Requiem for a Heavyweight: The never-ending career of Danny Williams

Requiem for a Heavyweight: The never-ending career of Danny Williams

By Garry White

The Tondi 17 Boxing Hall, Tallinn; Ramazan Njala Sports Palace, Albania; Panther Gym, Cologne; or the Arena Riga. What do they all have in common? I’ll tell you. They are all places where former heavyweight champion of Britain, the Commonwealth, and one-time Mike Tyson conqueror, Danny Williams, has fought over the past half-decade or so.

Facing him in these far-off post-Cold War venues were a motley gang of the never-was and never-will-be. Fighters like Louison Loizou, Serdar Avci, Djuar El Scheich and Kristaps Zutis. Names that don’t trip easily off the tongue, even in their native lexicon. Yes, good for a bumper Scrabble score, but not much else.

Zutis had already failed to win three of his nine club fights when he sparked Williams in just 23 seconds in a Latvian ice hockey stadium back in 2019. El Scheich stopped him in three in a nothing six-rounder in a sparsely populated German gymnasium. Avci, a former bantamweight, at least had the good grace to go the full four rounds with the Brixton man before shutting him out on all three cards.

When Williams was dropped in the opener and similarly shut out by Louison Loizou at the Tondi Boxing Hall – a glorified gym with a capacity of barely three hundred in the frozen boxing outpost of Tallinn – it had to be hoped that it would form the closing act in a career that had overrun by at least a solid fifteen years. That defeat came in August 2023, but last weekend Williams was at it again on an unlicensed show in Colchester, Essex.

It was, no doubt, a nothing show of plodders and nobodies. People don’t even try to convince you that this unlicensed stuff is effectively ‘semi-pro’ anymore, as though it were a serious kickabout in front of a couple of hundred fans in the regional Isthmian Football League. But I am sure it serves a purpose, and so good luck to them.

Topping the bill at the Trilogy Nightclub was 41-year-old former Commonwealth cruiserweight champion Tony Conquest. Facing off against him was, of course, the even greater name recognition of Danny Williams. No one forgets the man who famously beat Tyson, except for time, motor skills and memory, and so it goes that there was a ready-made hook to hang the show on. The trouble is that Williams is now 52 years old. The strapline was that this was meant to be the Brixton man’s last fight, but we have heard that at least eight times over the years.

The first was prior to him even stepping into the ring against Derek Chisora in defence of his British title back in 2010. Prior to landing a single shot, he was adamant that this fiftieth professional fight would be his last. The fact that ‘Del Boy’ stopped him in two rounds at the claret-and-blue Boleyn Ground lent further credence to his plans. But he was back out less than a year later, feeding off a no-hoper in Bielefeld, Germany. The old home of West Ham United has since been reduced to rubble, and the same applies to Williams’ prospects in the ring.

The 55 wins that he possesses include the likes of noteworthy domestic and European-level opposition such as Michael Sprott, Audley Harrison, Matt Skelton and John McDermott. But these successes are now chronically disfigured by 33 losses, including 17 within the distance, many of them often ugly beatings in the brutalised environs of grey, post-Soviet nowheresville.

Yet those British and Commonwealth titles, even the unsuccessful shot at Vitali Klitschko’s WBC strap, probably by themselves lack sufficient lustre for the kind of mercenary promoters that are still willing to pass him envelopes. For their part, the BBBofC haven’t licensed Williams since that Chisora defeat, and so all that remains is the ‘road’. And when even that becomes a step too far, there is the murky world of the ‘unlicensed’.

It can only be the continued willingness of Williams and that ominous presence of Mike Tyson that keeps the phone ringing, pulling him back into a life that he has no business still being in.

Oh, that name Tyson again – what a blessing and a curse it must be to have Iron Mike on your résumé. Faded, jaded, and broken, he may have been, the version that later even contrived to lose to flabby Irish-American Kevin McBride. But even so: it’s Tyson!

When considering both names together, it is tempting to dwell on the circle of life. That time in Kentucky when Williams shocked most – if not all – observers, given the wretchedness of the late-career Tyson, when he stopped the former-undisputed champ in four rounds. Williams still had some road ahead of him then, and a golden moment to luxuriate in. Tyson was utterly finished, although still, by financial necessity, ready to degrade himself one final time.

Christ, boxing can be cruel. Often all at once and then in ‘minute particulars’, in a black reversal of William Blake’s protestation on the manifestation of good deeds. Yes, fighters fall apart gradually and all at once. In the case of Williams, the pieces get swept up, sellotaped back together, broken apart again, and whatever fragments can be found amid the wreckage are reassembled, but never as robustly as they were before.

There is something sad and haunting about watching Williams between the ropes on all these grainy sports hall videos. His physique still looks impressive and strong. For a man of his age, it is nothing less than immaculate. But at the same time, he somehow looks more fragile than a Royal Doulton figurine resting precariously on the edge of your grandmother’s mantelpiece.

Everything that matters is missing. All of it thrown away and spent in both big fights and hopeless board-shuffling in bouts that no one can remember, and sometimes no one even bothered to record. What a thing it is to throw away your future in this way on people who don’t deserve or value your blood, who only want your name for what it meant 20 years ago when it became forever conjoined and embossed by the copperplate of a fighter who, in his prime, would have swept you away with scorn.

Now, it seems that Williams’ mind can barely summon the muscle memory to link the necessary circuits to form a punch. He shuffles from ring post to ring post without a hint of a spark or glimmer of fire behind his eyes. There is no sport to see here: pugilism reduced to a mere dog-fighting blood sport.

I have no idea why he keeps coming back. He used to say it was to pay for his daughter’s school fees. And if that is true, then it is both laudable and tragic. We want our parents alive and cognisant, not broken and destroyed whilst still in middle age. The youngest of them must now be in their early twenties. Hopefully, this is now the time for Danny to permanently call it a day. That these final grim three minutes in Colchester have provided him with a final sense of closure. 

Surely now nobody, not even the nagging voice at the recesses of his mind, can lure him back for a lousy few hundred quid or a grand. The game’s up. But then again, it was up fifteen years ago. I hope, beyond hope, that his true driver isn’t a form of addiction to something he once had. An inability to find something else, and thus endlessly treading back over a path that is now strewn with so much blood and broken glass.

I saw him fight once in the flesh, from the cheap seats of a packed and anonymous London Excel. He narrowly outpointed the dangerous punching Matt Skelton in a bill-topping Commonwealth title defence. It was 2006, and so long ago now as to be almost ridiculous. A young Amir Khan, in only his sixth pro fight, having turned pro just seven months earlier, was also on that card, along with a once-fancied Margate-based welterweight named Takaloo and the future nearly-man Kevin ‘Mighty’ Mitchell. Names from another age that have no active place in boxing’s present. The turn of the century: that was Williams’ time. And that’s where he deserves to be remembered.