Another sad chapter in Jayson Williams' fall
Posted: Monday, April 27, 2009 1:01 PM
It’s likely that there aren’t many people left who give a rat’s tail about Jayson Williams, the former Nets forward who got drunk and shot his chauffeur. And I wouldn’t, either. Except I used to know him as a terrific guy who never left an autograph unsigned or a kid without a couple kind words.
New York City cops had to Taser him early this morning. He was in his hotel room, reportedly drunk, surrounded by empty pill bottles, and maybe suicidal. He was restrained and taken to a psychiatric unit for evaluation.
“Jayson is doing fine. He said he was fine,” his manager, Akhtar Farzaie reportedly told The Daily News. “All of us are here to be by his side as friends.”
That’s the sort of thing managers are paid to say. The truth is Jayson isn’t doing fine at all. In 2002, two years after he retired at the end of a very good nine-year career, he went for a night of revelry with friends in a limo. Drinks were involved. They stopped back at his palatial estate in New Jersey.
Jayson wasn’t the kind of guy to leave the limo driver sitting in the car with nothing to do while he was having fun with his pals. So he invited the driver inside. While showing off a shotgun inside the house – Jayson loved guns, despite several demonstrations of his inability to handle them – the gun went off and killed the limo driver, Costas “Gus” Christofi.
Jayson was charged with manslaughter. In 2004, after a lengthy trial, he was convicted of trying to cover up his role in the death, but a jury deadlocked on the manslaughter charges. He’s awaiting a retrial.
Since then, his wife has filed for divorce, accusing him of abuse and adultery and drug use. And now this.
I’ve never been the kind of guy who hangs out with the athletes I cover. I keep my distance, trying to keep things on a professional basis. But it was impossible to keep your distance from Jayson. The product of a big multi-racial family in New York, he simply collected people. I was the columnist for the local newspaper when he was playing, and he made me his friend.
I still didn’t hang with him, but we had some long talks during which he told me about losing a sister to a murderous mugger in New York and another sister to AIDS she contracted from a tainted blood transfusion. When he hit the big time in the NBA, he took in his sister’s children and raised them as his own.
So there’s a lot of good in the man. There’s also a lot of pain that tended to show up when he’d had too much to drink. There was also too much show-off – he was the little kid in the big family who got attention by doing funny and outrageous things. That’s how Christofi died – Jayson was being funny and outrageous. Except when the gun went off, the fun ended.
I get the feeling it ended forever, that life can not have been anything but torture for him ever since. Whether he’s guilty of a felony or not, he did something stupid and a man died. I know Jayson cares about the loss he’s responsible for. I know it tortures him. He’s that kind of guy.
If I hadn’t known Jayson, I’d probably be ripping him up and tearing him down and railing about the culture of violence in sports. That’s what we do, and I don’t just mean columnists. We’re all great at knowing the motives and deficiencies of people we’ve never met. It’s the ones we have met that present the complexities.
So instead, I’m sitting here writing about what’s happened to a man who had it all – and seemed to deserve it. And now he has the wreckage of a life so tortured he seems to be trying to end it. In a way, he deserves that, too.
