Ricky Williams Is Hoping to Heal Others, and His Image

Source: www.nytimes.com 

KENDALL, Fla. — The latest milepost on what Ricky Williams calls his spiritual journey is an acupuncture and massage college tucked inside a strip mall, above a video store, next to sandwich and liquor shops.

Here, where the study hall is named after the philosopher Lao Tzu and one room contains some 300 Chinese herbs, Williams is a massage therapist in training, a running back who generally hopes to avoid contact on the football field now seeking his license to touch.

To Williams, 32, this represents another step toward a career in holistic healing and away from his self-described reputation as “the poster child for marijuana.” The process has been messy and public and shaped into an all-too-familiar narrative: superstar spits on the American dream, travels the world in search of enlightenment and returns reformed.

Only for Williams, on the verge of his ninth N.F.L season, it’s not that simple. And never was.

“I get defensive,” he said. “I like to think I’m the same person. I just have more clarity.”

Errick Lynne Williams said he first felt the effects of marijuana during his senior year at the University of Texas. He had smoked before, maybe a dozen times at parties, but said he never felt high until one night after a breakup, when his mild depression lifted in a cloud of smoke.

He had no idea then that marijuana would eventually define him in ways he says are neither accurate nor fair.

He used to joke that only dumb people failed drug tests, at least until he failed them. That led, in part, to his departure from the N.F.L. in 2004 and his yearlong suspension in 2006.

Williams said he never identified as a pothead, never wore clothing bearing marijuana leaves, never inked an endorsement on his heavily tattooed arms. So yes, it bothers him, all the jokes and innuendo, the doctored pictures online that show him carrying a football and smoking a superimposed joint.

At college sporting events, at bars in his native San Diego, everywhere he went, smoke followed. At first, Williams said, he found the attention cool. Eventually, that changed.

“Since I’ve become famous for it, I’m amazed at how many people ask me to smoke,” Williams said. “For me to move on with my career, this has to be behind me. I don’t want to keep being reminded of it on a daily basis.”

Distancing remains difficult, though, as N.F.L. drug testers report to the Williams home three times each week. His children are friendly with the tester and look forward to his visits. Williams estimates he may soon take his 1,000th test.

Will he smoke after football? Sometimes he thinks no. Sometimes he does not know.

Will the cloud hovering over his image ever lift? Of this, he is hopeful but not certain.

“The guy’s never been to jail, never been arrested,” said Dr. Richard Browne, the owner of the massage school. “I’m not saying that he’s perfect, that he’s a saint. No, he’s a man. He’s a human being who slid from grace.”

Williams filled his passport, stamped in Australia, Fiji, India, Europe and Japan. He learned ayurveda, a traditional Hindu system of medicine from India. He lived on a yoga ashram in California. Along the way, his partner, Kristin Barnes, wondered how all of it would fit together.

“It was hard to see,” she said. “But I trusted that it would.”

Barnes met Williams when she worked on the New Orleans Saints’ charter plane, and she found him different from the other players, a Heisman trophy winner who helped her wash dishes in the back.

She found that Williams let his spiritual aspirations guide him. He ordered hundreds of books on subjects like how to play guitar and astrology and homeopathic remedies. His influences included Bob Marley, philosophy and Greek mythology. He identified with Prometheus, chained to a rock, and Persephone, headed to the underworld.

In India, he spent six weeks engaged in yoga and meditation, chanting and scripture study. It was better than being high, he said, and longer lasting.

“I’ve always been attracted to things that are taboo,” he said. “I’ve never been afraid to go to that dark place.” Yet Barnes found him humorous, gentle and intelligent — 230 pounds of new-age philosophy searching for a world view that resonated more closely with what he felt.

“At the core, we’re all spiritual beings,” Williams said. “It’s something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.”

He led the N.F.L. in rushing in 2002. The next season, he carried the ball almost 400 times despite intense pain in both shoulders. The perks of fame, like meeting the actress Halle Berry, had long worn off, replaced by what doctors called social anxiety disorder.

So off he went, like the tattoo on his left arm — Run Ricky Run — losing 25 pounds and his trademark dreadlocks. He started at a hostel in Melbourne, Australia, in 2004, where he bunked with travelers from Pakistan and Sri Lanka. They went to movies, or the pub, and never once talked football. They saw something in Williams that he never saw reflected in himself.

When he returned to the United States, he was annoyed that his status as a football player usurped his qualities as a human being. He left, at the time, he thought, for good.

But he returned to football in 2005, partly because of his dwindling bank account and partly because he had spied an N.F.L. game on television at a Thailand hostel.

The next year, while on N.F.L. suspension, Williams played in the Canadian Football League, where he broke his arm. Trainers performed an alternative treatment on him, which he said helped him heal faster. This led him to attend four workshops to learn craniosacral therapy, and there, for the first time, Williams said he felt the healing power of his touch.

That led to massage therapy school. Next, he plans to earn a premedicine degree, followed by graduate school for osteopathy.

What once seemed like a strange series of encounters, Williams hopes to one day fully integrate. He envisions becoming something like an N.F.L. shaman, responsible to a team or players for a holistic approach — body, mind, soul — to healing.

“The more I pay attention to what’s going on inside, the more I realize that how I feel, and how I react to what I feel, really creates my reality,” Williams said. “And the more in touch I can be, the better chance I have to control what’s happening in my life.”

As part of the N.F.L.’s drug program, Williams meets once a week with a psychiatrist. Lately, they have discussed something Williams’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, has long implored him to consider. How will he be remembered?

Before, Williams said, he felt trapped by fame. Now, instead of compartmentalizing his ideals — tough football player, lenient father, sensitive partner — Williams views them as a whole. He acknowledged there were events he did not handle well, but he claims no regrets over what some say could have been a Hall of Fame career.

He lives with Barnes and the two children they have together, including 7-year-old Prince, who calls him Dr. Williams. He says he plans to play two more seasons and predicts that this one will be his favorite, even though he enters it a backup running back for the Miami Dolphins.

As part of his image makeover, Williams hired a financial adviser, and he receives an allowance, which he spends mostly on books. He also hired Mark Lepselter, who runs a marketing company for athletes and joked that Williams reminded him of another quirky client, Lawrence Taylor.

Williams plans to use his given name after football, because, he said, “The name Ricky is kind of tainted.” He wants N.F.L. teams to change the way they approach healing, to include the emotional aspects and alternative medicine.

Temptation surfaces occasionally. Marijuana jokes persist.

“It’s like the open-minded, spiritual person and the football player, they get into a tug of war,” Williams said. “It’s not pretty. It’s ongoing. I have to find a way to reconcile both those parts of myself so that I can have some kind of peace.”

Earlier this month, he stood over a fellow student, performing shiatsu massage, transferring energy to his fingertips by rocking. Finding, he hopes, the proper balance.