Where there's a Williams, there's a way

Now is not a good time to be Jason Williams, Jason Williams or Jayson Williams.\nJ-Will? More like J-Won't.\nJason Williams is a point guard for the Memphis Grizzlies. One of his best friends growing up in West Virginia was Randy Moss, the Minnesota Vikings wide receiver who, like Williams, is also known for his transgressive behavior. His college career was the opposite of Moss'. Moss started elsewhere and finished at Marshall. Williams started at Marshall and finished elsewhere, namely Florida as he followed coach Billy Donovan there.\nIn what turned out to be his only year as a Gator, he averaged 17 points and seven assists, but he was kicked off the team Feb. 17, 1998 for "violating team and athletic department policy." As is typical for most colleges, exactly what policy he violated wasn't specified. His five-game suspension at the beginning of the 2000-01 NBA season for violating the league's Anti-Drug Policy possibly shed some light.\nWilliams played long enough at Florida to impress the scouts. He was the seventh overall pick in the 1998 NBA Draft, taken ahead of Paul Pierce and Dirk Nowitzki among others.\nThe Sacramento Kings selected him, and even though the Kings rose up out of their black hole of Clippertude with Williams starting at point guard, the honeymoon slowly but surely wasted away. The concept of shot selection is as unbeknownst to Williams as live singing is to Britney Spears as his reckless hoisting of 30-footers has led to a 38 percent career shooting percentage.\nThe Kings traded Williams to the Grizzlies last June. Grizzlies general manager Dick Versace said that Williams went unappreciated in Sacramento.\n"Artists, in our culture, have always been treated differently. This was the common ground (with Jason). And I think he sensed that, and we had a good talk," Versace said upon acquiring him.\nThe Grizzlies have the worst record in the NBA at 15-44 -- yes, even worse than the Bulls.\nAnd I find myself wishing I could appreciate a 38 percent shooter.\nJason Williams is a point guard for the Duke basketball team. If you don't know that, I congratulate you because that means you have not listened to Dick "Dukie V" Vitale prop him up at every tic and reflex.\nWilliams scored 37 points in Sunday's 93-68 win over North Carolina. Sure, 37 points is a lot of points, but there should be an exchange rate on that. After all, scoring 37 against a Matt Doherty-coached defense and this year's North Carolina team is equivalent to scoring about 22 or so against a real basketball team.\nWilliams is likely to be one of the first couple of picks in the 2002 NBA Draft, and even if Vitale didn't pump him up to messianic levels, he is going to win the Wooden Award as college basketball's player of the year.\nWhat was most newsworthy in the last few days though about Jason Williams is that the Duke Television Network -- this just in, the correct official name of the network is ESPN -- presented a program last Friday called "Outside the Lines" in which, among other things, Duke's academic program for its basketball players was called into question.\nThe program asked how Duke can have graduation rates occasionally reaching 100 percent and how Williams can get his degree in three years when many schools cannot find a way for a student-athlete to do it if he or she tried. The answer is easy, as in easy classes, easy independent study homework with almost no attendance requirements and the pigeonholing of most basketball players into becoming sociology majors, Duke-ese for "easy time of it."\nAnd I find myself wishing I could appreciate a sociology major at Duke.\nJayson Williams is a former NBA star power forward with the New Jersey Nets whose affability and wit have livened up NBC Sports' NBA studio team. (Then again, merely sitting next to Ahmad Rashad, who is about as animated as a scarecrow, would do the trick.)\nWilliams won't be doing any studio work anytime soon after police in Flemington, N.J. charged him with manslaughter in the shooting death of a limo driver on his property. Williams claims that the shooting was accidental.\nWilliams' most famous line in his autobiography "Loose Balls" revolves around psychological testing the Chicago Bulls performed on him during a 1996 tryout when Williams was a free agent. The day after the tests, the Bulls acquired Dennis Rodman, and Williams laughed about the purpose of the tests.\nThat's not so funny today. \nWilliams was accused of smashing a beer mug over a patron's head in a 1992 Chicago bar fight. In 1994 authorities accused him of firing a semiautomatic in the Meadowlands parking lot. As it has turned out, Williams has used humor to mask a dark side.\nAnd I find myself wishing I could appreciate a wacko with guns.