From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
Getting body slammed by 250-lb. linebackers? Piece of cake. For running back Ricky Williams, the hard part came next—facing a bunch of paunchy middle-aged reporters. Terrified of interviews, the 5'10", 228-lb. football player was famous for wedging himself into his locker stall, keeping his visored helmet on and giving mainly monosyllabic answers. "He was seen as a head case," says ESPN analyst Joe Theismann. "Here's a kid crawled up in his locker and scared to death of the media, and you're thinking, 'What kind of weird bird is this?'"

Turns out Williams was wondering the same thing. Now leading the National Football League in rushing for the first-place Miami Dolphins, Williams, 25, struggled for years to understand the debilitating fears that led teammates and even friends to think he was crazy. Williams so dreaded other people that he holed up in his house for weeks and almost walked away from football. Then in early 2001 he saw a therapist and found a name for his demons—Social Anxiety Disorder, a depression-like chemical imbalance that affects roughly three million Americans. "Just knowing I'm not crazy or a weirdo was a huge relief," he says. "From the moment I had something to call it, I started getting better."

Williams's work with his therapist has led to a resurgence on the field and off. Since being traded to the Dolphins from the New Orleans Saints this March, he has done such previously unimaginable things as signing autographs and playing cards with teammates. And what of his most dreaded foe, the microphone-wielding reporter? After what was probably his best professional game ever in a 30-3 victory over the New York Jets on Sept. 22, Williams stood outside his locker and—with helmet nowhere in sight—cheerfully talked to reporters until they ran out of questions. "I got the help I needed," he says. "It feels good."

Growing up in San Diego, he was only 5 when his father, Errick, and mother, Sandy, a U.S. Navy purchasing agent, divorced. Ricky, his twin sister Cassie and younger sister Nisey did the cooking and cleaning while their mom studied accounting at night.

At the University of Texas at Austin, Williams won the 1998 Heisman Trophy and was a fan favorite who willingly signed autographs and bantered with teammates. Yet it was in college that things began to change. Texas teammate Ricky Brown remembers Williams always wearing headphones to avoid conversations. "A lot of star athletes have their quirks," Brown says. "But he was in his own world."

Still, the New Orleans Saints picked Williams in the first round of the '99 NFL draft. "They expected me to be the savior," he says, but instead he was hobbled by injuries during his first two seasons. "I had always developed my self-worth through football," says Williams. "So when I didn't play well, I just thought I wasn't worth much."

The combination of high expectations and low self-esteem turned him into a recluse. He skipped team meetings and sometimes fled the locker room in his uniform to elude reporters. Rock bottom was refusing to take his daughter Marley, 3 (whom he had with a girlfriend he met in New Orleans), to the park for fear of running into people. "I thought, 'I'm not a good father, a good friend, a good teammate, so what am I? I'm a monster,'" he says. "I was ashamed."

When he told a college friend he felt this way, "she said, 'No, you just need help,'" he recalls. At his first meeting with a therapist in March 2001, he "couldn't even look me in the eye," says Janie Barnes, a counselor in Baton Rouge, La. "He felt people were watching his every move." She diagnosed his disorder and recommended he go on an antidepressant, which Williams took for a year.

The changes have been gradual but profound. Williams can now walk into crowded elevators without feeling mortified and likes to keep the top down on his black 2003 Ferrari. He also continues to see a therapist—though not Barnes anymore. He broke off their weekly sessions so he could ask her 32-year-old flight attendant daughter on a date. The two now have a son, Prince, and live near each other in Fort Lauderdale.

Being a father is perhaps his biggest newfound thrill. In the spring he and Marley (who lives with her mother in Massachusetts and stays with Williams one week a month) went to Disney World together and had a blast. "Now we can go to playgrounds, to parks, wherever," says Williams, beaming. "And now I tell her I love her so often, she has to tell me to stop saying it."

Imagine that: someone telling Ricky Williams to be quiet.

Alex Tresniowski
Lori Rozsa in Miami and Kevin Brass in Austin