​            Ike Williams was a professional boxer who held lightweight championship titles (1945-51). He was born in Brunswick, Georgia, a coastal town south of Savannah. Details concerning his life outside of boxing are sparse. His parents, Isaiah Williams and Della Blue were separated in 1932, Williams accompanied his mother to Trenton, New Jersey, where he resided for all but the last years of his life. A shy and sullen child by all accounts, Williams grew up in grinding Depression-era poverty and suffered teasing by classmates for his thick country accent. Williams took up boxing in his early teens to develop self-confidence and blossomed into an athlete, earning positions on the varsity track and baseball teams at Trenton Central High School. Williams continued to pursue boxing at a neighborhood gym under the tutelage of Jesse Goss, a former prizefighter. Competing as an amateur, Williams won the featherweight championship at the 1938 Trenton Times Golden Gloves tournament. With Goss's encouragement and help, he withdrew from school and obtained a professional boxing license, registering false documents to circumvent the state's minimum-age requirement of eighteen. It can be surmised from references made by Williams to "my wife, Virginia" that he married circa 1942-44. The couple had three children all now deceased, one of whom died of pneumonia at age ten in 1958.

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Powerful Right Hand
         Standing five feet, nine inches tall, weighing about 132 pounds, Williams possessed the impressive leg and hand speed expected of lightweight boxers. His distinguishing characteristic was a powerful right hand, capable of delivering a knockout blow in any round. He had his first professional fight in 1940 and won seven of his first ten bouts, scoring four knockouts, three of them in the second round. Beginning in October 1941, Williams won thirty-two consecutive bouts, fourteen of them by knockout, during a twenty-seven-month period. As his string of wins grew, he earned appearances on cards in major cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, where he won a decision over Jerry Moore in Madison Square Garden, then a showplace of the boxing world. Connie McCarthy, an experienced New York-based manager, bought the Williams's contract shortly thereafter.
        The undefeated streak ended in January 1944 at the hands of Bob Montgomery, a ranked fighter and former lightweight champion. Montgomery knocked Williams down three times before finishing him in the twelfth round of a featured bout at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Williams rebounded from the setback with twelve consecutive wins, including eight knockouts, yet McCarthy was unwilling or unable to get him fights with ranked contenders. In April 1945 McCarthy seized an opportunity for Williams to substitute for an injured fighter in a title bout in a Mexico City bullring against Juan Zurita, a local hero who was recognized as lightweight champion by the National Boxing Association (NBA), one of several sanctioning bodies. Zurita's fans believed the unknown American would present no problem for the champion, making for a festive atmosphere. "The crowds treated me like some hero," Williams recalled. "They hoisted me up and carried me through the streets. Everyone cheered me" (Kelly). However, in a stunning upset, Williams landed a powerhouse right in the second round, sending Zurita down for the count. The crowd, which numbered about thirty-five thousand, started rioting, throwing bottles and bricks at the ring. In the midst of the chaos, Williams was robbed at gunpoint of the championship belt he had been awarded minutes earlier.

​Blackballed
          Having struggled through five years of relatively meager purses, Williams was eager to reap the benefits of defending his title against a major contender. He was especially keen for a rematch with Montgomery, who had since regained the world lightweight title recognized by the state athletic commissions of New York, Pennsylvania, and other states with major boxing venues. When McCarthy could not bring Montgomery to the table, Williams expressed his dissatisfaction to the press, blaming McCarthy's drinking problem. This set off a chain of events that would haunt the fighter's career. McCarthy filed a complaint with the Boxing Managers Guild, an organization dedicated to absolute enforcement of the contracts by which managers controlled boxers, many of whom were barely literate and had little understanding of what they were signing. The guild upheld McCarthy, effectively blackballing Williams from professional boxing. Williams tried to act on his own behalf, but major promoters would not talk to him. Outraged, Williams attempted to organize boxers into an association of their own, making appeals to several stars who had experienced problems with managers, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Jake LaMotta, and Willie Pep. "I wanted to start a fighter's guild," Williams later told an interviewer. "They said, 'No, we don't want anything to do with that.' I don't guess they were afraid but . . . They were doing alright , so why look for trouble?" (Heller, p. 269). At this point, Williams was approached by Frank "Blinky" Palermo, an organized crime figure who would eventually serve prison time for his activities in the boxing world. Palermo assured Williams that he could resolve all problems with McCarthy, break the boycott, and get him the bouts and purses appropriate for a champion. Facing banishment from boxing, Williams agreed to sign with Palermo.

 

​Fighter of the Year
          Palermo arranged a series of non title fights for Williams in the Northeast, mostly against welterweights--a strategy that kept Williams at a distance from lightweight contenders for the NBA crown, while giving him exposure in the states in which Montgomery was recognized as champion. When the NBA threatened to strip Williams of his title for inactivity, Palermo arranged a match in Los Angeles with Mexican-born Enrique Bolanos, knowing that the area's large Chicano population would turn out for a chance to see Zurita's defeat avenged. On 30 April 1946, thirteen months after winning the title, Williams made his first defense, knocking out Bolanos in the eighth round. Palermo arranged a second defense in September, against Ronnie James in Cardiff, Wales, giving Williams international attention against a fighter who had little chance of beating him. Williams again won by knockout. Still unable to arrange a "unification" championship bout with Montgomery, Palermo then sets up another series of non title bouts with welterweights in a tour of Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and other major cities. With each victory, Palermo proclaimed Williams the "true world champion" to the press and accused Montgomery of hiding from him.
         

          The strategy worked. Palermo had the public clamoring for a showdown to determine the undisputed world champion. More than thirty thousand fans were on hand at Philadelphia Municipal Stadium on 4 August 1947. The two men pummeled each other mercilessly for five rounds, with neither sustaining an advantage. In the sixth round, Williams knocked down Montgomery. Taking a nine-count before struggling to his feet, Montgomery was unable to raise his gloves as Williams moved in on him, causing the referee to stop the fight and award Williams a technical knockout (TKO). "I whipped him like his daddy," Williams said. "It was the greatest night of my life" (Kelly). The Ring magazine named him Fighter of the Year.
          Williams held the lightweight crown for more than three years, successfully defending it five times. Two were easy victories against Enrique Bolanos before large crowds at Wrigley Field, Los Angeles. In the summer of 1948, at a fighting weight of 134 pounds, Williams was at the height of his powers in scoring a pair of fifteenth-round TKOs over Beau Jack (12 July, Shibe Park, Philadelphia) and Jesse Flores (23 September, Yankee Stadium). Seeing no lightweight challenger who could attract a lucrative gate, Palermo reverted to the strategy of restricting Williams to non title fights with boxers from the junior welterweight (135 pounds) and welterweight (147 pounds) classes. Combining the speed of a lightweight with the punching power of a heavier fighter, Williams had many memorable matches with welterweights during his career, including such welterweight champions as Sammy Angott and Johnny Bratton, defeating each of them twice. Kid Gavilan, who would eventually hold the welterweight and middleweight crowns, suffered the first knockdown in his career in a loss to Williams but later defeated him twice.

​Taking a Dive
         Fighting as much as twenty pounds above the lightweight limit, Williams had increasing difficulty making weight for his title defenses, and the fluctuations made him subject to frequent training injuries. On 25 May 1951, seventeen months after his previous defense (a decision over Freddie Dawson), Williams faced Jimmy Carter in a title bout at Madison Square Garden. Carter, a relative unknown, put Williams on the canvas four times, causing the referee to stop the fight in the twelfth round. Carter had taken the title by TKO. Time magazine described the normally powerful Williams as "looking string-muscled and drawn from the strain of making the weight" ("End of a Champion," p. 79).
          Later that year, Williams was called on to testify before the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, headed by the senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee. Palermo had saved Williams's career as promised, but details of the full price emerged at the hearing. Williams admitted to serving Palermo's gambling interests by "carrying" fighters to specified rounds, although he insisted he had never "taken a dive" (i.e., willingly lost a fight). Williams also revealed that at times Palermo underpaid or refused to pay him. For example, he claimed Palmero owed him thirty-three thousand dollars apiece for his successful title defenses against Beau Jack and Jesse Flores. "I fought those two fights and paid taxes on them," he told an interviewer. "I never saw a penny" (Kelly).
          After losing the championship, Williams continued to box, but his injuries were not healing properly, and the general reaction to his appearance before the Kefauver commission made it clear that he would never regain a position in the top ranks of boxing. This may explain why he took a dive in a 1952 bout with Chuck Davey, just months after testifying. Williams officially retired in 1956, with a record of 125-24-5, including sixty victories by knockout.
Like many boxers of the period, Williams faced tremendous difficulties after leaving the ring. He returned to the large home he had built in 1948 in the Forest Valley neighborhood on the outskirts of Trenton. Enjoying the role of local hero, he picked up checks, loaned money to old friends who could not repay him, took up golf, and sponsored youth sports teams. But his generosity and his mounting gambling debts soon sent him into bankruptcy, causing him to lose title to two Trenton apartment houses, his only reliable source of income. His marriage dissolved in the mid-1950s under the strain of the deteriorating financial situation. At the end of the decade, he was living alone, working as a low-wage laborer.

 

​Universal Praise
          A younger generation of boxers discovered Williams during the 1960s, admiring him for his style in the ring and for his attempt to rebel against the boxing establishment two decades earlier. Muhammad Ali was among those who went to Trenton to see him. Appalled to find the former champion working at a warehouse and living at the YMCA, he offered Williams a job at his training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. But Williams proved a bit too rebellious, even for boxing's greatest rebel. "The Muslims got mad because I brought pork into their camp, and some guy I knocked out in 1943 called Ali," he said (Kelly). The boxing promoter Don King and the heavyweight champion Mike Tyson were prominent among a group who took an interest in Williams's welfare during the 1980s, helping to arrange for him to retire to an apartment in Los Angeles. Williams's only income was a six-hundred-dollar-per-month Social Security benefit. He died as a result of untreated arterial sclerosis.
          Boxing historians are universal in their admiration for Williams. He was among the inaugural inductees to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, and almost all who have written about lightweight boxing place him among the top five to have fought in the division. Ring magazine's Top 100 list of boxers from all weight classes ranks him as the seventy-eighth greatest in history. Williams's contributions to the city of Trenton and its African American community were recognized in 2005 with a memorial statue in Clay Street Park, just blocks from his childhood home. A half century after Ike Williams was rebuffed and thrown into the hands of a mobster for attempting to take charge of his own career, professional athletes take for granted the right he was denied. Williams did not need an agent or an entourage to boost his confidence. He got that from his mastery of boxing.
 
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Bibliography
Williams gave an interview to Peter Heller in 1973 that appears in Heller's book In This Corner: 42 Champions Tell Their Stories (1973; rpt. 1994); and another to Bill Kelly on 28 Aug. 1994, days before his death, available online at

www.gamemasteronline.com/Archive/SweetScience/IkeWilliams.shtml. Also cited in this article is "End of a Champion," Time (4 June 1951). An obituary is in the New York Times, 7 Sept. 1994.

 

David Marc
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Online Resources
• Marty Mulcahey offers a definitive portrait of William as part of his Forgotten Champions series at
http://www.maxboxing.com/mulcahey/mulcahey1004a05.asp.
• Williams's complete professional boxing record is at
www.boxrec.com/list_bouts.php?human_id=9020&cat=boxer

 

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Citation:
David Marc. "Williams, Ike";
http://www.anb.org/articles/19/19-00982.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Thu Apr 11 19:30:21 EDT 2013
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