‘IT STAYS WITH YOU FOREVER’
14 years later, Williams remains tormented by shooting as he continues long road to recovery
WHEN it came at all, sleep would come fitfully for Jayson Williams, and while he was waiting to drop off, that’s when the demons and everything that accompanied them would come. How else to fight them off, even for just a few hours, but with a drink, and then another and then another? Life was a lonely place for Williams, a few years removed from serving an 18-month prison sentence for the accidental killing of limo driver Costas Christofi and subsequent coverup and light years from his nine-year NBA career, the last seven seasons with the New Jersey Nets before a collision with a teammate shattered his knee cap, cracked his tibia and knocked his life off the rails. He was estranged from his two daughters. The 6-foot-10 ex-power forward’s weight had ballooned to 315 pounds and, as much as he hated his own company, Williams — always the life of the party and of the locker room — often preferred to take to his cabin in the woods alone for weeks on end. There he could drink his “moonshine” in peace. Except there was no peace, and there likely never will be. Williams, who said he has been sober for the past 11 months and now volunteers at Epiphany, a rehab center in Delray Beach, Fla., where he most recently received treatment, said he can never escape that night in February 2002, when, inside hi s Milford, N.J. , home, he snapped a shotgun closed and it went off, striking Christof i in the chest, killing him. “Everyday, all day long ,” Williams said when asked how often he thinks about that night, which began with friends at a Harlem Globetrotters game and ended in tragedy. “Any time I have idle time. Any time you feel that life is going well, that comes up. Any time life is going bad, it’s because of that night.
“There’s no freakin’ pill that you can take and no drink you can have that makes you not [think about it]. ... S--t, when you accidentally take somebody’s life, there’s no words for that. There’s no actions for that. That’s just it.
“It stays with you forever. You were reckless. You had an accident. You made a mistake. You were a coward by trying to cover it up. You were selfish and you f--king live with it.”
Williams spoke by phone Saturday from Delray Beach. It was 7 a.m. — a time he had insisted upon to chat — and he had already been to the gym for his 4:45 a.m. workout, which he does six days a week. He had just returned from a McDonald’s run, a trip he said he makes every Saturday when he buys big breakfast platters for all the clients at Epiphany.
“Forty-three Saturdays in a row,” said Williams, who runs Epiphany’s adventure therapy program, according to Greg Goyins, the center’s co-founder and former Wall Street wunderkind before the loss of four friends in the 9/11 attacks sent him into a substance-abuse tailspin it took him years to pull himself out of.
“Jayson came to us about a year ago and was interested in working in the treatment industry,” Goyins said. “And while I found that interesting, I thought he wasn’t going to have the makeup to do it or it was a passing fancy. But he’s turned out to be an invaluable member of our team.
“It’s about finding what wakes you up in the morning. … Because of the life Jayson has lived, he’s been able to help our clients find that passion.”
THE 48-year-old Williams said his work has given him purpose, made him accountable and given him a reason to sleep at night because he can’t wait to get up in the morning. He said it also has made him feel like part of a team again. That’s a feeling he said he has missed since his playing career ended so abruptly in April 1999.
“Here is where I found out where t he
world’s needs and my life skills and abilities meet,” Williams said. “My purpose in life is just getting up in the morning and helping others. Well, I think I’m helping others, but they’re really helping me.
“To be quite honest with you, before I couldn’t find my purpose. I used to have something to get sober for — like basketball. Something was dangling that carrot in front of me. I would do it because it was my job. Here I’m doing it because I met some really good people, and they have brought accountability.
“That’s what’s different this time,” said Williams, who has gotten sober for lengthy periods since his release from prison in 2012 only to slide back down the rabbit hole. “And I’ve kinda found my purpose right now. I love being around people who don’t judge you.
“We get different clients every 45 days, so every time I think I’m feeling better and then you go pick up somebody from the airport and you see this kid and he’s in a wheelchair because of heroin and you hear his story and you go, ‘Man, I can’t leave here. I got 45 more days.’ … Every once in a while you go, ‘ OK, I’m going back to New York and getting back to life,’ and you meet a new client and he says, ‘You gonna be here with me?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be here.’ And you run into another one and another one. So I try not to think too far ahead. I just think about what my job is today.”
On Saturday, Williams’ job was to pick up breakfast and then take a group to the nearby Atlantic Ocean for a sailboarding activity. Last week ex-Knick Charles Oakley, who — along with ex-Jet Curtis Martin — has stuck by Williams through it all, flew down, played some basketball and cooked barbecue for the Epiphany clients. Williams said Oakley and Martin were “the only ones” to visit him in prison.
“He’s doing good,” said Oakley, who was supposed to be with Williams that night in 2002, but changed his plans late. “He’s fighting an up hill battle, and he knows it. He’s found something that completes him right now.
“I think he’s for real. ... But it’s the end of [his] chances. He knows that.”
Goyins said the former St. John’s star has been invaluable to the success of Epiphany, a 160-bed coed facility that opened in October 2015.
“He’s a good man,” Goyins said. “He spends an extraordinary amount of time counseling these guys. ... I think he is as much a reason why we’re successful as any of our clinicians or anyone else who works here.”
WILLIAMS said everything he does is “because of that night” when he killed Christof i and then went to great lengths to cover it up.
“To be honest, what I’m doing down here is really a defense mechanism,” he said. “I try to stay busy and try to help people so I don’t think of that night. Understand this, and this has to be clear: I’m not helping people down here; they’re helping me. ... I know I can’t help nobody because I don’t know how to beat this beast.”
Williams, who is the subject of a “60 Minutes Sports” profile scheduled to air Tuesday night on Showtime, said he really didn’t want to do any interviews. But he said he agreed to help try to remove the stigma often attached to substance abuse and alcohol recovery.
“I find that so many people come to treatment and they don’t want anyone to know,” he said. “And I don’t understand that. We have to lift that stigma off of people.”
But he said he also worries about how this renewed attention will impact the Christof i family and his daughters, Tryumph, 14, and Whizdom, 12, with whom he said he does not have a relationship. Williams is divorced from their mother.
“My kids will come back when they feel comfortable with me,” he said. “I’m not going to rush the process. There might be a time when my family says, ‘Hey, Jay, we don’t ever want you back.’ And I have to live with that because I have hurt a lot of people, including the Christofis. And when I do an interview like this, the first thing I think of is, ‘Shoot, I’m opening up scabs for the Christofi family.’ That’s the first people I think about.”
Williams said he would still like the opportunity to sit down with Christofi’s sister, Andrea Adams, and apologize, though he did express his sorrow in court when he was sentenced after pleading guilty to aggravated assault. He also paid the family $3.5 million.
“I opened my bank account, and it was whatever they wanted — three and a half million dollars. I know that’s no price for anything. … It’s going to take time. You can’t force yourself upon somebody. That’s the one thing about sobriety. You have to have patience.
“I want them to know that there’s not a day, not a minute, that goes by when I don’t think about the damage I did. ... I’ve done everything a man is supposed to do and not supposed to do, which is why I love my space down here. I’m a f--ked-up person and I’m around people who are better than me, who have more courage than me and who are teaching me how to get better every day.
“I’m with a bunch of people here who have caused a lot of damage in their lives, even more than me if there is such a thing because I’ve done the ultimate. But we all have one thing in common: Getting through the day without letting addiction beat us. That’s my life. … If nobody ever mentioned my name in the media again, I’d be fine. I’m happy helping people here.”