Roy Williams’ Suicide Comment All About Context

“We had a chance to visit and [Zeller] said I was one of the few guys who could make him laugh. I asked him Thursday night when I called him late, I said ‘Are you thinking about getting the knives out and slicing your wrist?’ He said ‘Maybe.’ I said, ‘Well if you’re gonna do that then call me and I’ll come do it with you.’ I told him my son would want to know it first so he could change the will and get control of everything. He liked that statement, too.”

But if you listen to the audio of Williams saying it, you’ll quickly realize that it was a throwaway joke about the emotional state of a young player following what had to have been the most crushing loss of his life.

Yes, suicide is no joke but to make the inference that Williams doesn’t know that or is in some way trying to be insensitive is making a leap for the sake of having a talking point. Like Gary Parrish points out, no one is actually trying to make light of an actual train accident when they call a game a “trainwreck.”

Sometimes we just say things and there’s nothing more to it.