Just after being selected with the No. 5 pick out of Texas in the 1999 NFL Draft, former New Orleans Saints star running back Ricky Williams kicked off his pro career with a notorious ESPN The Magazine cover alongside his Hall of Fame head coach, Mike Ditka.
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In the picture, the 5-foot-10, 226-pound future Pro Bowler posed in a wedding dress, with Ditka looking dapper as his groom. The header? "Ricky and Ditka take the plunge."
Williams was almost instantly an impactful talent on the field. By his second season, he notched 1,000 rushing yards and nabbed nine touchdowns across just 10 healthy bouts. In his third pro season, his 1,245 rushing yards were the eighth-most in the NFL.
But his tenure with the franchise — like Ditka's — proved to be short-lived. Williams was traded to the Miami Dolphins during the 2002 offseason. He leveled up that year, earning Pro Bowl and All-Pro honors while pacing the league via his 1,853 rushing yards.
During a recent conversation with Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson, Williams looked back on that iconic first photograph with Ditka.
"That was the image of me wearing a wedding dress. It was all going around at the same time and so it was pretty clear that I had lost my mind!" Williams chuckled. "The timing of it does reek of Dennis [Rodman] vibes and around that time I got to meet Dennis for the first time and especially at that time, Dennis was an ICON... So I will say that I did love the fact that Dennis allowed his athletic ability to take him to other places; and he was known for his athletic ability but known for ‘more.’ So I did resonate with that but the truth is, I’m not really not out there like Dennis, you know?"
Ditka and Williams' ill-fated "marriage" lasted just one season, after the Saints went 3-13 in 1999.
"The idea came from Dan Le Batard. So Dan Le Batard and I got really close — he did a story for me at the end of my collegiate career and we just became friends and he was writing at the time for ESPN the Magazine and they said they wanted to put me on the cover," Williams added. "We went back and forth for a couple of weeks about what the cover should be and one day Dan called and said, “The idea that we came up with now is a wedding dress…” And when he first said it, I didn’t think about Dennis. I just laughed because I thought it was funny and I thought that it was an interesting way to portray the trade that Ditka had initiated."
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