Loyalty to the Truth

My concept of the truth expands on a daily basis. And my loyalty is to the truth and not to consistency.
—Ricky Williams

Ricky tests people.
—Sean Pamphilon

“Why do you have to be the one who’s going to change society or whatever?” When Sandy Williams remembers asking her son Ricky this question, her interviewer asks, “Why not?” She smiles, “That’s what he says.”

This exchange suggests a theme for Run Ricky Run, Sean Pamphilon and Royce Toni’s documentary on the Dolphins’ brilliant and sometimes controversial running back. Five years in the making, the film—which premieres 27 as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series—includes interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as Williams’ own reflections on his mercurial career. Pamphilon describes him as “a gentle man in a brutal business,” underlining the contradictions that shape the man’s experience—or at least other people’s perceptions of it.

The film embraces contradictions, at once intriguing, intimate, and analytical, biographical and philosophical. It picks up at the point when the University of Texas Heisman Trophy winner is drafted by the New Orleans Saints. “We thought it was a prudent pick at the time,” remembers coach Mike Ditka. Immediately, Williams reveals he has a sense of himself as a professional athlete that might best be described as “different.” Insisting on an incentive-based contract, he ensured that he wouldn’t see most of his money until and unless he ran some 1600 yards in a season. Sandy expresses her disappointment, but his sister Nisey sees Williams adhering to principle: “He chose that contract because he wanted to earn his money,” she asserts.

Such an attitude drew attention early in his professional career. He was wildly gifted and very hardworking, as Saints teammate Kyle Turley says, “Ricky was a machine on game day.” But he was also sometimes unfocused, or at least looking elsewhere. In New Orleans, the film observes, he lived in a small apartment, tree or four rooms with no windows. A neighbor remembers that he kept to himself, as a fisheye lens image has Williams peering at you, warped. “Ricky didn’t give anybody a chance to love him,” says the neighbor. 

Following a couple of seasons curtailed by injuries (“He realized how much of his self-worth was tied up in body parts that could betray him,” notes John Bianco) and swirling with media coverage, Williams lands in Miami, where he sets records—on the field and off, finally suspended for failing three drug tests, producing more tabloidy coverage. While Williams was traveling in Australia, Pamphilon says, he called, “high off his ass,” convincing his friend to start the film project that would become this documentary.

On his return, he is diagnosed with clinical depression and social anxiety disorder, and in 2004, he decides to retire from football at age 28. This and other decisions have produced assorted rumors as to Williams’ emotional state. His friend Dan Le Batard reframes the speculation to a question: “Is this a product of him being bipolar or mentally ill, or a product of him being the only sane person out there and the rest of us are all worshipping the wrong things?” Here, at least, he appears strikingly sane. 

When Williams un-retires, he runs into more trouble, when he returns to Miami, in 2005 fails another drug test, and plays for a year in Toronto. He says repeatedly that he loves football and that he is unconcerned with the money (the Dolphins want him to pay back over $8 million). What is important, he says, is finding a truth—about his own life, which has to do with helping and healing others. Marc Halpern—with whom Williams has studied holistic medicine at the California College of Ayurveda—sees Williams possessed of an “incredible thirst for knowledge.”

At least part of this impulse, the film suggests, is born of his own difficult background. When he was just six, he revealed to his mother that his father, Errick, was sexually abusing him. When the marriage subsequently ended, the boy felt guilty, and eventually afraid of his mother, who says here that she worked hard to maintain “control” over her home. When Pamphilon asks Williams now about that period, he resists. Asked whether he suffered chock as a child, he begins to break down the very concept of “shock,” as only the result of two ideas imposed on each other. “It seems so pointless to have this discussion about what’s shock,” he sighs.

As much as Williams wants to keep focused on his life now—in which, his wife Kristen Barnes says, his feelings still shift day to day—the film’s exposure of this past has already drawn more media attention. “Looking back ties you to the past and keeps you from going forward,” Williams says. This even as the film looks back, yet another contradiction that makes too much sense.