For all the fans that are telling us to not rip into Ricky Williams | FinHeaven - Miami Dolphins Forums

For all the fans that are telling us to not rip into Ricky Williams

T

TerryTate

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I'm normally a cool, calm, and collected guy. Then I got the news that Ricky retired....he retired in such a manner that it just irritated me to no end. After hearing additional details leak out i was even more angry. Then I come on hear and have to sift through the hostile posts, which is understandable and everyone has a right to be upset. Then I see a few posts telling us to lay off of Ricky. I ask the people that posted that side of the issue.......WHY???? Here's a rundown of why I am angry about this and why each and every Dol-fan should be too....

1) Read this passage from RUNRICKYRUN.com

A good friend of mine who lives in L.A. told me a story last night about a school she visited. While at the school, she noticed a vocabulary lesson with my name in it. The class was working on words, and one of the words was 'aggressive.' The little girl wrote "Rickey plays football very aggressively." When I heard this story, I was overcome with a sense of disappointment. Not disappointment over the fact that she spelled my name wrong, but I was disappointed at myself for sometimes forgetting my real fans, like that little girl. It rarely occurs to me that anyone outside of my friends and family pay much attention to me that way. The way kids hang my posters in their rooms, the way they wake up early on Sunday mornings eagerly waiting to see me play, or the way the 3 and the 4 are falling off their "Ricky Williams" jersey because they wear it everyday. Not the way people in a restaurant hear that a football player is seated across from them, disturb my meal to ask me if I play football, if I start, what team do I play for, and ask for an autograph. Not the way they come up to me to tell me the Dolphins suck, and ask me to put down my teammates. To me, that's not a fan. I could go on forever. But who wants to be negative? Not me. Back to the little girl: The story made me realize that their are people who are really interested and touched by my personal account of my daily life. I even met a guy in Australia who recognized me, told me how great my site was and how much it helped his girlfriend deal with some difficult things in her life.
Click to expand...

Is this how he really feels, to leave fans like these in the dust, please tell me that this doesnt irritate the living hell out of you.....

2) He has claimed that he has tried to be a role model but now he burns all bridges with the NFL, the NFLPA, and the Dolphins Organization by saying that he drinks certain liquids to get rid of drugs (he likely is referring to weed in this) in his system before drug tests, and he says that many players in the league do the same. He always had this innocence and falsely led us.

3) He has a contractual obligation to the Miami Dolphins and in essence he has one with the fans. The fans pay his salary and buy his Adidas merch and his Jerseys.

4) Ok so lets just say that this is just like any other job in society where you can just quit and move on (depending on the education and experience that you have, etc...) to bigger and better things. If you truly respect your co-workers (as Ricky supposedly did), you would never leave them in a bind like this. He screwed Junior Seau, Zach Thomas, Jason TAylor, and the rest of the seniority on this team. Say you were a big shot lawyer and you were in the middle of a landmark case and u suddenly say "I dont want to deal with this anymore".....what happens to the other members of your law firm that heavily relied on you before to win this case? What is the chance they do just as well as they would do if you were around? That probably is a bad example but whatever.....

5) The worst thing of all is the timing with all of this. What is new O/C Chris Foerster going to do with Travis Minor and Sammy Morris? There is less than a week before training camp. Williams' retirement crosses the wire only a day or two after the last reliable running backs get signed....and those would be Eddie George and Antowain Smith.

The more I type, the angrier I get, so im just gonna stop....but like I said, how can some of you say "Dont get mad at ricky cause he decided to move on....etc"....I know there were a few of you that posted that too....

We have every right to be mad that Ricky went off the deep end.

:fire: :fire: :fire: :fire: :fire:
 
for a brief second i hated ricky when my friend woke me up at 2am to tell me what had happened. But i agree, if he hates it and can be secure financially and just have fun the rest of his life, who can really blame him. If i was rich and got beat up at my job everyday and i could walk away and travel and just enjoy life at the age of 27 with a healthy body and a lot of money, come on...who wouldn't do that.
Most guys end up with a totally beat up body and cant even enjoy retirement after football.

I'm with most of the board in that i'm just truly disappointed in the timing and the way he handled it. He said it was such a burden for him and he's "finally free" which leads me to believe he could have easily made this decision at the end of last year. This wasn't a sudden thing, it's been in his head awhile now. This is a team and a city that turned his career around, gave him a new contract (if you remember how awful his old one was) and made him a community favorite and helped give him the strength to make this decision and battle his social disorder.

Basically, the trade to miami and the city of miami gave him a new lease on life and helped make him a better person/player and give him the strength to make this decision. I just wish he could have been slightly less selfish with the timing, and consider all they have done for him as well...either retire at the end of last year, or maybe announce that this would be his last season and retire at the end of this year as that is not uncommon in sports.

It's a shame, it really is, it's tough to fault him for the decision, you could make an argument for the timing, that's about it.

Having said all that, im not overly concerned with our team. It sucks that he's gone, but stranger things have happened, We've won with lamar smith and other not so big names at RB. We've won with fiedler at QB, we've won without receivers the likes of chambers/boston and certainly without a TE like mcmichael and we've won without a defense that was this good (i expect ogun to re-sign now). Is it going to be a super bowl run, probably not, but we had a lot of question marks as it was, there are no guarantees in this league.

So the morale of our team is probably at an all time low, with this culmination of our atrocious offseason, and our initial gameplan is probably completely shot but we have great leaders(zach, seau, taylor, etc...), and still enough to compete for a playoff spot in the NFL with the parity in this league. last three years there hasn't been an elite runningback winning the Super Bowl. So while i have mixed emotions and was devastated by the news, I'm ok with it and ready to move on, we will be fine as a team. Hopefully the front office doesnt panic anymore and throw out too much money to a less than capable back or make an unreasonable trade.

I'd like for them to pursue deshaun foster or michael bennett (highly unlikely as tice has made him his guy), maybe onterrio smith, and i wished we hadn't sent leonhard henry to europe now, but what can you do. It's time to move forward and it is nice to not be super bowl favorites for a change heading into the season. Teams will definitely take us a little more lightly and won't be as geared up to stop the run for sure, will ease some of the pressure off the o-line not having so many guys in the box i'm sure.

Should be interesting to see how it all shakes down, but it is not the end of the world, and it is extremely tough for you to hate and crucify Ricky for his decision to stop doing a job he just doesnt enjoy doing and pursue other things in life when he has millions of dollars and he's still healthy.
 
That is a great post TT. There is every reason to be angry.

The people that should be the angriest are his teammates.

I'm sure there will be plenty of speculation from the national media that the Dolphins are done without Ricky. And if I was a man on this team, the thought that one person could be so important that I'm considered a loser already, would piss me off to no end. I would make damned sure that when this season was over NO ONE would be saying that.
Anger is what you need in football. I look forward to getting written off.
 
Yeah your right TT, but at least it gave us a reason to get even more ****ed up....too bad the keg went dry .....i would have drank till i passed out if it didnt.
 
The only reason why I am mad at Ricky is not because he retired but because of the timing. If he retired in January, I would be fine with it. However, he waited all the way until right before the start of training camp to retire and that pisses me off because it doesn't give us time to find a replacement. We were prepared to go into the season with Ricky and all of a sudden he decides to walk out on us. He betrayed the team and betrayed his fans. I was a huge Ricky fan. I was so excited when he came to Miami. He worked hard on the field and played very well for us. However, he just decided to quit on us at a horrible time. Now we are going into the season unprepared at RB and we will struggle because of it. I don't care about the weed. As long as he avoided suspension, I don't care if he smoked weed. It isn't performance enhancing and if he wants to smoke marijuana I think he should be allowed to as long as he doesn't do it right before a game or anything. What makes me angry is how he walked out on the team.
 
Let Ricky do what he wants. I understand people being very upset but if he's gonna be happy retiring at the age of 27 then let the guy be happy. It's too bad that he didn't do this much much sooner but no one can do anything about it now. The only legitimate reason people should be very upset is if he retires then comes back and plays for a different team....now that would drive me insane. Like I said, I wish he would have done this a long long time ago so he didn't put our Phins in a bind like we are now but let the guy live his own life.
 
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