Ex-New Jersey Nets star Jayson Williams blames booze for all his woes — and says prison saved him.
“Alcohol is the cause of all my problems,’’ he told Fox 5’s Lisa Evers in his first exclusive interview since his release from Rikers Island days ago.
“If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it’s that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles heel for me.’’
Prison, he said, “polished me up like stone..and sent me back out. Because I’m going to tell you something, Lisa – if it wasn’t for prison, I was in a bad way.’’
Williams served eight months at Rikers for driving drunk in Manhattan in January, 2010 after hitting a tree.
He previously served 18 months in a New Jersey prison for assault and witness and evidence tampering in the 2002 shotgun death of limo driver Costas Christofi at Williams’ mansion.
Evers caught up with Williams at a Brooklyn high school in Bedford=Stuyvesant where he was talking to students and urging them to avoid his mistakes.
He tells Evers, in the interview which will air tomorrow on “Fox 5 News at 10 p.m.’’ that he wants to help other young men have a better future..
Williams says that he believes the night Christofi was accidentally shot and the arrest and trial that followed were too much for his father, who had a stroke and later died.
“I caused so much pain…but the biggest thing is, not one person died, not (only) Mr. Christofi, but so did my dad. I accidentally killed two people that night.’’