent of the players do. 1 don't like putting foreign sub­stances in my body. I'm a vegetarian. But whenever I'm ambivalent about football, I smoke. I mean, it wasn't like I couldn't stop when I was motivated to play. I'm an ath­lete. I'm disciplined. But my pot smoking was definitely a way to deliberately sabotage my career when I didn't have the balls or didn't value myself enough to put my foot

down. Marijuana served the purpose of making my decisions for me."

Ricky had already failed two drug tests with the Dolphins, the first right after he was traded in May, for which he was put in the NFL's substance-abuse program, which required him to submit to eight to 10 random drug tests a month. He failed the second, in December 2003, and was fined four weeks' pay, and he failed the third, in February 2004. Ricky knew with his third failure would come a suspension, prob­ably for four games. So before his failed test was made public he called the Dol­phins in July 2004, a week before training camp was set to begin. He told his coach, Dave Wannstedt, that he was retiring from football. The Dolphins' fans and the media were furious, the players crushed. Because Ricky waited until just before the opening of camp, the Dolphins had little time to find a replacement for him. The fans and the media called him a quitter, a traitor and a coach killer. They would be proven right. After the Dolphins struggled to a 1-8 start in 2004, Wannstedt resigned. (Ditka had lasted only three years in New Orleans.)

Wayne Huizenga, the Dolphins' owner, was so furious with Ricky that he demanded he return his $8 million signing bonus. Ricky contested the demand, and in Sep­tember 2004 an arbitrator ruled he had to return his bonus. Ricky's response was to run away from the whole mess. He flew to Japan and then Australia, where he stayed for a month, backpacking from one hippie commune to another. He lived in a tent with only books on yoga, meditation and vegetarian lifestyles. He read the books by the light of a candle while he smoked ganja. He ate almonds and rice. He drank carrot and celery juice. He smoked ganja. When he lost his wallet, he said it was proof he

"wasn't supposed to be carrying a wallet." He smoked more ganja. Then he found a little bit of paradise on a mountaintop, 165 acres oflemon trees that looked down over the ocean. Ricky looked at the land and said, "This is where I'll live." He phoned his agent, Leigh Steinberg, and told him there was "no way I was coining back." Steinberg said, "Don't burn your bridges."

"I never did buy the 165 acres," Ricky says in the tiny living room of his small apartment. "I thought 1 could live there at the time. It was the most enriching, fulfilling time of my life when I was away from football. But that's the past. You have to keep up with your evolution. I'd miss what I have now."

What Ricky missed in Australia was his ties to football, to people who knew who he was, people who pursued him, tried to understand him, wooed him, wanted to love him. He had neurotic needs that "paradise" could never fulfill. After Ricky returned to the States, he joined the Sivananda Ash­ram, a yoga monastery in Grass Valley, California, near Sacramento. He spent his days with Kristin and their two children in a $426,000 house next to the yoga farm or at the ashram, where he studied medita­tion, spiritualism and positivism. He says for the first time in his life he felt free from "a life of money and fame, which brings a loss of self."

"Football represented the black, or Western, part of myself," Ricky says. "Yoga represented the white, or Eastern, part of myself that I'd abandoned. I had been too heavy on the football side, so I got into yoga to get back that part of myself that wants to approach God."

Ricky's marriage to the ashram and his divorce from football didn't last long. It was put in perspective by an older Vietnamese woman who became Ricky's guru at the ashram. She told him he was neglecting his responsibilities to things outside him­self, like football. She told him he had an obligation to football. She made Ricky real­ize that "I couldn't live in the monastery forever. I couldn't give up my ego." So in 2005 Ricky announced he was unretiring from football because, he tells me, "Foot­ball was such a big part of my life, and I missed it. I wanted to go back to the NFL and fix things, my legacy. There's nothing in the world I love more than playing foot­ball, but I had been conflicted about it. I was too idealistic about football. I thought my strength was in holding on to what I believed without compromising. I rebelled by showing I didn't fit the mold. Now I realize my strength is in compromising. A part of me needs to conform but without giving up part of myself. I didn't have the wisdom to see that before."

The south Florida media were not so accepting of Ricky's epiphany that convinced him to return to the Dolphins. The media wrote that he was returning so he wouldn't have to give back his $8 million signing bonus. "Hell, no!" Ricky says. "I wouldn't do anything for money. But money was def­initely the reason I came back. It dawned on me that it was out of my control, that I was supposed to play football...just like I (concluded on page 175)

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(continued from page 172) was supposed to be with Kristin. Everything I ever did to get away from that relation­ship with Kristin never worked. I had never thought that having kids, a wife and a stable family life was a reality for me, that I could fit into that role. I never thought that role was natural for me, so 1 ran away from it. Now I'm working with Kristin on being aware of hurting others."

Before he could play for the Dolphins in 2005, Ricky had to sit out a four-game suspension for his 2004 failed drug test and agree to 10 drug tests a month for the rest of his career. When Ricky finally began play­ing for the Dolphins, his new coach, Nick Saban, who had replaced Wannstedt, told him he'd have to share running-back duties with the Dolphins' young back, Ronnie Brown. Neither of the two backs benefited from that arrangement. Ricky averaged only 61.9 yards a game, and he says of Brown, "It was detrimental to Ronnie's career to play with me." Of Saban, Ricky says, "He called me into his office twice a week to check on me. He said he valued my opinion. He fooled me into thinking he really cared about me." (Saban left the Dolphins after the 2006 season to coach at the University of Alabama.)

Shortly after the season was over, in Feb­ruary 2006, it was made public that Ricky had failed his fourth drug test and would be suspended for the entire 2006 season. With no place to go and no job, Ricky let Stein­berg negotiate a one-year contract for up to $500,000 to play with the Toronto Argos in the Canadian Football League, which at the lime had no substance-abuse policy.

Ricky says he loved playing in Canada because "Canadians weren't so uptight about football. In the NFL, being myself wasn't acceptable." He also felt comfortable for the first time talking with the media because the Canadian media "wrote what I said and didn't try to make a stir like the NFL media." In fact, the Canadian media just quoted Ricky verbatim, without critical comment, which was not necessarily a favor to him. He told the Canadians, "I outgrew marijuana when I found yoga." He said yoga put "balance, beauty and harmony" in his life and taught him that "God plus mind equals man" and "oxygen is a better source of energy than food." He showed reporters his meditation room with a ghee-burning lamp beside a deity-laden altar. "I found myself with yoga," he said, "and now I'm going deeper into myself."

Ricky played only five games with the Argos before he broke his left arm and had (o sit out the rest of the year. At the time, he was the sixth-rated rusher in the CFL.

Ricky is sitting in his Waltham apartment, explaining how failing his fifth drug test brought him to where he is now, visiting a shrink five days a week "to help me recap­ture that boyish, passionate innocence I've given away" while waiting for his NFL future to be decided.

"I failed the test," he says, "but I didn't

smoke. I just didn't take the necessary steps to keep myself out of harm's way. 1 was liv­ing in the monastery and inhaled second­hand smoke. It was freakish. I was shocked. 1 should have stuck up for myself with the NFL and explained. But I didn't know whether I forcefully wanted to come back." So he came to Boston, to a shrink, to see if that shrink could "help me dig down deep to see if I still have a passion for football."

Ricky says one of the things he has learned from his shrink is that he has a problem with confrontation, with repressed anger he can't express. "I thought not expressing my anger meant I was good, sensitive," he says. "But it meant I was weak. You need anger in sports to compete. But I was never comfortable with that side of football. I'd go to extremes to be sensi­tive. It was detrimental to me. It seemed I didn't care that much about football because I wasn't aggressive off the field, on the bench, sitting alone with my head down in the locker room, talking to the media. But that went against my nature."

Ricky can trace his repressed anger to his childhood when his father left the family and Ricky became, for all intents and pur­poses, the caretaker of his twin sister, Cassie, and younger sister, Nisey. "It wasn't so bad," he says. "There was no one to tell me what to do." Ricky's mother, Sandy, was 25 at the time, with three children and no husband. She was a competitive, stylish woman with a lot of frustration, says Ricky. "Her parents pushed her to marry my father," says Ricky, "and now she wanted her life back. She worked, went to school at night and had her boyfriends. She had no time or maturity to see who I was, so I grew up with an exagger­ated need to be liked and understood."

Ricky is not close to his mother today, he says. Yet the first thing he did when he got his Phillies bonus money was to buy her a house and pay for his sisters' col­lege education. When I talk to Sandy over the phone, she says there is a distance between her and her son now, a wariness, she says, because "it's not all about Ricky with me. Ricky is not my whole life."

As the man of the house at the age of six, it fell to Ricky to do the laundry and cook meals for his sisters. It was not long before his repressed anger at his role in the fam­ily finally surfaced and he underwent anger counseling. What he learned from that counseling was to hide his anger behind his faux gentleness. In third grade, as one of only two blacks, he listened to his white friends talk about all the places diey'd visited on vacation. This made Ricky determined to travel when he got older, which is why, he says, "I've never been in one place more than six months these past three years. As I got older, I pursued all my interests to catch up to what I never had as a kid."

By the time Ricky was a young teen, he had pierced ears and tattoos, which, he says, made him look "threatening" in his predominantly white community. When he walked on the sidewalk and a white person who didn't know him came walking toward him, that person would cross the street. "That was difficult for me," he says. "I never thought my mere existence could be threatening to people. I didn't want people

to be afraid of me, so I overcompensated by being soft-spoken. As I got older that gentle stereotype was exacerbated." Ricky smiles and adds, "You know, God gives us the parents who make us stronger."

Kristin, her mother and the children enter the house with bags of groceries. They are dripping wet from the rain. Ricky gets up and goes outside to get the rest of the bags. I ask Kristin if I can talk to her tomorrow morning before I leave. She says, "I've always refused to talk to the press." Then she says okay.

Kristin meets me in the hotel lobby for breakfast. She is wearing a little makeup for the first time in four days. It has trans­formed her from an attractive woman to a beautiful woman. She sits down and orders an omelet, toast and a stack of pancakes. She can't weigh 100 pounds. I tell her that pound for pound she's the most impressive eater I've ever seen. She laughs and says, "I'm just a country girl. I sound like it, don't I?"

I ask her how long she and Ricky have had a real relationship. Kristin laughs. "Hmwmmm. Let's see. What's today? Well, the past few months have been good." She says they have had problems, their age difference and cultural differences. "I've always wanted someone to take care of me," she says. "When Ricky went to Australia, I thought he'd be gone a year. I was alone with my son. I had to take care of myself. I played golf and sat alone in my house on Las Olas, drinking wine. I believed Ricky would come back to me even as I thought, You can't do this! But it was good for me. I wouldn't trade any of it. Being with Ricky has forced me to be independent."

I ask Kristin if she smokes pot with Ricky. She says, "No. I drink wine. But I never thought Ricky had a problem with pot. It didn't change his personality. He doesn't wake up and smoke. But I do agree that he smoked pot when he wanted to fail his drug tests."

Ricky appears. He slides into the booth on Kristen's side. She smiles at him and pats the seat closer to her. He says, "You come to me." Kristin looks at me. Then she slides toward Ricky and curls herself into his big body.

Ricky says, "I was thinking of something last night that I had to tell you." He goes into a Ricky monologue about how we're all pack animals and it's human nature for animals in the pack to nip at the one who's not in line. "You either fight, leave or fit in," says Ricky. "I fled, but I need to learn to fight the system so I can be myself in the system. I'm not a perfect role model. I've pissed off a lot of people, but I can bring something to the NFL."

Ricky and Kristin get up to leave. "All my life I have been searching for guidance. I fantasized that one day I'd be walking in the park and an old man would call me over. He'd look up at me and say, 'You're the one. The Golden Boy.'"

Then he leaves.