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Saints RB
Ricky Williams
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I can sympathize with Saints RB Ricky Williams. He recently announced that he’d
been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, which might explain some of his strange
behavior the past couple of years.
It’s probably hard for the typical fan to sympathize with the complaints of a
highly paid professional athlete. But the truth is, Williams is a person like everyone
else. He has great athletic ability, which earns him a lot of money, but that doesn’t
make him immune to normal human emotions.
Most pro athletes are like most people — they’re sensitive to embarrassment,
humiliation and public scrutiny. I’ve read surveys that report that the fear of
public speaking is second only to the fear of death on the list of things people dread.
Pro football players suffer from that same type of performance anxiety.
It’s the sort of fear that most men feel when they ask a woman out on a date. No
matter how many times you’ve done it, there’s always a bit of trepidation
because you don’t want to be rejected. It’s bad enough if it’s a one-on-one
situation. Imagine if you had an audience of hundreds of thousands of people sitting in a
stadium, watching on TV and listening on the radio as you walked forward to ask a woman
out.
None of us wants to be embarrassed, and as a pro athlete, you learn that embarrassment
is unavoidable. You are going to drop the occasional easy pass. You are going to fumble.
You are going to trip over your own feet. You are going to miss blocks, run into your
teammates, get injured and lose games. If you play long enough, all these things will
happen to you, and when they happen, it’ll always be in front of a huge audience.
Williams’ situation has been exacerbated by the fact that pressure has come on so
many fronts. It started when former Saints head coach Mike Ditka traded all of the
Saints’ draft picks to select Williams, calling him "the final piece of the
puzzle." Ditka assured his critics that Williams was all the Saints needed to win.
So before he even arrived in New Orleans, there were incredibly high expectations that
Williams justify being the first player in the history of the NFL to be a team’s
entire draft class.
I’ve heard Williams state that he doesn’t feel pressure, but I don’t
believe him. If he’s human, his rookie year must have been incredibly tough.
Then there was the strange, incentive-laden contract negotiated by rapper Master
P’s upstart agent business. Williams was paid nearly $9 million in a signing bonus,
but the contract basically locked him into near league-minimum salaries unless he proved
to be among the best four or five backs in the history of the league.
That contract created its own pressure because people wanted to know if Williams
regretted signing it, if he really thought he could reach the levels of production
required to earn his bonuses and if he thought people were laughing at him.
I recall an interview on ESPN’s "SportsCenter" a couple of years ago,
during which Williams said something to the effect of, "Well, when I go out and
perform and end up making more money than everyone else, who’ll be laughing
then?"
Either people were going to laugh at him, or he was going to laugh all the way to the
bank. But to win the laughing game, Williams had to perform on the field, and before he
got too far into his rookie season, he was beset by injuries.
There’s a certain amount of embarrassment and frustration that comes with being
injured. We’re a society that takes great pride in toughness. Football players are
among the toughest of men. We like running backs who deliver the blow rather than taking
it. We love linebackers and safeties who deliver a big hit. We love quarterbacks who get
crushed and keep getting up.
So a player who gets injured is seen as weak, fragile and unreliable. The criticism an
athlete receives for being injured can be more devastating than the injury itself. Turning
on the radio to hear people rant about your injury is akin to overhearing an ex-girlfriend
tell her friends that you have a small, well … you know.
It hurts.
The reality is that an athlete’s body is like a race car. The car can get banged
up and keep running, but it can’t race with a flat tire. It can’t race with a
broken suspension. It simply can’t continue when it’s severely damaged.
That’s not an indictment of the car. The car is not weak. It’s not a wimp.
It’s not fragile. It’s just a victim of physics.
Ricky Williams had the bad luck to get injured his rookie year. So on top of the
criticism that he wasn’t worth all those draft picks, and on top of the jeers that he
was foolish to sign the incentive-laden contract came criticism that he was a weak,
fragile wimp.
Maybe this social anxiety disorder diagnosis will make people back off a little bit.
Williams is human, and he’s been under tremendous pressure. With a little bit of
patience and compassion, he’ll turn into the back everyone expected him to be.
Reggie Rivers played for the Denver Broncos from 1991 to ’96. His Web site is
located at http://www.reggierivers.com |
