Here’s how I would describe it: Before I hit the ground, something large hit me in the head. I know now that it was Willie, flying in at a death angle, dropping his shoulder and running it through my temple into my tonsils. The blow dislodged the ball and knocked me out. It was the kind of borderline hit that today might get him fined. Being knocked out in a football game is not a painful event at impact. It is a dimensional vacuum through an extremely narrow wormhole. It is a piano falling on your head in the middle of your recital. It’s a system reboot.

A look back at the long, strange journey of Ricky Williams, who’s reportedly retiring from the NFL:

It’s a mighty long goddamn run Ricky’s made to paradise. And now here I am, alone on the beach, the jet lag sitting on my shoulders heavy as wet sand, looking for footprints.

Ricky wanted to be found badly enough for him to have narrowed his whereabouts to a particular notch of Australia’s east coast, but not so badly to have offered up exactly where, exactly when. Which means . . . which means what? Maybe he’d rather keep secrets than appointments. Maybe the social-anxiety disorder that came to define him is acting up now that he’s quit the Paxil. Maybe he’s had enough of everybody wanting something from him. Maybe he just wants to be left alone.

A veteran writer’s very first trip to the big game.

On deadline, the author captures a crestfallen quarterback.

An excerpt from one of the author’s big-game dispatches.

How humble and bizarre were the Patriots’ beginnings?

In one of their earliest games, a fan ran into the end zone to bat down an opponent’s last-play, game-tying touchdown pass attempt. The fan then retreated, vanishing into the crowd with a Patriots victory assured.

In another game, the stands caught on fire, interrupting play as evacuating fans congregated at the 50-yard line. Several other Patriots games were delayed by power outages, impromptu snowball fights or referees who refused to take the field until they were paid. In one memorable pregame sequence, an ex-player was plucked from the stands to suit up, then made the tackle on the opening kickoff.

Terrell Owens is out of work, out of money, and currently in court with all four of his baby mamas. And for the first time in his long, checkered, and spectacular career, nobody wants to throw him the ball.

Are sports video games art?

You forget, when you’ve been away from sports and sports watching for a while, how visually and emotionally ravishing sports of all kinds can be. Even football — which I have gone to impressive lengths to avoid watching and playing — can be as darkly gorgeous as peering down on warring amoebae through a high-powered microscope. Something like humanity’s cultural ancientness is revealed through sport, which reminds us of what we actually are: savage, noble, strange, playful, and, above all, creative beings.

Beleaguered, battered and booed for much of his career, the former No. 1 pick did the unthinkable, outdueling Drew Brees in a postseason epic to lead San Francisco to within one game of the Super Bowl.

A look at the dysfunctional Kansas City Chiefs organization:

Todd Haley walked into the public relations office at Chiefs headquarters on a Thursday in early December. Four days before he was fired as the team’s coach, he wanted to talk about what life was like inside this organization. But he didn’t know who else might be listening.

Looking up toward the ceiling, he darted into a back hallway before hesitating. Then he turned around, going back through a door and stopping again. Haley suspected that many rooms at the team facility were bugged so that team administrators could monitor employees’ conversations. Stopping finally in a conference room, Haley said he believed his personal cellphone, a line he used before being hired by the Chiefs in 2009, had been tampered with.

On the New England quarterback’s time at the University of Michigan:

Brady’s resolve stiffened. He went to Schembechler Hall, the team’s football facility, almost every night to watch extra film. He soaked up everything: schemes, opposing players’ tendencies, the minds of Michigan’s defensive coaches. Slowly, a different quarterback emerged. Brady recognized defenses before the ball was snapped. He knew which receivers would be open and, in what would become his hallmark, became unshakable in the pocket, able to maintain both his concentration and his accuracy when he was about to get hit. On the bus after games Brady could go through every incompletion in order and tell his teammates what went awry: wrong route, wrong read, bad throw, missed block. He had not yet watched film.

Tim Tebow became “compelling” because he became a character in the great national dumbshow that is our culture war. And we should be very clear about one thing — he wasn’t dragooned into this. Nobody drafted him. He walked into this role with his eyes open. Before he ever took a snap in the NFL, he appeared in an anti-choice television ad with his mother that was sponsored by Focus on the Family, an influential anti-choice, anti-gay-rights organization founded by the Rev. James Dobson. He knew what he was doing.