Former NBA Player is Now Homeless
‘I’m desperate, man’
Two years later, Williams was out of the NBA and hurtling toward financial ruin. By 1994, he was in a New Jersey bankruptcy court, having lost his home, his marriage, and nearly his life.
“I was so stressed out that I thought about suicide,’’ he said
Instead, he set out for Florida. Trying to start over, Williams secured a grant from the Legends Foundation. But he lost the money, court records indicate, when the widow of a condominium owner who agreed to a lease-to-own contract with Williams opted out of the contract after the owner died.
Broke again, Williams repeatedly tried in vain to hold jobs. Hindered by his diabetes, which was diagnosed three years ago, he lost or walked away from jobs as a cleaner, handyman, high school girls’ basketball coach, bakery worker, and golf course groundskeeper. In 2005, he filed again for bankruptcy.
Transient since then, Williams has bounced from one friend’s house to another’s, from one shelter to another. He finally ran out of friends to stay with, soured on the shelter life, and settled a couple of months ago in his car. He also owns a ’97 Chevy Tahoe but needs to pay a repair shop $550 to release it.
He has no health insurance or car insurance. And he already has tapped his NBA pension, he said.