Williams Retires to Tin Shack

Everyone who played sports as a child remembers the one kid who would always quit in the middle of a game to go inside and play Magic the Gathering. The teams would be messed up and the game would be over. No amount of coercion could get the kid back on the playing field where he belonged. He would just whine about how he didn't want to play anymore, and it just didn't make sense. Ricky Williams is that kid.

"I don't want to be in this business anymore," Ricky Williams told the Miami Herald. It was that simple for him. Just like that, in the mind of Ricky Williams, he was free from his obligations to the Dolphins. A few days after it happened, it still hasn't sunk in for most people.

"I'm finally free," Williams said. This all seems like some bad dream (maybe Williams thinks he is in Martin Luther King's dream, and that is he is "free at last"). I keep thinking that Ricky is going to wake up, take off his wedding dress (it was Williams who posed on an ESPN The Magazine cover in a wedding dress) and get back to work.

This makes about as much sense as Red Sox fan and Presidential hopeful John Kerry being interviewed by ESPN and saying that if he is elected, he will try to abolish the Yankees (it's only fitting that John Kerry associates himself with a perennial loser).

Apparently, Ricky has been thinking about this for awhile, but he neglected to tell anyone. One week before camp starts, he leaves his team high and dry. That's it. His teammates deserved better, the fans deserved better. They have backed him for so long, and the fans are the ones that pay his salary. How does he repay them? Packs up his wedding dress and heads overseas.

"I never remember being this happy," Williams said. That doesn't come as a surprise. I bet Williams doesn't remember what he had for breakfast, or even if he is wearing pants. While Williams tested positive for marijuana in the spring, I think that was just the beginning of his extra curricular activities.

"The people in Jamaica, living in these little tin shacks, they were the happiest people I've ever seen," Williams said.

"This is an opportunity to be a real role model," Williams said. "Everyone wants freedom. Human beings aren't supposed to be controlled and told what to do."

Ricky Williams will definitely go down in history as one of freedom's greatest champions. William Wallace, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King can't compare to what Ricky Williams did for mankind. He taught them to be free. Free from a tough life of millions of dollars, a lavish lifestyle, and the slight restrictions of drug use, all things no man should ever have to endure.

There is definitely no question that he is a role model. He showed kids that the real way to succeed in life is to just quit when you don't like something and then do a lot of drugs. Forget the DARE program, and enroll in Ricky's Double Dog Dare program, where he encourages youths to experiment with what the man has been holding back from him.

Ricky is portraying himself as a man who thinks the best course of action when things get tough is to quit and as a man who enjoys occasionally donning a wedding dress. If he stopped bathing for awhile, one would get the impression that he was trying to make a run at being the spokesperson for the entire country of France.

Williams does know he needs to be a man with a plan to be a good role model. "I have no idea what I'm going to do," Williams said. "I'm halfway intelligent, I'll figure something out."

I consider Hollywood Harlot and famed druggie Courtney Love to be halfway intelligent, so I have no problem granting Williams the same title.

Williams doesn't know where his travels will take him or what he will do, but he knows he will enjoy it. The Miami Dolphins certainly won't enjoy it, but I don't think this is the last we will hear from Ricky. If the Dolphins get in a crunch next year, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone search overseas to bring Ricky back in.

He shouldn't be hard to find, he'll be the one in the tin shack with the wedding dress drying outside.

Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].