RICKY'S RUN FOR THE BORDER

He's got this dream about buyin' some land / He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands / And then he'll settle down / there's a quiet little town / And forget about everything.

Sports Illustrated's Michael Silver is reporting today that the Miami Dolphins are about to give Ricky Williams their blessing to come play for the Toronto Argonauts.

Why is Ricky making his run for the border? Simple. Silver concludes he needs the cash.

I am an Argos fan, because of . . . well, geographical convenience, mostly. (Growing up in the Kingston, Ont., area in the late '80s-early '90s, there was no other choice when it came to CFL allegiance: we hardly got any news about the Hamilton Ticats, Montreal didn't have a team and the Ottawa Rough Riders were taking the long slide down. So the Argos were it.)

Yet for reasons I can't pinpoint, I'm not overjoyed at increasingly likely prospect of the Argos signing a recent NFL rushing leader. It's not that I think Williams is washed up, although those 2002 and '03 seasons in Miami when he carried the ball 25 times a game behind a weak line took a toll on him. Even in his diminished state last year in Miami, when he had lost too much weight and too much explosion after a year away from football and yielded featured-back status to Ronnie Brown, he still gained 280 yards in the final two games of the season.

How serious is Williams about coming up here? How do the Argonauts plan to use him? How much of a grace period does he get with the media?

Suppose that in the season opener on June 17, the Argos win (they're playing Hamilton, so that's a safe bet), but Williams is used sporadically and rushes like seven times for 25 yards, which wouldn't be unreasonable to presume considering it will be his first game of Canadian ball. How much fallout will there be?

The Argos got a lot of bad press two seasons ago when they acquired John Avery -- the incumbent at Williams' position, tailback -- and their running game remained in low gear. It wasn't Avery's fault. When a football team has a struggling running game, it usually stems from the blockers, the blocking schemes and the play-calling, not the guys carrying the ball.

But those kind of nuances tend to gets lost when the media are sharpening their knives like an actor in a Quizno's commercial.

Bottom line: From a football standpoint, Toronto bringing in Ricky Williams is really the kind of decision that, like Hockey Canada putting Todd Bertuzzi on the Olympic team, that can only be justified if you win a championship or come damn close. Bertuzzi's bed-soiling in Torino wasn't the main reason Team Canada flopped, but it just gave the critics more ammunition.

So if this comes to pass, the Argos have to hope Williams still wants to play and that he can help Toronto's offence rival its defence and special teams -- it says something that the most dangerous Argo over the past two seasons, kick returner Bashir Levingston, doesn't actually play offence.

More importantly, maybe it starts Williams toward finding his purpose in life. He'll probably find his before I find mine.

OTHER BUSINESS

• Larry Brown's '70s fashion ensemble has to be seen to be believed. As David Letterman once said, "I had friends back then. Why did they let me leave the house lookin' like that?"
• By the way, with Eric Crouch making a comeback, the Argos could have two Heisman winners in their backfield. This has happened before -- Andre Ware backed up Doug Flutie in 1996.
• A gossip columnist is reporting that the Arizona Cardinals have told Matt Leinart not to party it up so much with Paris Hilton. As one Deadspin commenter put it: "This has got be bad for Paris. You know you have a bad rep when the Arizona Cardinals look down on you."
• Score one for my pal Jay Fitzsimmons, my one-time roommate at Queen's. A couple nights ago, the CBC's Rex Murphy had a commentary which Jay (he's a PhD student, so he knows his stuff), offered a rebuttal to which was read on The National: "Rex Murphy is of the opinion that the science of climate change is'contentious.' His opinion is irrelevant - the world is getting warmerregardless." Which is a nice way of saying that Rex Murphy is a pretentious windbag, I guess.

That's all for now. Let's hear it for Helix.