Jayson Williams Speaks Freely

The Author

Being left alone in a cell with your thoughts is a dangerous thing, Williams admits. That’s why there are suicide prevention assistants walking up and down the halls at all times.

Thankfully for Williams, he found an outlet for his contemplations through his cellmate Matt Maher, a former soccer player who is in the midst of serving a five-year sentence for killing a man while driving drunk.

The two professional athletes formed a bond at the New Jersey state prison. They studied the Bible together, played ball together and even cooked together — usually mackerel and ramen noodles, Williams says. Maher was the one person Williams could truly trust at all times. “I only ate with one person,” Williams says. “You can’t eat with just anybody because you don’t know how their day is going.”

Maher had also started a blog while he was in prison. Since there was no Internet there, he would write and date his entries, then send them in envelopes to his mother, who would post them online a week later. Soon Williams began to write, too. Not comfortable with the blog format, the 6-foot-10 inmate started addressing letters to his father, who died in 2009 from a stroke. Using just the inside of a pen — because, in prison, the plastic outside parts of a pen could be just as mighty as a sword — he poured out his thoughts about God, prison, family and the many tragedies in his personal life, including the deaths of his sisters (two died from AIDS acquired through a blood transfusion, one was murdered) and being molested by his uncle when he was 10.

In June, Williams published many of these letters in his second book called “Humbled.” It’s a sharp contrast from his 2001 book “Loose Balls,” which told colorful tales from his NBA playing days, including multiple incidents of gunplay.