Cleveland Williams Tracking The Cat The Ring

I always have to laugh at the criticisms of Williams management. Benbow supported Williams financially, paid all of his medical expenses, covered his legal fees, waged a very successful p.r. campaign after Williams drunkenly attacked a police officer, built him a gym so he could train his way back to the top, etc etc and then when he actually expected to be reimbursed (which Williams tried to get out of) Benbow is the bad guy. Weird take.

 

That's a pretty misleading way to characterize what happened. The contemporary newspaper account doesn't simply establish that Williams "drunkenly attacked a police officer." It says Williams was arrested on suspicion of drunkenness, and according to the patrolman's account, Williams resisted being put into the car and struck him twice in the head. That's one part of the story.

But the shooting itself happened during a struggle over the officer's gun. The officer claimed Williams grabbed the pistol and pulled it toward himself, causing it to fire, while Williams was the one who ended up being shot in the hip and abdomen. The article explicitly says the officer's account was that Williams "grabbed the pistol"—it doesn't establish as an undisputed fact that Williams deliberately tried to shoot or seriously injure the officer.

And there’s also a broader historical context that shouldn’t simply be waved away. This was a period when accounts of confrontations between white law enforcement and Black men were hardly produced in a social vacuum, and there is ample historical reason to be cautious about treating a police officer’s characterization of a confrontation involving a Black man as automatically definitive. That doesn't prove the officer was lying in this particular case, but it certainly means his account should be treated as an account of what happened, rather than as a neutral transcript of objective fact.

So if you're saying Williams was intoxicated and resisted arrest, that's supported by the contemporary report. If you're presenting it as some straightforward case of "a drunk Williams attacked a cop," that's flattening a disputed incident into a much cleaner story than the actual evidence supports.

And there's a pretty important distinction between resisting arrest and striking an officer and the much broader implication that Williams was some crazed drunk who simply attacked a cop for no reason. The contemporary account doesn't establish the latter.

For someone who apparently prides himself on knowing obscure boxing history and having access to footage and material most people haven't seen, you'd think you'd be a little more careful about distinguishing what a source actually establishes from what you want the source to establish.

 

Excellent post, and yes, you're on the money regarding Williams working on Benbow's farm to regain his strength. That makes the claim that Benbow "built him a gym so he could train his way back to the top" particularly misleading. It's presented as though Benbow simply went out of his way to provide Williams with a private training facility out of the goodness of his heart, when the reality appears considerably less charitable. Having Williams work on his farm while he was recovering and trying to get back into fighting shape conveniently provided Benbow with free labor at the same time.

Given how eager some people have been to portray Benbow as this almost entirely selfless benefactor, I don't think it's unreasonable to question where that "built him a gym" narrative came from in the first place. Especially when the same people have an obvious agenda when it comes to Williams, I'm not inclined to accept a flattering anecdote at face value when the underlying circumstances were considerably more complicated.

If Williams was working on Benbow's farm as part of his rehabilitation and conditioning, then portraying the arrangement as Benbow simply "building him a gym" conveniently leaves out the part where Williams was providing Benbow with actual labor. That doesn't mean Benbow did nothing for Williams, but it certainly undermines the sanitized picture of the relationship that this claim is trying to create.

 

Benbow and Adams were partners. The point is that Williams crying about his management team that literally saved his life and career is ridiculous. Williams was served because after the heavy expenses his management incurred in him he was refusing to repay them and was about to earn his career high payday.

Its also patently ridiculous to pretend Williams was either providing free labor or forced to work for Benbow. He wasnt. He was willingly working out on the ranch doing manual labor as part of his training and rehabilitation. He only cried about that crap later when he didnt want to pay what he owed his management. I guess when fighters went away to training camp and chopped trees etc they were slaves? Get real.

Its funny, Williams can lie and paint these damning stories about his management after they have a falling out but when his management does the same they are the bad guys?

Fighters always have sob stories and fans always believe them because they are fans and objectively biased

 

Williams admitted to being out all night drinking. There is nothing misleading about what I said. The facts are fairly well established and most of them were not disputed by Williams or his friend who was arrested with him. And no, Williams didnt just grab the gun because the officer suffered facial wounds from a beating, a beating which was corroborated by Williams friend. Williams story was that after drinking all night he was pulled over for drunk driving, arrested, and then panicked and tried to jump out of the car. The officer tried to stop him, Williams assaulted him, and the officer who was MUCH smaller shot him in self defense. Those are the basic facts and again Williams didnt really dispute them in the immediate aftermath. His story changed later to say he was scared because the officer was taking him to a jail in a racist town. Thats bull**** though because the jail he was being transported to was in the same town he had been drinking all night so congratulations, you fell for it. If he was so scared of this racist town why was he there getting drunk all night with one of his black friends?? But you know all of this "obscure" information because Ive educated you on it before. Doesnt matter. Youll believe what you want because you are this forums biggest Williams dicklicker. Like I said, fans are inherently biased because they are fans.

 

You're doing a lot of arguing with a position I never took. I never said Williams was innocent. wasn't drinking, or didn't assault the officer. I specifically acknowledged that the contemporary account supports the claims that he was intoxicated, resisted arrest, and struck the officer. My point was that you presented a much more specific reconstruction of the incident as though the source itself established all of it.

And now you're adding quite a bit that wasn't in the contemporary account I was discussing. You're telling me that Williams's "story changed," that his explanation about being afraid of the jail was false because of where he had been drinking, and that his friend corroborated the entire sequence you describe. Fine. Those are claims that can be examined on their own merits. But they don't magically turn the patrolman's account into an objective transcript of what happened.

In fact, your point about Tomball appears to be bull. The accounts I've seen place Williams drinking and driving near Houston, with Tomball being the place he realized he was being transported to and was afraid of being taken. I haven't seen anything establishing that Williams had been drinking in Tomball. So asking "why was he there getting drunk all night" assumes precisely the fact that you need to establish. If you have a source showing that he was actually drinking in Tomball, produce it. Otherwise, that argument doesn't demonstrate that his fear of being transported there was fabricated.

And there is actually some historical context here that makes your dismissal of Williams's fear even more questionable. One contemporary observer described Tomball as having "historically been a white community." And this isn't some characterization of Tomball that appeared out of nowhere. In 2005 — 2005, not 1965 — Tomball was sued after the city rented a public building for a Ku Klux Klan event. The city disputed the allegations in that lawsuit, so I'm not claiming that the lawsuit by itself proves every allegation made against the city. But the fact that Tomball was still embroiled in a Klan-related civil-rights controversy in 2005 is certainly relevant historical context.

More importantly, we're talking about 1960s Texas, and the racial climate of the time wasn't some abstract historical footnote. Just months before Williams was shot, in June 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were arrested by a local Mississippi deputy sheriff and subsequently murdered by Klansmen, with the deputy later convicted for his role in the conspiracy. You don't have to believe that Williams thought the exact same thing was going to happen to him to understand why a Black man in that era might be apprehensive about being arrested and transported by a white police officer, particularly to a community he understood to be hostile toward Black people. That fear was not coming out of nowhere.

And there's an even more immediate piece of context that you seem to be ignoring. Williams himself said that he heard an officer say, "Don't put that ****** in my car." If that's an accurate account of what he heard, then we're no longer talking merely about abstract racial tensions in 1960s Texas or whether Tomball happened to be predominantly white. We're talking about Williams allegedly hearing an explicitly racial statement from someone involved in the circumstances surrounding his arrest. You can dispute Williams's account if you want, but you can't reasonably dismiss his fear as though it existed in some historical vacuum.

So your "why was he there getting drunk all night" argument misses the point even if your premise were correct. Being willing to drink in the Houston area with another Black man does not somehow mean a Black man couldn't be afraid of being taken into custody and transported to a different community by a white officer. And again, you haven't even established that Williams was drinking in Tomball in the first place. You're attacking the plausibility of his explanation based on a fact you haven't established, while ignoring the very real historical circumstances that made his apprehension plausible.

The fact that the officer suffered facial injuries establishes that he was beaten. It doesn't, by itself, establish every detail of the subsequent struggle over the gun or the precise sequence of events that led to the shooting. Likewise, saying Williams "panicked and tried to jump out of the car" is a characterization of the incident, not something that becomes an established fact simply because it makes the story more coherent.

And there's another rather inconvenient detail for the picture of Benbow as the endlessly devoted benefactor. When Williams was later arrested, he reportedly said, "I called Mr. Benbow to bail me out tonight, but he said he wouldn't." The authorities said they had acted on a telephone complaint from someone identifying himself as Benbow. So the man who is routinely portrayed as this saintly figure who did everything imaginable for Williams apparently not only refused to bail his own fighter out, but was also the person whose complaint led to Williams being arrested in the first place. That doesn't exactly fit the sanitized version of Benbow's relationship with Williams that you repeat as gospel.

I never even had a debate with you about this subject, so I'm not sure why you're talking as though you've "educated me" on it before. Come to think of it, the complete lack of paragraphs, the unusually emotional writing, and the conspicuous absence of apostrophes do remind me of a certain permanently banned poster. Funny that.

And while we're on the subject of that aforementioned poster, his argument that Williams' prime was supposedly untouched by the shooting is just as laughable. He wrote: "Williams was 31 years old and had been boxing for 15 years when he was shot, immediately after which his doctor said he would make a full recovery. Then when Williams fails to beat the best fighters he faces, just like he did before he was shot, his prime is suddenly cut short. LOL."

That's an astonishingly shallow assessment of the subject for someone who supposedly "educated" me on it. Yes, Williams' doctor initially said that he would make a full recovery and could potentially return to the ring in six months. But that wasn't the end of the story, and presenting it as though it was is exactly the kind of selective reading that undermines your credibility when you start lecturing other people about the subject.

Within a few weeks, Williams required another operation on his damaged kidney. By that point, the doctor's assessment had become considerably less optimistic: "I'm confident he will return to normal health but I don't know if he will be strong enough to take the punishment required of a heavyweight championship contender."

And six months after the shooting—precisely around the point when the original prognosis had suggested he might be fighting again—Williams was being described as a shell of himself and unable to lift more than 25 pounds without pain. https://ibb.co/jRWwtbW

That's not some convenient retrospective excuse invented after Williams started losing fights. That's contemporary medical evidence showing that the initial prognosis was wrong and that his physical recovery was substantially more complicated than the simplistic version you're repeating. If you actually know this material as well as you claim, you should already know that.

So when you reduce the entire issue to "he was 31, the doctor said he'd make a full recovery, and then he lost to good fighters just like before," you're not demonstrating superior knowledge of Williams' career. You're demonstrating that you've either failed to examine the evidence beyond the convenient portion of the story, or you've examined it and decided the inconvenient parts weren't worth mentioning.

And that's particularly ironic given that you're accusing me of being a biased fan who "believes what he wants." The evidence you're dismissing isn't fan speculation. It's the medical record of what happened to Williams after he was shot. If your argument depends on pretending the initial optimistic prognosis was the final prognosis, while ignoring the subsequent surgery, the revised prognosis, and Williams' documented physical condition six months later, then perhaps the problem isn't that I'm too biased to accept the facts. Perhaps you've simply been selecting the facts that make your preferred narrative easier to maintain.

 

@Andre2000 I'm sorry that troll derailed your thread but found something I thought you might like. I came across this image of Liston feeding Williams in the hospital. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-union/204175258/

I know the picture of Liston holding up a newspaper in front of a smiling Williams is fairly well circulated but this is the first time I've come across this particular one.

 

You seem to labor under this bizarre impression that it was wrong for Williams' management team to want to profit off of him and to not provide him charity. So by your logic they should have supported him financially, including all of his **** ups, and expected nothing in return? Wow! Thats a great deal! Where do I sign up? You say that his medical bills were promised to be covered? Fully without expectation of repayment??? No. Dont be obtuse. Williams wasnt a child and these guys werent his parents. Their only obligation to him was to further his career and get their cut. They did exactly that. It isnt their fault that Williams went out drinking (which was an issue with him) and got shot. Why should they be on the hook for it when it threatened a huge investment they had in him? Do you seriously think that if the shoe were on the other foot and Hugh Benbow had been shot that Cleveland Williams would have been on the hook for his expenses??? Of course not. If Williams thought he couldnt make money with Benbow and Adams do you believe he would have stayed with them out friendship? Get real. This is a business relationship and business partners had zero obligation to foot all of WIlliams bills, especially when he was completely ****ing up their investment. I mean, this wasnt even a one off. After he got shot, he failed to appear for court and had a warrant sworn out for his arrest and during the time he was out of the hospital but before he was sentenced (after pleading no contest to all charges btw) he was arrested for harrassing his wife at her work with a gun. But I guess his management should have just bailed him out, kept feeding him, and paying his bills, and expected nothing in return...

 

LOL, so its not an argument you made or believe in but youll argue it anyway. What a load of horse**** you just posted. The guy Williams was arrested with stated they had been drinking in the bars around Tomball since noon that day. They were arrested around Midnight. Thats twelve hours of drinking in the same town that you are arguing/not arguing Williams was justified in being scared to go to. Williams account, which is riddled with lies, states that he was actually heading to Tomball (to visit is "auntie" LOL) when he was arrested. Yet he was arrested heading south on Highway 149 which is now 249 on a direct line from Tomball to Houston. Williams himself stated that he attempted to flee because he was afraid he would ruin everything with Benbow. He even states that he promised Benbow he would stay at home that night with his wife and not go out drinking so this had been an issue that was discussed previously. Instead he goes out drinking all day, picks up two women hes not married to, and then gets arrested because hes driving 80 miles an hour and swerving so dangerously that he almost forces the patrol officer into a ditch. He panics because hes on the verge of a title shot that could be jeopardized and just got caught late at night with a woman who wasnt his wife that was at home with his child... He panicked, tried to flee, and the situation escalated. Its as simple as that. And you know why its as simple as that? Because its not only supported by the evidence but Williams pled no contest to it. He even admitted that he tried to flee. He admitted that the officer did nothing wrong and that not only was he only doing his job but that if hed shot him dead he would have only been doing his job.

As for Benbow being some saintly benefactor, I never made that claim. In fact its you dick licking fanboys who seem to think Benbow had some obligation to be a saintly benefactor. He didnt, and thats my point. Williams was an investment to those guys. Period. And thats the only obligation he had to them or they had to him. They had already invested nearly $150,000 in his career and the only way they were going to recoup that investment was to make sure he was healthy and walking free so that he could fight and get that title shot. Period. Is that wrong? Is it wrong that they expected a return on their investment? Any answer other than "no" is pure poppycock. Why should Williams just expect that these guys pay all of HIS expenses and expect to not have to pay them back when the money came in?? ANSWER ME THAT SIMPLE QUESTION.

Oh, and the call to the police you mentioned, the one that was never confirmed to be Benbow? You forgot to add that WIlliams was arrested for harrassing his wife at her place of work with a pistol to the point she was afraid to leave the building. Thank god someone called the police whoever it was. But yeah, lets not tell the entire story for fear it might make others think less of your hero.

And you can keep harping on about Williams being a different fighter after being shot than before and I will keep pointing out the simple fact that there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN HIS RECORD OR PERFORMANCES that prove that. He beat nobody of consequence prior to his shooting and has a ridiculously thin resume. His two best wins were over Billy Daniels and Alex Miteff who combined records were 48-34-5. His best performance was against Eddie Machen. Go read what his hometown papers had to say about fight. Here I'll help: The Houston Post had two writers covering the fight. One thought WIlliams won the other thought Machen won. The writer who thought WIlliams won admitted that most of the fans thought Machen deserved the fight. The Houston Chronicle thought Machen won. Both papers said the crowd felt Williams didnt throw enough and Williams himself said he felt he let everyone down. Machen said he was robbed. So in Williams hometown Machen gets a draw that most thought he won and even the majority of opinions ringside thought Machen won. And this is Eddie Machen. This isnt Patterson, this isnt Liston, this isnt Ali. This is a guy who was nearly killed in less than a round by Ingemar Johansson four years earlier. He had already been outpointed Sonny Liston and Zora Folley and even light heavyweight Harold Johnson. So this isnt like some great feather in his cap that got a gift draw in his hometown against some legend.

But hey, its your favorite subject so youll blather on about him...