Fort Lauderdale, Fla. ? I may be a minority of one today, but I can’t help it: I feel sorry for Ricky Williams. There’s no defending him. There’s no saying he wasn’t properly warned. There’s no pretending after a fourth positive drug test that a year’s suspension wasn’t just the NFL’s right but most likely its duty.

There’s probably no real reason to feel bad for him, either, considering he goes around believing happiness is defined, “on the inside, not the outside.” Just the other night, asked about what he thought about the NFL’s pending decision, he said, “Right now, I’m happy. I’ve got gas in my car.”

I still feel sorry for him. What Williams has done allows people to view him as a circus clown at best and a monumental loser at worst. No matter what Williams does with himself from here, this is his second season missed, and he’ll be put up there with Dwight Gooden and Chris Washburn for wasted talent.

He’ll be on the sporting Mount Rushmore of squandered careers with Mike Tyson, Darryl Strawberry and Len Bias, if you want to start a sports-talk debate. Sub in Steve Howe or David Thompson.

The big question with Williams is whether it was marijuana again or just some herb, whether he fell off the wagon again or just didn’t read the labels of his alternative diet.

It hardly matters, though. He’d used up all the goodwill chips awhile back. And that’s the sad part, because what he did last year was become one of the good stories, the really important lessons, in sports.

He showed you can have a second act. He showed with the proper frame of mind, and the right way of carrying yourself, you could turn the most negative into a nice positive. That doesn’t mean you had to trust him or believe he was long for the Dolphins.

But you couldn’t talk to Williams this past year and come away not liking him no matter how hard you tried. And I tried. I called him a fraud. I wrote for the Dolphins not to bring him back after he quit on them. On and on.

There wasn’t any street-con in Williams. He didn’t fit into the neat caricature, though you sure could present it that way after watching him put on his white shirt, white pants, white socks, white shoes – all his clothes were white, the color of purity.

He didn’t shave, at least until his NFL drug hearing. “Shaving is vain,” he’d say, “and I’m trying to get all things vain out of my life.”

He’ll be 30 when he’s eligible to play again. That’s getting far ahead of the story of a guy who constructs his life around putting one foot in front of the other. But it’s not so far ahead that you can’t root for him.

Here’s hoping his legacy won’t be beside Gooden and Strawberry and Washburn and the athletes remembered for wasting talent.

Here’s hoping he’s the next Jennifer Capriati, someone else who everyone gave up on and returned a champion.