Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
Cowardly Williams took the money and ran away

BRIAN BAHR / GETTY IMAGES, 2002 Ricky Williams' hasty departure leaves his old team, the Miami Dolphins, short-handed on the eve of training camp.

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There's no glory in running away.

Maybe that's what is forgotten in the week Ricky Williams cut left and bolted on the Miami Dolphins. He gave his word in an iron-clad contract, pocketed the guaranteed money and, as a result, his team built itself around him. Then, after months of sealing that covenant in workouts and practices, he walked out on the deal just days before training camp. He did it at just the time his team couldn't replace him.

He said he was "free."

Others said this was just "Ricky being Ricky," that he was a running back with the forearms of a boxer and the soul of an artist. They said this was refreshing. They said it was wonderful to find a player who didn't need football to make himself complete. Some even said he was courageous.

But this was not courage. What Ricky Williams did over the weekend was among the most immature and cowardly things a football player has done. He ran off — leaving his coaches, teammates and fans in the lurch — and didn't even have the decency to tell them in person.

There's no glory in crawling out the door.

The problem is commitment. And how ironic is it that a player who posed for a magazine in a wedding dress should have such trouble with that word? It seems that everywhere Ricky Williams went after the University of Texas, people were giving things to him, but he was never giving back.

Mike Ditka threw a whole draft away for the right to have Williams carry the New Orleans Saints' offense, and Williams repaid Ditka's faith by showing up late to meetings, blasting his offensive linemen and cowering from the first sign of criticism.

Miami gave him its hopes and dreams when it traded for him in 2002, and he teased the Dolphins by making them believe he could take them to the playoffs. Then he waited until they had finalized their plans for this fall, until everything in the Miami arsenal was about him, to announce that he didn't want to play after all.

Sorry.
 
And for this we are supposed to feel for Ricky Williams?

Football might have lost one of its best running backs this week, but it also lost a player who was never anything he should have been. Ultimately, for all the promise, he delivered one playoff game — a spot the Saints clinched after he went down with a broken ankle.

Williams didn't want to play anymore. And this is understandable. What player should want to go through the poundings a running back takes in the course of his NFL career?

It is hard to find a former football player anywhere who doesn't have significant damage to his knees or neck by his mid-40s. Doctors still don't know the extent of the brain damage that comes from repeated hits to the helmet, but the suspicion is that it eventually becomes degenerative at a frighteningly young age.

If Ricky Williams said he didn't want to spend the rest of his life shuffling like an old Hobbit, nobody would have blamed him. All he had to do was tell his team at season's end, then pack his bags and walk away.

Instead, he ran first and gave a rambling list of excuses from the airport in Hawaii when the Miami Herald found him on the cellphone. Apparently he had been attached like a screaming groupie to Lenny Kravitz in Europe and found the rock 'n' roll life to be a rush better than ramming shoulder pads with defensive ends. He said he wanted to be free of rules, free to smoke all the dope he could possibly carry; and, on his way out of the league, he blew the secret of how his fellow players mask their drug tests to get negative readings.

There is nothing that says athletes have to play forever. Nothing that says they owe everything to their games.

Pat Tillman gave his career and ultimately his life because he believed in a cause. Robert Smith walked away from the Minnesota Vikings because he had other pursuits. Sandy Koufax left baseball when he was still the best because he didn't want to destroy his left arm.

But all of these players left without promising they would play another year. They left days after their seasons ended, when they knew there was time for their teams to replace them.

Ricky Williams waited until after the best running back available had signed elsewhere before phoning in his retirement from the other side of the country.

If he thinks there is dignity in this, there is not.

He'll be back. He has neither the stubbornness of Barry Sanders nor the resolve of Jim Brown — two men who walked away for the right reasons.

Until he returns, Ricky Williams will just be another athlete who took the money and ran.

Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com