Mike Williams is gone and all I got was Twitter blocked

Mike Williams.. Former Seattle Seahawks receiver.

It was a rather unlucky Friday the 13^th for now-former Seahawks wide receiver Mike Williams as the team announced today they have released him.

Word around the Twitterverse is that Big Mike Williams (also known as “BMW,” which I’m sure really helped his ego) had expected it “for some time now“. I expected it from the day he blocked me on Twitter, but we’ll get to that (so that I may show you just exactly how too seriously I take both 140-character social media and professional athlete maturity. And myself).

In a way, I feel bad for Williams, who had one of those redemptions stories in 2010 fans eat up like stadium nachos. You know, all gooey, messy but you really want more. The only difference is that Williams came cheap to the Seahawks in comparison to those nachos to your wallet.

I, too, was enthralled by the story. Williams, who had basically been blacklisted by NFL teams after becoming overweight and pretentious, had been given a second chance by the Big Man in the Hawks Nest – Pete Carroll. The Seahawks head coach has quickly made a name for himself these few years back in the pros by providing said redemption to lost athletic souls.

And it paid off. Williams was the Seahawks’ top receiver in 2010, with a respectable 65 catches and 751 yards for the team. Big Mike’s size allowed him to win match-ups in the air for catches and he appeared to have hands of steel. Not even a broken finger stopped him from catching nearly everything thrown his way that season.

The 12^th Man had found its very own Magic Mike, you know, without all of the body oil, gyration and 40-year-old women screaming for more. Okay, there was probably some of the lady screaming.

But 2011 was a different story. Along with a change in quarterback, which didn’t appear to help, Williams’ production plummeted and he instead became Tragic MIke. Us casual, armchair quarterbacks out in Hawk Land can’t be sure if it was a failure of Williams or mash potatoes QB Tarvaris Jackson not getting him the ball.

Toward the end of the year, Williams left the season with a broken leg.

And now he’s gone. We knew it couldn’t last, the question was whether one more year with the team would bring back that fairy tale BMW we had all grown to love.

Well, at least, most of us had grown to love. You see, Mike Williams blocked me on Twitter last year. It was literally July 2011 when he and I got into a bit of an electronic spat over his attitude on the social media platform.

You see, I take Twitter way too seriously, and I’m a very odd sports fan. Here’s the thing: I believe professional athletes owe some respect to fans, the people who make what they do even possible.

That’s not a sentiment held by a lot of people. Most fans would tell me to shut my face and just watch the game. I can’t do it. In a world where athletes work to brand themselves and demand attention on social networks, I swoop in as some type of hell bent hall monitor calling them out when I think they’re being, well, asshats.

And Mike Williams was an asshat with this tweet:

The rest is lost in the Twitterscape because archiving doesn’t go back that far and I can’t find keywords. But it went something like this:

My response was something very cordial and similar to “I do say, my good man, I take a smidgen of umbrage at your fairly racial tone. Please do appreciate that we’re all created equal and even the fair-skinned folk who have derived from the European continent enjoy watching you on the professional football sport pitch. Huzzah!”

Williams didn’t like my extremely-polite response and tweeted something else along the lines of “Sit on a bowling pin, biiiiiiitch!”

And then I said something along the lines of “blah, blah, blah, you’re an asshole who only cares about money blah, blah, blah.”

The next thing you know, my BFF Big Mike Williams has blocked me. It was an invigorating exchange of mature words, I assure you.

So, for nearly a year, I’ve not had the pleasure of following the “raw” thoughts of this consummate professional. Needless to say, he liked to brag about simply speaking his mind, whereas I thought he could have use a tad bit more humility, considering this was a shot at redemption, and he was not yet a star.

In the grand scheme of things, the argument was trivial, and his blocking of me was simply another day in the life of this armchair quarterback.

But there’s a big difference between Mike Williams and this writer: I still have a stake in the Seattle Seahawks this Friday the 13^th.

Now excuse me while I go police Twitter for some athlete using curse words like “darn it” and “shucks.”