Williams recovering slowly

Bulls guard trying to return from motorcycle accident

? Jay Williams remembers the motorcycle crash as though it happened in slow motion, the red-and-black Yamaha R6 getting away from him and heading for a utility pole.

Moments later, his body was contorted on the grassy curb of a Chicago street. He was face down from the waist up, with his mangled pelvis and left leg tilting grotesquely skyward.

“I remember hearing the ‘boom,’ spinning around. Everybody was looking at me,” Williams recalled Monday in an interview with the Associated Press. “The first thing I was yelling wasn’t, ‘I don’t want to die.’ It was, ‘I threw it all away,’ and I didn’t want to throw it all away. I wanted to play again. It’s weird how the first thing that came to mind was basketball instead of staying alive.”

It’s possible Williams did throw it all away, though he insists that will not be the case.

But with his Chicago Bulls and the NBA’s other 28 teams opening training camps this week, Williams remains a long, long way from playing basketball again.

After being hospitalized and bedridden for almost a month, he still cannot walk on his own.

Using crutches, his movements are accompanied by a painful grimace. With a frustrated tone he describes how going to the bathroom has become a seven-step process.

“I apologize for what I’ve done,” Williams said, sitting in coach Mike Krzyzewski’s office on the Duke campus, “but I’m young, and everyone, when they’re young, makes mistakes. My mistake happens to be more significant than others.”

Bulls general manager John Paxson wouldn’t answer directly when asked if the team would pay Williams his $7.7 million salary for the next two seasons.