Imagine the worst day of your life.

Then imagine confronting that day every single day thereafter.

Imagine lying in intensive care, watching on television as your team drafts your replacement. Imagine lying on your back, for months at a time, unsure if you will walk again, your leg held together by 100 staples and various metal contraptions.

Imagine the taunts, the ridicule, the built-in comeback — “Go buy another motorcycle, Williams.” Imagine walking through an airport — “Way to screw your life up, Williams.” Imagine working for ESPN, analyzing games — “Should have stuck to motorcycles, Williams.”

Imagine life as the Guy Who Threw It All Away.

“I’ve thought back to that moment a lot because people won’t let me forget,” Williams said. “And this might sound crazy, but it was the worst decision I made and the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He added, “This isn’t a pity story.”

Williams, 31, can say that now, more than nine years removed from the accident that nearly ended his life and irrevocably altered it. It took him that long to come to terms with the entirety of his story — high school all-American, national player of the year and national champion at Duke, No. 2 overall N.B.A. draft selection, and all that before the accident, before the hospital, before the injury that ended his professional career after one season and made him a retiree at 21.

In a series of interviews over the last three months, Williams, for the first time, detailed all that he went through.

For years, Williams struggled with depression. He refused to wear shorts or show anyone his left leg. He asked the inevitable: why me? He took too much pain medication, too much OxyContin in particular, for too long. He blew out the candles for his 22nd birthday in bed. He spent years in rehabilitation. He resented the teammates who lacked his drive but remained in the N.B.A., collecting paychecks, accolades, even championship rings. He cried himself to sleep. He went to therapy. He moved to New York City and tried to become an agent and drank alcohol frequently.

In those dark years, he would run into people who expected the image Jay Williams once projected to the world: that of the clean-cut Duke point guard who posed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in khakis and a letterman’s jacket, flashing a thumbs up, the photograph that best seemed to embody the stereotype of Duke, so prim and pristine. In strangers’ eyes, where he once saw awe or jealousy, he now saw pity, and from people, normal people, who could never understand the gifts he held that vanished on that street.