Ricky Williams does not regret temporarily walking away from football in , just two years after winning the NFL rushing title. He also doesn't regret missing the entire season after violating the league's substance-abuse policy.
If Williams does have one regret from his roller coaster NFL career, it is that he did not retire as a member of the Dolphins , a sentiment he recently shared during an appearance on The Greg Cote Show Podcast. It would have been great to play my last year [in Miami]. I probably would have played a couple more years if I stayed in Miami and I would have had the opportunity to become the Dolphins' all-time leading rusher.
I was maybe only something yards away. Williams actually finished just yards away from matching Hall of Famer Larry Csonka as the Dolphins' all-time rushing leader. Csonka, the Dolphins' starting fullback when Miami won back-to-back Super Bowls in the early s, temporally left Miami before retiring as a Dolphin after the season. Williams wishes he would have done the same. The way that I came back, the way I was embraced by the fans, I'll always love Dolphins fans and I'll always remember my time as a Dolphin.
Many fans don't remember, but Williams was on the precipice of greatness at the turn of the century. The Heisman Trophy winner who broke Tony Dorsett's year-old record as major college football's career rushing leader, Williams rushed for 1, yards in his second NFL season while helping the Saints win their first-ever playoff game.
Williams rushed for over 1, yards in before he was traded to Miami prior to the start of the season. The 5-foot, pound Williams had a devastating combination of strength, speed and agility that allowed him to beat teams with both power as well as finesse.
Williams said that there were many different factors that led to his abrupt retirement just before the start of the season. One factor was the fact that he was coming off what he described as a "horrible" season that saw him lead the NFL in carries for a second straight year. But unlike the season, when he won an NFL rushing title while averaging 4. Still, Williams knew he needed focused instruction to apply what he was learning in his astrology texts to a real-world environment.
In , after a successful and now-famous comeback to the NFL, Williams began to focus on his education in astrology more intently, studying with noted evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest. In Williams, Forrest found an unusually ardent student. After a multi-year apprenticeship under Forrest, learning to distill the glut of abstract information that comes with an astrological chart reading, Williams began doing his own readings with friends and family in From there, Curious Questions was born.
The conversation winds for another hour, the two men discussing their shared passion for the search for and examination of their places in the wider universe. Over the course of the podcast, it becomes clear that while Williams is the one leading the conversation, he is listening as much as he is talking, using the back and forth with Foster to both learn and to guide.
This is what the podcast symbolizes. Click here to cancel reply. And today he wants to empower those masses, steer them toward finding their own inner Ricky, more or less. Who you are. The fans, the balloons—Williams pays it all little attention. Over the past five years—in the time, roughly, since Sports Illustrated last spent significant minutes with the Heisman Trophy winner —Williams has moved from Austin here to Los Angeles; divorced and remarried; welcomed his fifth child, a boy named Sol; and inked a podcast deal.
Americans have, in roughly that same span, embraced the broad legalization of weed—and Williams, Mr. Weed himself, has shifted his focus elsewhere, evolving, Ricky -style, in unexpected directions.
It helps explain his past, and it points toward a bountiful future. Pull up a chair. Have some weed. Stay a while This does not mean that our fates are entirely predestined. Rather, the choices we make in living inform whether we eventually reach our lowest or highest potential—or, like most everyone, fall somewhere in between.
We fill in the rest. The admirers who lined up to see Williams on April 20—from the dude in the Looney Tunes jacket to the woman with red dreadlocks to a staggering number of patrons sporting man-bun-and-tank-top combos—have each been given, like Williams, a blueprint. They chose on this day to come to his store, to connect through him with something greater. Most, it seems, expect quick interactions. And they came to the right place.
Williams obliges. Because Williams also wants more from them. As he dishes out fist bumps and pens autographs and gifts eighths of marijuana, strangers shift the conversation toward golf and NFL highlights and the Hibachi Pappi food truck out front.
But Williams, as much as possible, turns every loose mind-of-a-stoner thread back toward astrology. Williams lives what he expects from others. His path into his latest obsession began on his break from the NFL, in , when he visited an ashram in Northern California. But he followed Swami Sita into her office anyway and learned the basics about how his astrology chart related to his life, based on her trained interpretation. He dabbled instead in other pursuits, searching all along for something that tied together so many disparate interests.
But around he says he again felt a celestial calling, particularly to the idea that his parents, his upbringing and the messages he consumed over the years had pushed him away from his true, pure self.
Astrology, he says, gave him clarity and enlightenment, the ability to understand his own actions. When Williams adopted that mindset, he says, he stopped seeing himself as a victim. Others would come to believe that the NFL had wronged him, by forcing him to choose between a now-acceptable means of pain relief from his injuries and, essentially, a lucrative career. But he no longer saw it that way. Always against the grain. His chart showed that he would encounter turbulence, and navigate it.
A corporate lawyer, Miron now helps him run their company, Real Wellness. Williams, all the while, was still seeking, searching, feeling his own way forward. Williams acted the way he did, in part, he thinks, because he saw himself that way. But Forrest told him that his chart showed decades of restlessness, an extended search for purpose; now he was entering a period of maturity and growth.
If this all sounds convenient—a way to excuse his worst transgressions and make random events seem part of some celestial order—Williams says he can only speak from his own experience.
In , Williams completed his astrology courses, earned his license and started deploying the medium, for those who believe in it, to give his clients a clearer picture of who they are, before anyone ever told them what to be.
He wanted to see if his interpretations of his chart helped explain why he felt so compelled to do certain things that other people found to be extreme or weird, like waving goodbye to millions of dollars and moving to Australia.
John W. He looked at July 18, , and interpreted what he saw: On that date his sign, Gemini suggesting an endless curiosity , was in close proximity to Jupiter, the planet of expansion, or adventure. He sighs thinking about it now. That part was his choosing, not predetermined. Had he stayed in football, he believes he would have limited his future. Astrology came to serve as a dot connector—a way to look back and make straight a meandering path.
The football, the interest in photography and the appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice. The yoga , Ayurveda , massage therapy , herbology and psychology … Williams sees all these pursuits as tethered to what his chart had in store for him. Sometimes he made choices that maximized what was possible. Sometimes he did not.
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