Paul Williams exclusive: I still feel I will fight again
PARALYSIS IS NOT STOPPING PAUL WILLIAMS FROM LIVING LIFE OR DREAMING BIG, WRITES TRIS DIXON
“YOU already know how I would fight Floyd Mayweather, the same way I fought everybody. Either he’s going to get me or I’m going to get him. You know what I’m sayin’? Floyd’s the type of fighter you can’t box. He’s too fast, he’s too good. He’s got a lot going for him.
“Floyd can’t deal with a guy who’s really coming to fight. You can’t be a guy that throws five, six punches and waits. From the moment you hear the bell ‘Ding’ you’ve got to be on him all night. You’ve got to fight the whole three minutes.
“The only way he’s gonna shut me down is if I get caught like Sergio Martinez got me. That’s the only way. You have to give a man respect and his props and all that, he’s good at what he does, but Castillo didn’t give him time. Everything you get against Mayweather you’ve got to earn it. And he’d have to earn a lot because I have a lot to give.”
Downstairs, and a few hours later, Marcos Maidana applies the pressure to Floyd Mayweather but it is not enough.
But here and now, in a spacious suite on the 28th floor in the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Paul Williams talks about how he would beat the pound-for-pound king.
There’s enthusiasm in his voice yet a resigned message simmers beneath his tones.
As he raises his fists to explain how he would dethrone Mayweather – using his incredible physical fighting gifts as a 6ft 1ins welterweight – his hands return to rest on his legs.
Perhaps sub-consciously he squeezes them.
That they do not register the pressure doesn’t interrupt the flow of conversation, but throughout the discussion his hands move from his lap, returning with a press or a gentle prod.
I’m sat on a rather luxurious couch. Williams is in his wheelchair. Two years ago he crashed his motorbike, leaving him paralysed from the sternum down.
The hands can feel the legs, the legs don’t feel the hands.
The week before
The bout with Saul Alvarez is agreed. It is called a $20million fight and marks young Mexican idol’s first foray into the pay-per-view market.
Williams is his acid test.
There is a school of thought that, following hard fights with Sergio Martinez and Erislandy Lara and a subsequent one-punch knockout defeat to Martinez, that the tall “Punisher’s” best days have past him by.
His fiancé was online when she told him the deal had been done for the contest, “’They got you fighting Alvarez’.
I said, ‘They’ve got me fighting everybody.’
“They were talking about a $20million fight and this and that and I said, ‘For real?’ I said, ‘I’m going to go out to this wedding tomorrow, then me and Mr Peterson [trainer George Peterson] will fly back to DC and set up camp.”
Williams believed he would scalp the up-and-coming Mexican and move on to bigger things once more.
He wanted to give Alvarez the kind of gut-check he’d given feared Antonio Margarito.
“I got to the point now, ‘Let me test your heart’, and I found a lot of guys are soft,” Williams remembers. “That’s what I see now, with the guys coming up they’ve never been tested. Of course, when I started out they gave me some tomato cans, then they fed me some cab drivers. Then they fed me some pork chops and Margarito was my steak. I proved it. These guys now they give them cab drivers and tomato cans and then they give them a little pork chop and they can’t even bite through that so how are they going to bite through a steak?
“If I fought Canelo, of course he’s going to get his shots in, like everybody, but I was his steak. I was going to be that steak he didn’t want to bite through. Mayweather, he knew that. He’s like, ‘Canelo, he’s never been tested’ and he was right. How would he have felt in the deep water if – in the first couple of rounds – he’s getting busted up and it ain’t going his way? How would you answer that? No one knew. Look at [Adrien] Broner. The first time he had a fight and it wasn’t going his way he didn’t know how to adjust. He stopped throwing punches and got embarrassed and stuff because he stopped punching. if he kept letting his hands go, that keeps your opponent at bay.
“When those guys be in a fight, and you see the guy that’s got all the hype around, he’s only doing his thing but as soon as a dude starts hitting him he stops punching.”
The crash
It is 7am on May 27, 2012, his brother’s wedding day. Paul Williams is on his hornet yellow custom-built Suzuki Hayabusa 1300. “It was a normal day,” he recalls, fondly showing off a picture of the beloved beast on his cell phone.
One minute he’s heading home to collect his tuxedo, the next he’s lying in a crumpled heap on a grassy embankment having been flipped from his bike and “folding like a suitcase” on impact.
He hears the sirens of the ambulances coming to his aid. He registers the flashing lights.
“I asked them not to cut my pants or my belt. I had a $4,000 belt on and I had a lot of cash on me.
“The funny thing about it was there was no pain at all. None. They got me on the ambulance and all that stuff and I’m thinking, ‘This can’t be true. I can’t get up. Something’s got to be more wrong than they’re saying. I’ve got a big fight coming up, I’ve got my brother’s wedding today’.”
Tubes are fed into his lungs to help him breathe. His eyes, nose and ears are filled with mud from the wreck.
He attempts to wiggle his toes in anassessment of the damage.
“You try to move them and stuff, you know in your head, you don’t know if they’re moving and I couldn’t see because of all the dirt and stuff. I tried to get up. For some reason it felt like I was still on the bike.”
Short-term pain is absent, though a long-term battle has begun.
Despite the news, his brother’s nuptials go ahead but the reception is cancelled so they can be by Paul’s bedside.
“They had their honeymoon but it was hard on them,” Williams admits.
It was harder on him, though.
He was devastated, learning how to live and function in the wheelchair.
“That’s the biggest thing I had to overcome, not controlling when you go to the bathroom,” he remembers. “That was my hardest part. ‘This ain’t me,’ I thought.”
He wouldn’t see visitors, did not want photos taken and had little interaction.
“No pictures, no nothing,” he says. “I was like a ghost in there.”
Gradually, the nurses encourage him to put images of his boxing career on the walls of his room.
“You can’t be playing dead,” they say. “You ain’t dead.”
So he starts living.
More people come, more pictures go up and he feels more comfortable. He even relaxes a little.
There are wired patches on his legs and the muscles start twitching. There’s life in them once more, the fibres reacting to the electric pulses chasing through them.
Williams is told the paralysis is like a roadblock, that one day it could clear and the signals will be sent around his body and it might function how it used to.
