Why Ricky Williams Chose Weed over Football

Great Moments in Weed History

David Bienenstock

Tv & Film, Comedy, History

4.8 • 659 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Heisman Trophy-winning tailback Ricky Williams famously chose natural grass over professional football back in 2004,, the NFL, sportswriters and many fans reacted with horror and anger. How dare one of the greatest football players in history walk away from the game that made him rich and famous? With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, Abdullah and Bean decided to ask the man himself, and found out that from his first time getting high, to starting his own cannabis company (appropriately called Highsman), to studying Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, Ricky Williams has always blazed his own path in life. He also led the way for a generation of athletes who successfully pushed back against professional football's hypocritical and draconian ban on cannabis, leading to a new era where the NFL has now stopped drug testing players for weed, and has just donated $1 million to study how the plant's medicinal properties could actually help players deal with pain management and provide neuroprotection from concussion. PATREON Please support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video versions of this podcast and private seshes, plus cool rewards like a signed book or signature lighter. And it truly helps us make the best show possible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, how's it going, folks? It's Abdullah and Bean. And welcome back for our Super Bowl week special
0:07.2	episode, which also happens to be another classic history episode of great moments in weed history.
0:16.1	Isn't that right, Bean? Yeah, and I don't want to disappoint anybody, but I feel like making a pun about smoking a
0:23.0	Super Bowl while you watch the Super Bowl is pretty played out.
0:27.0	You will not catch me doing it.
0:28.8	Yeah, yeah, right.
0:29.5	And you just totally did it, so that one's marked off the list.
0:34.6	There's our Super Bowl pun.
0:36.3	You can't say we didn't deliver on that.
0:38.5	Our guest for today is football and cannabis legend Ricky Williams in 1998 while he was at the
0:46.6	University of Miami. Ricky Williams won the Heisman trophy. If you're not a football person,
0:52.0	this is the trophy awarded annually to the most outstanding
0:55.0	college football player in the nation.
0:58.1	And no, I cannot let the Heisman pun go.
1:03.1	I got to get that one into.
1:04.7	Yeah, and neither could Ricky Williams, incidentally, because that's the name of his cannabis brand.
1:10.5	It's called Heisman.
1:12.6	Definitely a brand name after Bean's Heart. So a little bit more on Ricky. After suffering
1:18.8	through a couple injury-prone seasons, he was getting banged up quite a bit out there, going very
1:23.8	hard. In 2002, Ricky Williams led the NFL in rushing yards and scored 16 touchdowns.
1:30.0	This guy was no slouch. He was absolutely a superstar. But that's also the season that he first
1:36.5	failed a drug test for cannabis. This set off a 10-year odyssey of at least 500 additional drug tests from the NFL, including five that
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