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This is a fight I'm hoping brings out a ton of fireworks. I'm a fan of both guys, but that Texas connect has me backing Charlo on this one.Comment
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WAR JRock
I think Cuellar beats the nutcrackerComment
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Julian will show that he is one of the very best fighters this sport has to offer on Saturday. I can't wait.Comment
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War jrock
Thats the only fight on the card im worried aboutComment
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My prediction: J-Rock will win a close good fight (7:5, maybe 8:4 rounds), but they will give Jermall the decision.Comment
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It was a half a lifetime ago, but Julian Williams can recall the ride home vividly. Little details remain crystal clear in his mind.
He’d just competed in the national Silver Gloves boxing tournament, and one of his coaches had a car full of kids he was bringing home. The car would make stops in various Philadelphia neighborhoods, and the coach would watch as the young boxers would climb out of the car and bound into their homes.
Williams was the final kid in the car as his coach drove down Roosevelt Boulevard.
“Let me out here,” Williams told his coach. But his coach glanced around and saw no home for Williams to go to.
“What is your address?” the coach asked. Williams was reluctant to say, and again asked to be left off where they were. The truth was, there was no home. He was living in a shelter in the bottom floor of an old hotel, and he was too embarrassed to admit that.
His mother, who died in 2013 at just 53 years old, was addicted to crack *******, and her children had a tumultuous early life when they were young.
“Things got really bad for us at the time,” said Williams, who on Saturday will challenge Jermall Charlo for the IBF light middleweight title at the Galen Center in Los Angeles in a bout televised by Showtime.
“She was struggling with her addiction. They took our house and my little brother and I got put into foster care. I went to stay with my father for a minute, but then I came right back because he got incarcerated. Then I started living with my mother again, but she was living with a friend of hers who also was a drug addict. It was a bad environment.”
It wasn’t the kind of place to raise children. When Williams was 13, he got a major break in his life, though he could hardly have understood the significance it would have at that point.
A social worker wanted to remove him from that home, and asked if he had a relative. His older sister was 21 and he was off to live with her.
“She was always mature and always had her own apartment and she had a boyfriend who is now her husband,” Williams said.
A stable home was a positive. By that point, Williams had found boxing and fallen in love with it. He was talented and even at that age, showing signs he could be a successful pro.
“I knew early on, he could be special,” said Kenny Mason, one of his early coaches who is still a mentor for Williams. “He was a little out there and we had to rein him in a bit. One of his things was, he loved to fight. A lot. That’s what brought him into the gym, really. He was getting in trouble quite a bit and he did like fighting. It was obvious, to be honest, so I took that and used it.”
Williams is now 22-0-1 with 14 knockouts and one of the best prospects in the sport. His only blemish was a draw in his seventh fight against Francisco “Chia” Santana, who was four years older and had more than double the number of fights Williams did.
But his home life presented problems that a lot of athletes didn’t face. The stable home his sister provided was a positive, but one of the downsides was that he couldn’t train as much. He had to babysit his sister’s children, because she worked the second shift and went to her job when Williams got home from school.
That meant he could only get to the gym once a week or so, and it wasn’t the way to advance his career.
Then came the real bombshell. His sister and her family were moving to North Carolina. By that point, Williams was plotting out a career as a fighter and dreamed of becoming another in the long line of successful boxers from Philadelphia, following the likes of Bennie Briscoe, Bernard Hopkins, Frank “The Animal” Fletcher and Meldrick Taylor.
He didn’t know much about North Carolina other than it didn’t have fighters like Briscoe, Hopkins, Fletcher or Taylor.
“I never heard of any great fighters coming from North Carolina, and I knew it would be hard to pursue boxing in North Carolina,” he said. “But if I stayed, I’d basically be homeless, or close to it.”
He was so dedicated to boxing, he decided to stay, and went into the shelter with his mother in the basement of the hotel.
Mason became his father figure, providing structure and discipline in his life.
There are unheralded coaches throughout the country who sacrifice themselves to help troubled youths, and that’s what Mason did. He had a daughter and two sons and doted on them, but he took on many fighters who walked through the gym doors and treated them as if they were his own.
Thats a lot rougher than i realised for Williams. I know its a pretty standard childhood for a lot of boxers, but i always pictured Williams being from a slightly better background due to how he carries himself and the way he talks. Ward has a similarly troubled childhood and Williams reminds me alot of him in his mentality, so I guess it shouldnt have been a shock.Comment
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