BELLE, W. Va. -- Basketball will save Jason Williams. That is what they say around Belle, a low-slung patch of earth and industrial solvent outside Charleston that rests five minutes from the hometown holler of Lakers legend Jerry West.

In Belle, people say that Williams loves the game too much to let it slip away from him again, that the lure of basketball will persuade him to play it straight from now on.

"I just think, once the season starts, there won't be any worries," says Williams' father, Terry. "Because he's gonna be playing."

Because the only way you can hurt this young man is to take the ball away from him.

Because basketball is the only thing, the only thing in this great wide world, about which he appears to understand the slightest thing.

So they believe, and so they say. They say it knowing that Williams already once walked away from the only career he has ever considered. They say it knowing they are talking about a 22-year-old with a morbidly fascinating self-destructive streak that, until now, hasn't been brought to heel.

They say it while speaking about a player who was chosen seventh in the 1998 NBA draft, by the Sacramento Kings, barely four months after being thrown off his college team for lapses in judgment so egregious -- so flat-out dumb -- that his flummoxed coach essentially conceded the rest of the season in order to make the suspension permanent.

They say it because they believe that, without a basketball in his hands, Jason Williams is nothing.

And they might be right.

"I don't know what I'd do," Williams says when asked about a life without basketball. "I mean, I don't know. Start all over, I guess."

Doing what?

"I don't know. I guess that's why I can't wait to play."

He is a player. Ask about Jason Williams' talent, and people whose lives are enmeshed in the game of basketball respond with low whistles, murmurs of appreciation. Williams has left NBA players standing in their shoes, stopped still in the middle of gymnasium pick-up games, watching the 6-foot-1, 190-pound player control the floor from the point-guard position.

He sees the court with clarity, runs it with feel and anticipation and total energy. He delivers passes with powder charges packed in them. He can bury a jump shot on command. One of his representatives, reflecting upon the only point guard taken ahead of Williams in the draft, says, "Mike Bibby can't touch him."

"I have seen Jason do things with a basketball that I've never seen done before," says Billy Donovan, Williams' college coach at Marshall and then, for one abbreviated season, at the University of Florida.

ESPN analyst Larry Conley: "He just might be one of the most exciting guards I have seen in the last decade. He's like a magician, and there's nothing he won't try."

Orlando Magic guard Nick Anderson: "He's like Jason Kidd, only he can shoot. . . . My goodness, can he play the game."

That is, Williams is so good with a basketball in his hands that he can make you forget -- or at least forgive -- the things he does without a basketball in his hands.

And there has been a significant amount of forgiving.

In the course of a few astonishing years out of high school, Williams committed to Providence and then backed out when the coaching staff turned over. He enrolled at a military institute and called his father after one day to come get him. He played one season for Donovan at Marshall, and then followed Donovan when the coach took a Southeastern Conference job at Florida.

He loved Donovan so much as a coach, respected him so much as a person, that he was willing to forfeit a year of college eligibility to transfer.

"He made a real commitment to me," Donovan says.

And then Williams broke Donovan's heart. But all is forgiven.

My goodness, can he play the game.

"I'm just not a big believer in holding grudges," Donovan is saying now from his office in Gainesville, Fla., reviewing the wreckage of Williams' lone season playing for the Gators. "I don't think Jason is a bad kid. I do think he should be held accountable for his actions."

On Feb. 17, Donovan announced that Williams -- the team's leader in points, assists, steals and free-throw percentage -- had been suspended from the Florida team for the remainder of the season. Both knew what it meant. Williams' college "career" was over after one year at Marshall and 20 games for the Gators.

Officially, Williams was suspended for violating team and athletic department policy.

"Everybody knows what happened," Terry Williams says. "He tested positive twice for marijuana."

He tested positive twice, and when NBA scouts and general managers and coaches began taking stock of Williams before the summer draft, it was that word "twice" that seemed to linger in their memories.

Williams, who loves basketball more than anything, who has no second choice for his life's work -- who even today says Donovan is like a father to him -- tested positive the first time, and was warned.

"He knew the consequences if he tested positive again," Donovan says. "And that's the thing that was disappointing to me -- that he knew the consequences and did it anyway."

And why? The answer is, there is no why. Williams not only doesn't know, he hasn't spent five minutes trying to figure it out since the day he learned his fate.

Asked about the incidents -- he also was suspended near the start of Florida's season for "conduct detrimental to the team" after sulking on the bench in a couple of losses -- he mentions something about "hanging with the wrong people" and acknowledges, as he has done all along, that he made some bad decisions.

"Can't change the past, can't predict the future," Williams says. "Can't dwell on it my whole life. I don't really think about that stuff no more."

When his father asked him what could possibly possess him to jeopardize his basketball future, Jason Williams replied that, since the school had already tested him once that semester, he didn't think it would test him a second time.

Donovan was outraged. His team was wrecked, going 1-7 after Williams' suspension (it was 12-8 with the guard on the roster). Jason Williams was chagrined. And Terry Williams, the father, a man who loves his son dearly and believes both in his promise as an NBA player and in his growth as a human being, pronounced himself "embarrassed to go back to work."

Terry Williams, 49, has been a West Virginia state trooper for 27 years.

"In my job, I can't tell you how many times I've picked up kids and called their parents, and their parents would say, 'Oh, my kid would never do something like that,' " Terry Williams says. "Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

"In Jason's situation, we didn't deny that he did what he did. I have great respect for Coach Donovan and the University of Florida. I think they did everything they could for Jason. I blame Jason. He did it. And he paid the price for it."

It wasn't the first time Williams had sabotaged his own tenure at Florida. In early 1997, in the middle of the transfer season in which he was eligible to practice with the Gators but not to play games, Jason abruptly called his father and said he was coming home.

"I just got fed up with school, and I wasn't getting to play ball," Williams says. So he packed up and drove out of Gainesville, presumably for the last time.

He returned to Belle, a depressed area of 2,500 residents whose high school bears the name of its major industrial employer, DuPont. He returned to the prefabricated home that Terry Williams, in a security arrangement with DuPont High School, maintains smack in the middle of the school's campus lawn.

And Jason Williams, whose passion for basketball is legend in Belle, did what so many of his former high school friends and teammates have been doing since the day they graduated:

Nothing.

"We have a little 7-Eleven down here on the corner," Terry Williams says, "and that's where a lot of the guys who used to play sports hang around. We call it the All-7-Eleven team, because that's really all they do.

"Jason came home and he sat here in this house for three weeks. He didn't do nothing. And I talked to him. I said to Jason, 'What are you gonna do? There aren't any jobs around here. Where you gonna get a job at?'

"I said, 'What are you gonna do, go be All-7-Eleven?' "

After three weeks, and at the urging of his older brother, Shawn -- a college graduate now at the police academy in Charleston -- Jason called his father at work and said he wanted to return to Florida. Terry Williams called Donovan.

And Donovan, knowing what he was getting into, knowing the track record and the potential heartaches ahead, went to work getting Jason Williams back into the program -- the program Williams would set back with his suspension less than a year later.

Why would Donovan lay himself out for such an erratic case?

My goodness, can Williams play the game.

He was the kind of athlete who comes along once in a great while. Incredibly, tiny DuPont High would produce two such gems in Jason Williams and Randy Moss -- and both would find trouble away from the athletic arena. But where Moss would seek his validation through football -- and begin to gain it with what is taking shape as a Rookie of the Year season with the Minnesota Vikings -- Williams had settled on basketball by seventh grade, and by his sophomore year of high school he had stopped playing all other sports.

"It's just fun, you know?" he says. "It's just so competitive. It's who's going to play smarter, and who's going to work harder than the other person. That's what I'm trying to do."

And Jason Williams on a basketball court is unlike Jason Williams in any other aspect of his life. On the basketball court he is a dynamo, tireless, fully dedicated and engaged -- the first player at practice, the last one standing afterward.

Because of Terry Williams' housing arrangement, his son grew up 100 yards from the DuPont gymnasium, with a key to access the doors after hours. From junior high school forward, Williams spent his evenings in the secure embrace of the gym, working on his game, alone.

It was during this period, Terry Williams says, that Jason's mother and father divorced, a bitter falling-out from which Williams never fully recovered. He still doesn't speak with his mother. Jason began to use the gym as a retreat, spending hours on the court without even shooting the ball. He worked instead on dribbling technique, bounced imaginary passes off cinder-block walls -- a precursor to his collegiate arrival as an otherworldly bestower of assists.

Basketball was the release. Williams dug hard after it.

"Some kids have the instincts but lack the work ethic. Not him, buddy," says Jim Fout, who coached Williams and Moss on a state championship-finalist team in Williams' senior prep season, in 1994. "He just loved to play. It didn't make any difference whether they were keeping score."

He was a two-time all-state selection in West Virginia, a hero in his lone season at Marshall, in Huntington, W. Va. His was a blinding, if barely controlled, talent -- and everyone knew it.

By the time Williams decided to follow Donovan to Florida, the people around him had begun to understand that he might even be an elite talent, a professional talent.

If only he could get out of his own way.

He is, unquestionably, a bundle of contradiction. A lifelong terrible student who has invented a hundred ways to skip a class, Williams somehow completed 18 units of summer school in order to become eligible to play for Donovan last season. A person of completely placid demeanor off the court who seems almost detached from his surroundings, Williams as a player is vocal, physical and emotional.

A pure athlete who, his father says, has absolutely no fallback position if basketball doesn't work out, has nevertheless undercut his own aspirations several times already.

His rsum is scary enough that several NBA teams, many of them less desperate than the Kings at point guard, were publicly wary of him. Yet his talent, heart and personal likability are such that the Lakers' West, upon seeing Williams work out and getting to know him during a visit at West's Bel Air home, tried to trade up high enough to draft him.

Williams went instead to Sacramento at No. 7, nearly twice as high as most projections had him being selected. Under the terms of the labor contract that was in place at the time, the Kings would have been guaranteeing Williams upward of $6 million over three years.

Despite a lottery-pick investment at a position of critical importance to the franchise, the Sacramento front office did not ask Williams to take the standard intelligence test that it administers to practically every draft-quality athlete it works out. Why?

"Because only time will tell whether Jason has learned his lessons from everything that has happened," said a member of the Kings' front office, who asked that his name not be used. "And there's no test in the world that is going to answer that."

Basketball will save Jason Williams. That's what the people closest to him believe. They believe Williams when he says that the incident in Florida, wondering for a time whether he had blown things for good, scared him straight.

As Williams puts it: "Getting suspended was the best thing that happened to me. That was the thing that turned me around."

If there is one thing most striking about Williams' escapades, it is the almost universal support he receives even from those who were singed by them.

Donovan, who didn't speak with Williams for a time after the suspension, says he had no problem recommending the guard to NBA teams. In the weeks before last June's draft, Williams had no greater public ally than the coach who had thrown him off his team.

"He's a human being who made some bad decisions," Donovan says. "My children are 4, 5 and 6 years old, and they didn't understand what happened to Jason -- but they love Jason Williams. They just love him. Maybe it's because he's a kid himself.

"He loves basketball. That's his world. And there's nothing wrong with that. And he loves the game for all the right reasons."

The Kings, whose decision-makers are unable to speak about Williams for the record because of the current lockout, clearly drafted the guard on talent and in the belief that focusing solely on basketball will help him find his way through. It's an opinion shared by many -- that Williams' chronic dislike of school was a factor in some of his more self-destructive acts.

As player-personnel director Jerry Reynolds cracked on the night of the draft: "We have promised Jason that he will not be required to attend class."

The campaign to save Williams from himself is in full swing. Two weeks after the final suspension in Florida, Williams signed with respected player agent Bill Pollak, who immediately moved Williams to Orlando. There, Williams was put in the care of one of Pollak's associates, Don Miller, and of the Magic's Anderson, a Pollak client.

"They're just helping me, you know, just learn who I should be with and who I shouldn't be with when I'm not working out," Williams says. "Nick went through it. He's went through bad and good. His life's kind of similar to mine. They've all been so much a help to me, not just in basketball but in life in general."

Pollak lobbied hard for Williams to play in small-market Sacramento, which nevertheless will be the largest city in which he has played. Donovan has spoken frequently with Williams over the past few months. Terry Williams plans to retire after the lockout ends and move to Sacramento with his second wife -- partially to watch his son play, and partially, he concedes, simply to be around.

"About the only thing I say to him now is, 'Do the right thing,' " Terry Williams says. "Jason's got some good people around him. If he listens to them, he's gonna do great. If he doesn't, he's gonna fall on his face. I think he realizes now what he could lose if he messes up, and I don't think he will."

They all believe that basketball will save Williams, because they believe that he can be saved. They see a person of terrible decisions, not a terrible person.

"It's like for all the negative things that came out about Moss," says Fout, the high school coach. "It was said that if he plays well, if he straightens up his act, then everybody will forgive him and love him. We are basically a forgiving people."

If Williams wants to be forgiven, it is, at best, a secondary concern. What he wants, he tells you, is to play -- the one thing at which he feels success. You cannot hurt this man so long as you leave a basketball in his hands.

"I can't wait for the season to start," he says. "I just can't wait to play. It's something to do."

He turns 23 this week. He is about to become a millionaire. Here is what the people who love Jason Williams believe: He is, any minute now, going to grow up.