Boxer’s Promise : Teen-Age Champion Sets Sights on Olympic Gold

He expects to be the next Mike Tyson. Only 16, he has met the rich and famous and, as the nation’s best amateur boxer, smoothly accepts adulation himself. But on one recent afternoon in a gym at Poly High School in Long Beach, he was just another teen-ager trying to fit in on a team.

“Hey, Jeremy, when you gonna play some volleyball, man?”

Jeremy Williams, who had hit the ball into the net, ignored the ribbing from his friend, Poly student Isaac Lewis.

Having just taken up the sport, he is not as proficient as his varsity volleyball teammates. But Williams stood out among them--6-foot-1, 180 pounds, broad shoulders, narrow waist, sculpted stomach, gold necklace and earring.

Between points, out of habit, he shadowboxed. When practice ended, he leaped and swung one-handed from the basketball rim.

Williams has established himself as fierce and fearless in the ring, a reputation that serves him well out of it. Admiring friends flock around him.

“When we go to a concert, if we think it’s going to be rowdy we take him along for protection,” Lewis said.

Williams has a 46-2 record with 26 knockouts. He was the national junior champion and now is heavyweight champion in the senior (16 and older) open division.

One Promise Fulfilled

When he was 15, he promised with a touch of Muhammad Ali’s brashness that he would win the Junior Olympics gold medal for Long Beach. He fulfilled that promise last June in Marquette, Mich. Now he vows to become Olympic heavyweight champion at Barcelona in 1992.

“I will give the Olympic gold medal to my mother,” he said.

Williams, who turned 16 in August, said it usually takes a couple of years for a junior national champion to be a senior national champion. But it took him only a few months.

In October he won the National Police Athletic League Amateur Boxing Tournament in Pompano Beach, Fla., and last month he won the Diamond Gloves championship in Detroit by defeating 22-year-old Kady King.

That was Williams’ most impressive victory, beating the local favorite, who had a fur coat, a diamond ring and an entourage.

“When I got (to Detroit), he said, ‘I’m gonna stretch you,’ ” Williams said of King, a sparring partner of Thomas Hearns. “I said, ‘Good luck, punk.’

“They told me King was one of the best, almost went to the Olympics. I beat him, no problem.”

Williams is trained by his father, Charles Williams, at the latter’s American Fitness Gym on Long Beach Boulevard downtown. Accompanied by the blare of a stereo and surrounded by boxing’s greats who stare out from magazine covers on the wall, he has been working out there since he was 7.

His father, though, worries that Jeremy may soon have to train elsewhere.

Charles Williams said he owes $300,000 on the building and is in danger of losing it because he can’t make the monthly payments. If he can find a way to buy it, he said the gym would become a permanent place for Long Beach youths to learn how to box.

Williams, 44, a former amateur boxer, has carefully planned his son’s career. He had a vision long ago that Jeremy would be a champion, and foresees him defending his title in the 1990s in Long Beach’s first championship fight.

This fall he made sure that Jeremy, who knows Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson as well as many of today’s top boxers, would meet Tyson.

“My knees were shaking when I met him,” Williams said of that night this fall when he met the heavyweight champion at the Forum. “I told him I beat his knockout record for the Junior Olympics; he laughed. I said, ‘One of these days you’ll see me across the ring.’ He laughed.”

“I want to fight Tyson,” he added. “People think I’ll stay this size the rest of my life. In 4 or 5 years I’m going to be big, a man, not a kid anymore.”

If Tyson is still fighting then, he would probably have to contend with a 20-year-old who is 6-3 and 220 pounds, the young boxer said.

Williams has defeated a 26-year-old and in the Junior Olympics beat two opponents who weighed close to 200 pounds.

“I feel no man can beat me,” Williams said. “I’ll fight till my hands fall off. I get mean but I keep myself under control. I go in there and try to knock them out.”

At the Junior Olympics he flattened an opponent in 8 seconds, beating Tyson’s record for quickest knockout by 1 second.

“He just watches you and goes after you,” his father said. “He’s got no fear. He’s so awesome now, people be running from him. Nobody wants to fight him.

Video of Victory in Florida

On a recent morning at the boxing gym, Williams played a videotape of one of his fights at Pompano Beach. Fists flying, he went after Chase Watson of Georgia. A hard right landed on Watson’s forehead. The cable-station announcer, just before the referee stopped the fight in the second round, said, “This kid is really a prospect.”

After his victory, Williams celebrated by stomping around the ring and bowing in all directions.

“He has a certain charisma that, along with his ability, will take him a long way,” Johnny Ace of American Boxing Co. Promotions said by telephone from Detroit. “The kid is coming along at the right time.”

For the next 3 years, Williams will be promoted by ABC Promotions.

But for the time being, Williams, who will have six matches a year until the Olympics, tries to lead a nonviolent life as a high school junior.

“I look at me as a person who’s not going to be in gangs, a positive role model,” said Williams, who has been a Boy Scout for 8 years. “I don’t think because I’m a boxer, I should be treated different.”

As he watched Williams play volleyball Monday, Poly assistant principal Adelmo Martinez said: “He doesn’t promote himself as a boxer, he doesn’t let it go to his head. He’s made progress in academics and his conduct and behavior is commendable.”

Last year, Williams received a disciplinary transfer from Wilson High School to Poly after he got into a fight.

“I never provoked anyone,” Williams said. “They say I should walk away but you can’t walk away from three guys.”

There has been no trouble at Poly.

“He likes to be with the girls, play the sensitive role,” his friend Lewis said. “Boxing and girls, that’s all he talks about.”

Because the youth has a black father and a white mother, he has had to meet physical challenges all his life. “He’s learned to stick up for himself,” Charles Williams said.

But his mixed heritage may eventually be the boxer’s greatest asset--”Jeremy’s going to be a people’s champion,” his father said.

The younger Williams has acquired a social polish beyond his years.

He returned as a hero with the California team from the Junior Olympics. “To see him signing autographs for people of all ages at the airport like Ali used to do, I knew right then our time was coming,” Charles Williams said.

The future is a delicious dream for the teen-ager.

“If my mother felt like going to Europe today, tomorrow she’d be there . . . that’s how I want my life to be,” he said.