Saved by the Bell: Jock, Shock and Two Smoking Barrels

There are lonely places and there are lonely places. And then there is wherever Jayson Williams is today.

On Monday, the former All-Star forward with the New Jersey Nets turned himself in and was charged with manslaughter 11 days after the death of limousine driver Costas Christofi. According to prosecutors, Williams recklessly played with a double-barreled shotgun while entertaining guests in his New Jersey mansion. The gun discharged and Christofi was fatally wounded.

After injuries had forced him to retire two years ago, Williams had parlayed his renowned rapier wit into a studio analyst’s gig with the NBA on NBC. Williams won’t be previewing any Lakers-Kings games any time soon, as NBC announced yesterday that he will not be on-air until his legal issues are resolved. And even though the Peacock Network eventually did bring Marv Albert back after his highly-publicized sex scandal several years ago, it is unlikely that Williams will rejoin Ahmad Rashad behind the sports desk regardless of the matter’s final outcome.

So here we are again—another case of a dumb jock letting fame get to his head, right? Williams had everything a man could ask for except for healthy legs and the slightest ounce of common sense. Like the O.J. Simpsons and Pete Roses of the world, fame made him feel invincible. And while each of those fallen athletes met different fates, the results were predictably messy.

Of course, it’s never that simple.

Williams walked what the New York Post has called the “tough streets” of Brooklyn as a youth. He walked them on his way back from school—where a speech impediment made him a laughingstock—to his home, where his mother fired a weapon at his father on one occasion and chased him with a butcher knife on another. He cried as he watched two sisters die of AIDS. He got into a number of legal scrapes early in his career as a late-night sidekick of Charles Barkley during their days as Philadelphia 76ers.

These episodes are not meant to be excuses for Williams’ alleged actions. Quite the contrary. They make it even more puzzling that Williams could so easily lose his grip on the good life once he achieved it.

And achieve he eventually did.

Williams resurrected his public image in the late 1990s with New Jersey. His gift of gab and stand-up comic’s sense of humor turned him into a media darling—his stories of New Jersey teammates have become the stuff of legend. He finally applied himself on the court, building himself into one of the league’s best rebounders. He was known for his charity work, particularly with Parkinson’s disease in recent years.

And he and his father built the $3.5 million estate where Costas Christofi died. Dubbed the “Who Knew” estate, the 65-acre affair stood as a testament to how far Williams had come. The manor’s title suggested that Williams appreciated the fact that—but for a few turns of fate, luck, divine intervention, or whatever—he could have ended up someplace very different.

Who knew, then, that Jayson Williams could keep trying to go where he could have ended up a long time ago? He was charged with reckless endangerment in 1994 after firing at the tire of a truck in the Meadowlands’ parking lot. He writes in his autobiography, Loose Balls, that he almost accidentally shot New York Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet in the face once during target practice at his home. And last November, he was fined for an altercation with police outside of a bar.

Texas Rangers reliever John Rocker will soon star in a low-budget movie “The Greenskeeper,” a low-budget flick about a slasher-killer at a golf club (“It’s Par For The Corpse,” the movie’s website raves). Better known for his earlier work as “The Bigot” in a 1999 Sports Illustrated interview in which he made derogatory comments about blacks, foreigners, homosexuals and the city of New York, Rocker appears at least somewhat on his way to an image makeover. For him, a psycho-slasher role is a big step up.

You have to wonder if he’ll make it last. Rocker probably wants what Williams hoped for in the closing pages of Loose Balls two years ago, as Mike Wise of the New York Times quoted yesterday: “I want people to look at me and say, ‘That’s a good man.’ Even the ones who say, ‘Isn’t that the guy who used to be so wild, who used to be drinking and fighting so much, who was always getting in trouble?’ Especially them.”

Wow, Jayson. Who knew?