In junior high, Jason was the quarterback of his football team, with current Viking's wide receiver, Randy Moss. Even though Jason was the captain, he says he only played for fun and decided not to play in high school. When Jason was fifteen, his parents divorced and Jason and his older brother Shawn chose to live with their father.

During high school, Jason was begged to play football and baseball, but decided against it because he said it would have interfered with his grades and basketball camps. As part of a security arrangement, Jason's father had a house on the Dupont High School grounds. Because of that, Jason had a key to the school gym that was only a few hundred yards from his front door.

Jason would go in there at night and practice for hours each night. He would wear leather gloves and wrap weights around his wrists to make it harder to handle the ball. Sometimes, he would draw a 2 by 2 square on the wall and throw ten behind the back passes with is right hand, and then 10 with his left, then 20 with his right, and 20 with his left, and so on.

After high school was over, Jason was admitted to Fork Union Military Academy by his father, who was then a state trooper. Jason called the first day and asked to come home. A week later, his dad came and picked him up. Jason then decided to sign with Providence but once the coaching staff changed, Jason changed his mind and decided to walk on at Marshall instead.

There, he met another walk on named Keith Veney. "I raised that boy," Veney said from Landover, Md. "Don't call him J.W. Call him Duck." That's the name I gave him. "Have you ever seen that boy's feet? They are flat as can be." Jason credits Veney for having exposed him to many of the tricks that can now be seen nightly on national sports shows. "He taught me all of that stuff," Williams says. "I met him my freshman year at Marshall. Our personalities are kind of the same. He's always laughing, I'm always laughing. I learned a lot of that stuff from watching him play and playing against him. I've never beaten him one on one."

Veney remembers his first encounter with Williams. "We were both sitting out a season at Marshall," said Veney, who visits Williams in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. "I'm from the city and he's from West Virginia. He was quick and could handle the ball. So I would tell him to throw this in his game and try this. With him being the basketball junkie he is, he would try and do all the tricks I showed him. We played one on one all the time. In the summertime, he stayed with me and my wife. He slept on our couch.

Then he came to Landover and we balled. He was the only white guy on the court. He was scared as hell. But after that, his game kind of took off." Veney now watches Williams take off on ESPN's Sports Center, and says, "Hey, I taught him that." After Jason's sophomore year in college, his coach Billy Donovan went to Florida and Jason decided to follow him. He had to sit out his first season at Florida because he was a t transfer student.

During his senior year at Florida, Jason played in only 20 games because he got kicked off the team. He had three suspensions, first for cutting class too much, second for inappropriate behavior (he sulked after he had a bad night and was hard on himself), and third for failing a test. Everyone agrees that Jason was a good kid, he just did a few bad things in his life and those bad things got publicized and magnified and now he's stuck with a reputation that doesn't suit him. After he got kicked off the team, he decided to make himself eligible for the NBA draft.

Many doubted he would even be in the first round since scouts knew little of him. He needed to get more publicity so he went to NBA camps and worked with NBA players. When draft day came, he was the 7th overall pick. In his first game he scored 21 points and dished off some assists that left fans with hanging jaws.

"The stuff he does in practice, it's flashy but it's effective. It's not just wasted energy. It's always for purpose. He could probably amaze me more than surprise me, because I expect anything." Says teammate, Chris Webber.