Eric Adelson
May 23, 2005, 12:30 PM
His eyes flutter open every morning. He flops his left leg over the edge of the bed. He sits up. And Jay Williams prays:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Courage? Williams is here, in Chicago, where his NBA dreams go on without him. Where seen-aghost stares of shock now outnumber autograph requests. Where the team he grew up worshipping reached its first postseason since Jordan as Jay watched from a couch, still recovering from a 2003 motorcycle accident that should have ended his career and could have ended his life. Crowds he so badly wanted to delight now come and scream and dance and go home without a thought of him. The position he once owned belongs to Kirk Hinrich, who didn't even plan to work out for the Bulls until the unthinkable happened. Williams watched Hinrich get drafted from his hospital bed and thought, "That's my spot." Courage? Granted.
Wisdom? Jay's got plenty. He knows the sight of doctors frantically trying to save a life. He knows the sound of a friend weeping outside a hospital room after hearing the word "amputation." He knows what it's like to feel old, and want life to end. He knows what it's like to feel young, and helpless to control his future. He knows what it's like to need help to brush his teeth and wipe his behind. Wisdom? Jay knows much too much for a 23-year-old.
Serenity? Now that's trickier. See, Jay Williams has trouble accepting things he cannot change. He couldn't even accept that another player shared his name. He's not about to accept the end of his basketball life, even as guys he once schooled (or mentored) turn into Windy City darlings. Serenity could have left him fat, or immobile, or dead. No disrespect to a lovely prayer, but serenity is for losers.
WILLIAMS AT least seems to qualify for Happy to Be Here. Anyone would after jumping on a motorbike (without helmet or license) on a hot Chicago day only to end up with a fractured pelvis, three torn knee ligaments and a severed main nerve in the same leg. Williams thought he'd shifted into neutral before he revved the engine. His front wheel popped up, and the bike veered over a curb. He remembers hitting flush against a utility pole and clutching a doctor's hand as he thought, I don't want to die.
But Happy to Be Here is life's elevator music, not its sound track. Happy to Be Here doesn't get you from uninvited to ABCD camp to back-to-back NABC Player of the Year awards. Just about any rookie would be happy to be anywhere near No. 23's old locker, but Williams went and took it, saying it was time to "move on." He suffered more losses in his first two months in Chicago than he had in his three years at Duke. Happy to Be Here would have meant biting his lip. But Williams complained, loudly, about the canonized triangle, about his older teammates, about coach Bill Cartwright. He even mentioned that maybe he should be traded. Fellow Bulls fumed. At the time, teammate Rick Brunson summed up the groupthink when he said: "People in this league hate Duke because they win and are always successful. Jay is genuine and maybe too smart for his own good. You can't change the league." Happy to be there? Please.
But then his world flipped upside down. Surely the accident, which occurred early in his first off-season, one day after he had dominated at the Bulls' practice facility, would calm him down a notch. Surely waking up after surgery and spending the next two months in a hospital bed in Durham would spin him into a different emotional orbit.
And he did feel grateful-deeply grateful. Sad. Sorry. Then all those days and nights in the ICU continued to creep by until he didn't know which was which. He hallucinated. Pain didn't come and go; it just switched places. His body began its slow sag from fast-twitch to slow-jiggle. "Sad to see a man mangled like that," says Duke assistant Johnny Dawkins. "His leg was the size of two of mine." Would he ever be able to have a family? Play with his kids? Visitors kept showing up with that puppy-dog look and he-won't-ever-be-thesame sympathy. Williams thought about the NBA moving on without him. He had never spat at a fan, had never got fined. He had even graduated early. Of all the athletes in the world, Jay thought, Why me?
And one night-yet another night in that same damn bed-Williams' mind careened to a place it had never been. He saw a pair of scissors. He picked them up. He looked at his wrists.
He still can't explain what snuck up on him that night. He will look you straight in the eye and say, "I don't know." Maybe it was the restlessness that had propelled him so far, twisting and buckling in on itself like a suspension bridge in an earthquake.
He may never understand what brought him toand mercifully away from-that point. Safe to say, it was not serenity.
Nor was it serenity that got him back on his feet. No, that took some help. It took two or three aides, in fact, to get him into a wheelchair and then brace him as he tried to stand. "There were a lot of times I doubted myself," he says. "I was scared and intimidated about doing certain things. A lot of times I wanted to quit." One day during that brutal summer, Williams first balanced on two feet. A second passed. Then another. Pain shot through his leg. He slumped back in his chair and cried. Tears of joy.
Serenity didn't get him moving. That took the lure of fresh air. On a blazing Durham day, Williams hovered over his walker and willed himself, painfully, down his driveway to the mailbox. Once back inside, he collapsed and slept for hours.
Serenity didn't drop the crutches. That took the game. It happened when a basketball he shot while propped up on his crutches dinged off the rim in his backyard and rolled away. Jay instinctively went after it, realizing only after he'd retrieved it that he'd walked on his own for the first time since the accident.
And serenity didn't lead him back to Chicago. That took the carrot of vindication. "He's the type of guy," says Dawkins, "who, if you tell him he's not gonna do something, he thinks, well I'm gonna do it." Williams returned this April to work with elite trainer Tim Grover. By then he had full range of motion in his knee, a serviceable jump shot and enough hops to dunk. After a three-week stay in the ICU, two bedridden months in Durham and more than a year of rehab, he looked like Jay Williams again. It was a wonderful story, yes. And then again, no, not yet. At least not to him. That would take getting all the way back-back in uniform, back in the league. Maybe not even then. Because that would only be Happy to Be Here.
The morning of that first workout at Hoops The Gym, Williams did not look back on his rehab in awe or amazement. He did not breathe deep to sop up the moment. He was too terrified for that. What if he'd taken all those giant leaps only to find the last half-step would never come? Grover would tell him the truth, he wouldn't hold backredemption story be damned. That morning, somewhere between saying his serenity prayer and getting in the car, Williams burst into tears.
A handful of agents and friends gathered at the gym to watch. Williams had blocked out the millions of fans who had watched him win a national title at Duke, but now the small crowd rattled him. He went through all the drills. He hit some shots, made some cuts, pulled down some rebounds. Then he turned to the whispering group. Gulp.
Grover finally approached and said, "You'll be back by this October." Williams just stared. Then he blinked and said, "What?"
WILLIAMS DIDN'T visit the United Center this season until Game 5 of the first round. It was too close-and too far. So he wasn't around to see old friend Tyson Chandler come into his own, or to watch all those new guards bloom at once: Hinrich with his drives, Sixth Man winner Ben Gordon with his range, former Duke teammate Chris Duhon with his passing. Williams had had all that once. Just watching the games on TV back in Durham shredded his heart. "That's my team!" he couldn't help but think, even as he cheered them on. "It's a soft spot," says high school friend Brian Wilson. "He misses the game."
So he watched most of the first round from his agent's loft way across town from the arena, well out of earshot of the buzz that reminded Chicagoans of the early years of the Jordan era.
Williams had played his whole career to be a part of this moment. He has to see the irony in all those pick-and-rolls replacing the triangle, in the fiery Scott Skiles replacing the languid Cartwright. Time has proved Williams right. Except now, billboards and radios bear good-tidings-at-last about some other baby-face guard. "It was just a matter of getting the right pieces," Chandler says of the team's backcourt. "He would've got there too."
But can he still? Williams says he'd return to the Bulls, despite reservations about having to go headto-head with Duhon, whom he calls "my brother." Of Skiles, he says admiringly, "I wish I could play for the guy." But then reality hits. "I don't know if there's a spot for me here," he admits. The Bulls might agree. The team bought out his $7.7 million contract for about $3 million, even though he'd violated the terms when he got on that bike. Fifteen teams have expressed interest, his agent says, and franchises like the Raptors and Bobcats need him far more than the Bulls do. So he'll likely land in a place that will remind him more of the quiet version of the United Center, where his pro career started.
He does have a legacy with the team, though. It's measured mostly in the words of Hinrich, who says he thinks about Williams' accident all the time, and in those of a college teammate who calls him Superman.
"Seeing the things he did on the court, I never thought anything could happen to him," says Duhon, a second-round pick, who might not even be playing had Williams not gotten hurt. The eeriness didn't hit Duhon until the morning after the draft, when he boarded a plane for his first Bulls press conference. "It was kinda weird," he says. "You start to think, `This is Jay's team.' I wondered what he was feeling. The city had one Duke point guard, then another. I wondered what kind of questions I'd get, like, Do you like motorcycles?'"
Williams called Duhon a few days later. He threw out sincere congrats, and quickly dropped as much advice as he could. Big brother was back, and that gave Duhon some peace of mind. "Not being able to play would be tough for me," Duhon says. "I'm a guy who has to be on the court. It's tough to watch on TV. I'd need constant support to keep from killing myself." Duhon then looks away, unaware of just how close his statements are to his friend's darkest moment.
WILLIAMS HAS had more than enough of people tiptoeing around his plight, though he's still polite and gracious and generous, and still flashes that same disarming so-nice-to-see-you smile and plaintive awww-man! brow. But he also remains relentlessly honest. Aside from hopping on that bike, does he regret the things he said and did back then? Not really. "I took the fan's point of view," he says. "The city deserves more." He still comes up with didn't-mean-it-that-way gems like, "I'm excited for Chicago. I don't know if they have a championship-caliber team right now, but no All-Star-caliber players and they're still in the hunt." And on Hinrich and Duhon: "Their careers are happening because mine is on hold." Then he catches himself and adds, "here." Happening here.
If he does return, will he be his same exuberant self? Maybe he'll lose a little of that 42-inch vert, he says. Maybe he'll have to make up for any diminished skills by playing more "vet-like." And he's working on some backup, like starting his own packaging company and taking the Series 6 investors exam this summer. "Basketball is what I love to do," he says, "but basketball isn't me."
But come on. That daily routine—90 minutes each for rehab, court drills and weights—isn't tailored to a business career. And Williams isn't in Chicago to apply for a marketing job on the Magnificent Mile. We heard him call college games on ESPN and thought, "How great!" He thought, "What torture." But don't expect him to take an end-of-the-bench role just to get back in the game. "I'm not coming back to be a story," he says.
Face it, Williams' return to two feet, and then to Chicago, and maybe even to the NBA, satisfies only the rest of us. "As much of the time as I am happy," Williams says, "it's like, what's the next big thing to accomplish? My mind is always spinning on how to do better things."
A couple of weeks ago, Jay met his boy Brian at an Applebee's in New Jersey. They laughed and caught up and reminisced. Then Jay looked at the guy he used to run with, looked at him real seriously, and said, "So … when we goin' to the court? One-on-one? Me and you?"
Serenity? Thankfully, you don't always get what you pray for.
