Life Is Not an Accident

by Jay Williams

  After Reed’s comment, I thought, Am I ready for this now? Is TV my new direction? Months later, while still working for Ceruzzi, I called Reed to tell him I wanted to give broadcasting another shot if he would have me.

  14

  Mended

  Going into television wasn’t a new idea. I had worked a number of college games for ESPN2 and ESPNU when I was first recovering from my injuries, and it wasn’t a great experience for me, the network, or, probably, the viewers.

  I didn’t know anything about doing television. I’d been interviewed on camera, but I was never a great sound-bite guy; at Duke we learned to give the politically correct answer, because Coach K didn’t want anything taking away from our focus on the team. So if someone asked me what I thought about the game we’d just played, I would say, “Well, we did everything we needed to do. We worked hard, we ran our plays correctly, and we executed defensively.” And if they got into more specifics about an opponent who elbowed me or something like that: “Well, I’m not really worried about that; my game spoke for itself, our team played hard.” Boring, right? That was the point. It always seemed to work for K, but never the viewer.

  Now it was my job to be interesting, insightful, and knowledgeable about two teams I didn’t know very well, if at all, and I had to do it while learning all the simple technical things that everybody else learned in Broadcasting 101: whether to look at the camera or at the person who’s asking me a question; how to think and talk while a producer is giving me information in my ear about the next thing coming up; even just how to have a conversation with a studio host, a coach, my play-by-play partner. And I had to learn those things in front of a national audience, in real time, in the deep end of the pool.

  Dan Steir, head of college basketball production at ESPN took me under his wing, not so much on the technical stuff as in learning to communicate on-air. “Less is more,” he’d tell me. “I need you to sssllowwww dowwwwwnn.” I’m a Jersey guy; we talk fast. Dan would look over my tapes and call me, and when I answered I’d say, “Heyyyy, Daaannn, how are yooouuuu?” And he’d respond with “I’m good, Jason. I just watched a tape of you, and I need you to sssllowwww dowwwwwnn. I need you to e-nun-cee-ate.” And no matter how slow I thought I was talking, he wanted it slower. It got very frustrating for me, and I’m sure for him, too. He was teaching me—coaching me, really—but I just wasn’t ready to learn what he wanted me to do.

  The truth is that at the time, I didn’t want to be doing television at all. It felt a little like giving up, packing it in. I was a player! I still thought I was going to make it back to the league, and that was what I wanted to focus on. It was weird to be commenting on seniors I may have played against when I was a junior and they were freshmen. I didn’t want to watch younger guys play basketball; I wanted to be the one on the court, playing against the best in the world. This was not how I pictured my future.

  The games I was assigned to weren’t exactly in the biggest markets and under the brightest lights. I didn’t know all the players or even the coaches at places like Tennessee State, or UC Irvine, Louisiana-Monroe. I was on commercial flights with several layovers, making my way through airports on crutches, wearing a boot and a brace on my bad leg, which I still couldn’t straighten properly. By the time I made it from gate A1 to A13, I was sweating like I’d run a marathon, not looking forward to being trapped in a middle seat, knowing that being in the air was going to make my knee and ankle swell up because of poor circulation. And all of these assignments combined paid significantly less than I’d made per game in the league.

  I was still having frequent pain from the nerve trying to regenerate itself. One night I was at a game working with Dave O’Brien, who was a terrific partner and couldn’t have been more supportive of me, when I had an attack of nerve pain that felt like I was being stabbed up and down my leg with a butcher’s knife. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. I literally took off my headset and started to cry in the middle of a play. Dave didn’t notice it at first; he asked me a question about something on the court and I just wasn’t there. He covered as best he could, and then at the next break he put his hand on me and asked, “Are you okay, man? Are you okay?” I looked at him teary-eyed and said, “I’m fine,” but all the time I was thinking, I’m a fucking mess.

  Games I worked and players I saw in that period are all kind of a blur, because I really didn’t want to be doing what I was doing. And on top of it, I was taking so much OxyContin that I probably didn’t know what I was seeing. It was too soon for me to be out in public and traveling around; people still recognized me, and they’d get this look filled with so much concern and sympathy, but to me it just felt like pity and I hated it. Even today, if I see that look from someone, I’m quick to say, “Yo, it’s okay, don’t worry, I’m here, I’m smiling at you, we’re having a conversation. I’m alive. I have my leg, I can still run, life is good, I’m good.” But back then I’d think, Oh no, he’s looking at me, and he feels bad for me.

  It was all so unfair to Dan Steir, who was such an advocate for me at the network; I’m sure I wasn’t anybody’s favorite there, and he deserved way better from me, and so did ESPN. There was never any question for me that TV was something I was doing to fill the time until I could get back on the court. That’s all I was focused on. I backed out of one game they had me scheduled for because I had a workout for a team coming up and I needed to get ready for it. The broadcasting business is filled with young people who would kill to get a chance at what I was afforded, and I just wasn’t capable of doing it well, because I didn’t care enough at the time to put the work in.

  When I started working with Reed Bergman, he put me together with CBS College Sports Network, where I was lucky enough to work with a great producer named Debra Gelman. One of my first times back on the air was on a studio show running in conjunction with Selection Sunday for the 2008 NCAAs. There was a panel of analysts—me, Sean Farnham, Steve Lappas—discussing the potential seeding and who should be in or out.

  Sean had launched into this soliloquy about how Arizona State deserved to be in the tournament—they were 35th in the Coaches Poll, they’d won both games against Arizona and a few more against likely tournament teams—and as he was talking, I realized (1) I had no idea what I was going to say, and (2) I had no idea who belonged in the tournament and who didn’t.

  They were working their way down the panel, and when they got to me, I just repeated a few nuggets of what Sean had said, and mentioned that I agreed with him about ASU. I don’t think I could’ve named one player on Arizona State, though I can tell you now that they had a pretty decent freshman guard named James Harden. It was like when you haven’t done your assignment in school and you get called on, and you come up with some bullshit and get away with it; there’s a feeling of relief, but at the same time I felt ashamed that I’d been so unprepared, that I’d put myself at risk of being embarrassed on national television. I knew I hadn’t done well, and when they invited me to do more for them, I was sure it was because of my name value and not for any talent I brought to the table. I felt like a fraud.

  Even so, I realized that being on air had gotten my heart pumping again and brought out the same kind of nervous excitement I felt whenever I was about to take the court. It was refreshing for me to feel anything at all, and when Reed gave me another shot I started to think that maybe I could enjoy doing television this time around. It could be something to throw myself into, rather than something to pass the time until I got my “real life” back.

  I was much better prepared when I went to the 2008 Final Four in San Antonio, where I worked with Greg Anthony. We weren’t in the usual sterile studio setting, which can feel more like a cold operating room than anything else. We were doing our broadcast outside, with hundreds of people surrounding us. The energy from the fans and the crowd was uplifting as we waited for the show to start. While sitting in my chair with my suit buttoned up and the lights on me, I thought, Holy shit, it’s game time! I’m about to play!<
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  That brief time with CBS College Sports got me back on my feet. But Reed knew that the place that could develop and utilize my abilities best was ESPN. If they’d have me back.

  I don’t know if I would’ve given me another chance if I were Dan Steir. But I knew I had to go up to Bristol, Connecticut, and sit down with him to explain everything I’d been going through years earlier when I behaved so unprofessionally. I remember telling him my story over dinner, and how working for CBS made me feel a sense of purpose that I hadn’t felt in such a long time.

  He heard me out. And he gave me another shot.

  I had worked only on games in my first go-around with ESPN; this time I was doing a mix of games and studio work. Despite my recent experience with CBS, I found the studio gig to be especially difficult. I’m not good with confrontation, which is typical for an only child who grew up in a household with parents who fought. During arguments, my instinct is to shut down and internalize my anger. That doesn’t make for great television. It didn’t matter if the subject had nothing to do with me; if someone said the sky is red after I said it’s blue, I felt like I was under attack. And sometimes I was under attack: Doug Gottlieb, for one, never hesitated to point out when I got a stat wrong or stumbled on a name, and that happened all too often.

  Doug is always very well informed and takes great pride in his craft. He’s probably one of the best broadcasters in the country when it comes to talking about basketball on the fly. But being as green as I was then, I couldn’t help but take his comments to me personally.

  We did a ton of halftime hits my first year in the studio. While there were 20 or so minutes before the game would start up again, my colleagues and I only had around four minutes of actual airtime after highlights and commercials were factored in. The producer would ask us beforehand what points we’d like to discuss so the host could tee us up properly when the time came. And when it was your turn to talk, you were looking at 45 to 60 seconds before “laying out,” which is TV-speak for shutting up and letting your host move on to the next analyst.

  Doug was up first and started to deliver his point. After about a minute or so, the producer jumped in our ears and asked Doug to lay out. But he kept talking as if he hadn’t heard the producer at all. After another 25 seconds or so, Doug was still holding forth while the producer started yelling at him to stop. Once he finally did, the host then started to tee me up for my question.

  While he was doing so, the producer said to me, “Jay, you only got about 15 seconds here, so I need you to be really tight.” Listening to the producer, I completely lost focus on the question the host was asking me. I stumbled over my words and looked like a complete fool on national television. This was an entirely new challenge for me—more of an intellectual jousting that I had to become better equipped for. But Gottlieb made me up my game each and every day, because I was forced to prepare like never before.

  Another of my many blunders early on was when we discussed Xavier. I had always heard the name pronounced X-zavier, so without hesitation, I say X-zavier on the air. To my surprise, a couple of days later, ESPN received countless letters from fans tearing into me for the mispronunciation—“It’s Zavier with a Z, dumbass”; “You’re a moron”; “Do your homework”; “Go hit another tree.” It was crazy to see how riled up people got over the smallest things. This was during the explosion of Twitter, which only made matters worse. Real-time feedback was provided for me constantly.

  In the long run, getting called out on my mistakes made me a better broadcaster; in the short term, it made me even more self-conscious than I already was. Still, I was really committed to this new career path, and I was determined to improve.

  And just as things were really starting to pick up, I received some scary news from my mom.

  WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER, “Grarock,” died, back in 1993, it was from polycystic kidney disease. The thought always loomed in my mom’s head that one day she might get it, too. In April—the same month as my grandmother had been diagnosed, and at the same age, 57—my mother was very sick for a couple of days, and I forced her to go to the doctor. I was by her side when she received the diagnosis she’d feared for all these years, and the emotional gravity of the moment weighed heavily on us. I knew that she would never want me to do what she had done for 11 years, driving my grandma back and forth to dialysis. I firmly believe she would have chosen to die rather than go on dialysis.

  We went to the only place we knew, which was all too familiar to us: Duke University Hospital. Duke’s policy was that in order to be put on the list for a kidney transplant, your kidneys had to be on the verge of complete failure. My mother’s sense of urgency left no room for us to sit around and wait. We began to use our resources to ask for help—and we didn’t just ask, we begged. Through two amazing people, Martin Morse and Scott Harrison, we were able to find a contact at Johns Hopkins.

  On September 22, 2008, my mother was fortunate enough to receive a kidney from her good friend Christine. Just as she and my father were there for me when I needed them, now it was my turn to be there for her—to encourage her in rehab, make sure she was eating and drinking the right things and taking her medication. Her complaining reminded me of my own when I was hospitalized, but thankfully we were able to laugh about which one of us was the bigger moaner. When she was finally fully recovered, I thought we should celebrate. All laughter aside, she could have died. Just a couple of years earlier, I could have died. And yet here we were, still full of life and learning how to love it again. That alone was a cause for celebration.

  I decided to spoil my mom with a vacation. She didn’t really travel that much, except for a few visits to Aruba, so I thought a trip to the Cayman Islands would be fun. It was beautiful there, and our hotel—the Ritz-Carlton—was so amazing that we didn’t even leave the room the day we arrived. We just ordered room service and watched TV. She ate about a quarter of the cheeseburger she’d ordered, before passing out. She started snoring, and I just looked at her and smiled. If anyone deserved to pass out from a food coma after all these years, it was my mom.

  The next night, she wanted to go out, so we went to a nice outdoor restaurant where we were seated maybe 20 steps from the bar. We were having a great meal and talking about life. She was always the best sounding board, even if I learned as I got older which sounds to bounce off her and which to keep to myself. As we were deep in conversation about all we’d been through as a family, she abruptly changed course and asked, “Do you want to do a shot?”

  “MOM!”

  She gave me one of those looks that said, Your mother isn’t a nun, and we called the waiter over and ordered two shots of Patrón. After downing her shot, she held the glass up and said, “Ohhhh!” smacking her lips.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Do you want to do another one?”

  We ended up doing three apiece. “Let’s go dance,” she said, after hearing Caribbean music coming from the bar.

  After dancing to a few songs, my knee began to ache, and I headed over to the bar to sit down. As I sipped my drink, it warmed my heart to watch my mom out there holding it down, dancing with anyone and everyone. Eventually, she made her way back to the bar, accompanied by a—there’s no other word for it—goddess. “I met this girl on the dance floor,” she said, “and I would like to introduce you to her. Selita, this is my son, Jason. Jason, this is the almighty Selita.” I immediately popped up to greet her and offered my seat. Selita then trumped me and offered the seat to my mom. She already had a leg up in my mom’s book. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I never wanted to stop looking at her.

  “C’mon, guys,” my mom said. “Let’s do a shot!”

  After a couple more shots, we all ended up back on the dance floor. Making small talk, I asked Selita what her story was. She said she was there visiting family, and I hung on her every word. I finally got the nerve to ask her for her number, and instead she suggested that we meet again the next day at the hotel. I
had zero objections.

  Those next couple of days were a blast. The three of us would sit in a different cabana at the beach, drinking wine and listening to music. Selita had this way with my mom, which made everything so comfortable. I’d look for music on my iPad and catch them chatting away as if they’d known each other for years. Let’s just say she was off to a much better start with my mom than a certain former fiancée of mine.

  I remember Selita wanting to change the subject any time I pried about her life back in the States. I figured something was up, but it wasn’t my place to push. Instead, for probably the first time ever, I started to open up about my own story. I showed her the scars on my legs, explaining how they all got there. Pretty intense this early on, but it was cathartic for me, to say the least.

  Selita put her hands on my leg and looked at me with genuine sincerity.

  “I am glad you are good. Are you good?”

  She barely knew me, but she could easily tell I was still a work in progress. One day, she revealed she was just coming out of a bad breakup. Before I could dig any deeper, she grabbed my mom to dance on the sand as reggae played in the background.

  On our last night, my mom and I joined Selita and some of her family for dinner at a restaurant on the island. One of the hostesses snapped a Polaroid of all of us. I pulled out my cell phone and took a picture of the photo and sent it to my boy Martin, telling him I had met the girl of my dreams. He texted back almost immediately, saying, “YO, that’s a Victoria’s Secret model.” After I replied with something like “Good one,” he sent me a few links to prove his case. He was right. And Selita wasn’t just any Victoria’s Secret model; she was the Victoria’s Secret model. But at the time, I had absolutely no clue what she did.

  One of the sites mentioned how a couple of her past relationships were with New York Giants Pro Bowler Osi Umenyiora and the singer Nick Cannon. I had my work cut out for me. And I thought to myself that if this was where it was going to end, then so be it. My mom was happy, I was happy, and finally we were moving forward, feeling good for a change.