Topic: Jayson Williams

Jayson Williams (born February 22, 1968, in Ritter, South Carolina) is an American former professional basketball player with the National Basketball Association. Standing 6 feet, 10 inches tall, he played high school basketball for Christ The King RHS in New York City and college basketball for the St. John's University, and he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1990. He is also notorious for his involvement in the shooting death of a limousine driver and other legal problems since his retirement from professional basketball.

Of Polish, Italian and African-American descent, Williams was selected by the Phoenix Suns NBA team in the first round (21st pick overall) of the 1990 NBA Draft. His draft rights were thereafter traded by the Suns to the Philadelphia 76ers for a 1993 NBA first-round draft choice on October 28, 1990. Williams was then traded by the 76ers to the New Jersey Nets for conditional draft choices on October 8, 1992. Injuries forced Williams to retire from pro basketball in 1999. In the year 2000, Williams and the journalist Steve Friedman co-wrote Williams's biography Loose Balls: Easy Money, Hard Fouls, Cheap Laughs, and True Love in the NBA (ISBN 0-7679-0569-5). In their book, Williams & Friedman claimed that Williams nearly shot the New York Jets wide receiver Wayne Chrebet while firing a large handgun on his skeet-shooting range. In January 2005, Williams briefly began to play basketball professionally again in the Continental Basketball Association.

In 1992, Williams was accused of breaking a beer mug over a patron's head at a saloon in Chicago. Two years later, he was accused of firing a semiautomatic weapon into the parking lot at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. He was never criminally charged in either case.