October 1998
Running Right
People said Ricky Williams was crazy to forgo the NFL and return to the University of Texas for his senior year. The best college player in the country has his reasons.
HE ISN’T EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, BUT HE IS everywhere. Sports Illustrated. The New York Times. Three separate interviews for ESPN as well as a major story in ESPN The Magazine. ABC Sports. Dozens of daily papers. He is the most famous college football player in the country. In mid-August, while his civilian classmates hit the Container Store and his football teammates caught their breath between two-a-days, Ricky Williams endured nineteen photo shoots. Dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings have not gotten this much exposure since the first Lollapalooza.
And a lollapalooza is what Williams’ 1998 season ought to be. He is already a big-time achiever, regardless of whether you measure him by the exciting poetry of his on-field destruction (more than half of his yards come after contact) or the cold, hard numbers that made him the NCAA’s leading rusher and scorer last season. Let’s face it—in 1997, perhaps the University of Texas’ most disappointing year in the post—Darrell Royal era, Ricky Williams was The Show, period. No one would have blamed the junior for leaving UT and turning pro, taking the money and running. But, to the surprise of everyone, he came back for his senior year and a season that promises even more than last year’s. Like a gridiron McGwire (only much faster, according to professional baseball scouts), Williams is expected to rewrite several pages of the record book, including the all-time rushing marks in both UT and NCAA history. Ideally, he will keep on running right into mid-December, when he will report to 19 West Street in New York City to receive football’s most revered piece of hardware: the Heisman trophy, awarded to the finest college football player in the land. Then (again, ideally) Williams, his fellow Horns, and new head coach Mack Brown will barrel through to the first day of 1999 (or, more realistically, the latter part of December 1998) and win a postseason bowl game. The Longhorns have never done that during Williams’ UT career.
Why did Williams return? Really, it was never much of a decision: all that potential college glory versus Sundays with the Arizona Cardinals. Here are ten factors that influenced his decision and will define his senior campaign.
1. He’s a good guy. It’s one of those oft-repeated stories, the one that reveals how big a softie Ricky Williams is: He once accepted a date with a woman he wasn’t really interested in . . . and continued to see her. All this because the guy just didn’t have the stomach to reject her.
Now, one has to wonder who this poor girl is—and how many times she’s going to have to read about herself in some glossy magazine (at least once more, apparently). But the point is that when Williams stepped up to the microphone on January 8 to announce his intentions for the 1998 season, some witnesses had the sense that when it finally came time to look the University of Texas football community in the eye, he just couldn’t bring himself to dash its hopes.
The decision wasn’t quite so spontaneous, but it did come down to the wire. Just days before the moment of truth, Williams had no doubt that he was headed for the pros. “Definitely,” he says now. “I had all the paperwork signed to send to the NFL. I hadn’t turned it in yet, but I had a notary stamp on it and everything.” His mind changed depending on what was on TV. “It was during the NFL playoffs, and the college bowl games too. So every day I’d see an NFL game, I’d want to go to the NFL, and every time I’d see a bowl game, I’d want to stay in college.”
In the end it wasn’t a purely altruistic choice. “I told him, ‘Do what you feel is best for you,’” Mack Brown says. “‘If you don’t need the money, make it a very selfish decision.’ More than anything else, he did what he wanted to do.”
2. The record book. You’re not supposed to admit it. You’re never supposed to say anything other than: “Individual achievements are nice, but I can’t think about those things. It would be great to win the Heisman, but it’s more important that the football team does well.”
Ricky Williams can spin those kinds of clichés with the best of them, but he can also be more forthright. At the season’s outset he needed 1,928 rushing yards to break Tony Dorsett’s all-time career NCAA record of 6,082 and 20 rushing touchdowns to beat Anthony Thompson’s mark of 64. Make no mistake—he wants the glory. “That’s part of loving the game,” he says. “Having a chance to put my name in the record books is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I knew that if I left, I could only be good, but if I stayed, I could be great.”
Merely looking at the numbers doesn’t do justice to the fact that, barring injury or a meltdown of the offensive line, Williams will leave UT as one of the greatest running backs in college football history. If he breaks the record, ’nuff said, and even if he falls short, he will still have outraced such celebrated backs as O. J. Simpson, Eric Dickerson, and Barry Sanders.
Meanwhile, the one mark Williams will erase for certain is Earl Campbell’s all-time University of Texas rushing record. At the beginning of the season he needed only 289 yards, and it had been suggested that the man they call Little Earl could cover that much turf in the September 5 opener against lightweight New Mexico State. “Ha, ha, ha, hopefully,” Williams said of this notion back then. His loose, genial laugh suggested that he realized how ridiculous it would be even to expect such a performance in a single game, but, yeah, you bet it had crossed his mind, lots of times. As it turned out, he racked up 215 yards before leaving the game with twelve minutes left in the fourth quarter.
3. The trophy. How does the best running back in the country put together the season Williams had last year and not get a free trip to New York for the Heisman ceremony? It’s not like Division I running backs gain 1,893 yards in a season as a matter of course. Only six have ever broken 2,000, and four of those guys won the famous stiff-armed statue. Next thing you know, they’ll give the Heisman to a cornerback.
Williams took the snub hard. “I knew I wasn’t going to win because of our team, but I thought I’d at least get an invite. I was kind of upset about that.” The implication was that on a losing team the yards don’t mean as much. So Ryan Leaf, Peyton Manning, and Randy Moss were summoned to the December ceremony, along with the winner, Michigan’s Charles Woodson. A cornerback. Williams came in fifth in the voting.
Williams hopes to take Manhattan this year, but showing up won’t be enough. “I want to win this time,” he says. There he goes again—being honest. The truth is, everybody—coaches and teammates, fans and journalists—wants him to win this time.
Of course, the usual caveat still applies. “Ricky would give up the Heisman to win games,” Mack Brown promises.
4. 4-7. Indeed. This season may hold the promise of supreme personal achievement, but it is really about redemption for the whole team. All Ricky ever hears when he runs into people he has not seen in a while is “What the hell happened against UCLA?”
“I just want to win,” Williams says. “Going four and seven, losing to, like, Baylor. That’s hard to swallow.”
Williams expects a turnaround this year, and with his backfield partner Ricky Brown plus a full complement of wideouts, he doesn’t expect to shoulder the whole load. “Not at all,” he says. “Our offense is going to be so good that it’s not going to be on me.”
Of course, this does raise the question—what about that NCAA record? Mack Brown acknowledges that he wants “a well-balanced team. It’s unrealistic to expect Ricky to get two thousand yards this year. That’d be great if he accomplishes that, but . . .”
You know the rest. Winning the games is what matters. “Last year we had high expectations, and we failed,” Williams says. “This year they’re going to be lower. I want to surprise the whole country. I want to be on a team where when you watch ESPN in the morning and before the games start, you’re one of the teams that they highlight. We want to be a team in the national spotlight again.”
5. No one expected him to stay. “I wanted to make everybody think I was leaving,” Williams said in the spring. “Everyone thought that anyway, so I figured I’d just play along with them. That was kind of fun for me.”
See, in case the hairdo, the pierced tongue, and the four tattoos hadn’t tipped you off, Ricky Williams is something of a non-conformist. A free spirit. Ricky Williams is not that far removed from being a teenager. Ricky Williams is from California.
