Cleveland Williams Tracking The Cat The Ring

When did I ever say it was a charitable donation? Please! Quit trying to argue both sides of the argument. Benbow and Adams were partners. They paid Williams medical expenses and its not their fault that Williams somehow got the idea that they did it out of the kindness of their hearts. I mean Williams isnt exactly the most reliable narrator but fans dont care about that. Give a dog a bone and he'll run with it. Some of us actually knew people involved in this entire story and havent just heard one side of it trying to paint Williams as some poor setupon prizefighter. Im not sure why you keep painting the suit against him for the medical bills as this horrible crime. I will repeat: If they had already invested all of this money in his career (regardless of whether you believe it or not) and then paid his medical bills, legal fees, etc. and maneuvered him to a totally undeserved title shot would you not expect them to get reimbursed?? I mean what are you even arguing here? Youve already said you werent implying that their financial support was charity. So what the **** are you arguing about? Your mad because Benbow was pissed that he froze on the biggest night of his life? I hate to break it to you but regardless of what your buddy swag thinks Im not the first person who has called Williams an overprotected front runner with a padded record who couldnt hack it when the chips were down.


His wife rescued him from the streets? LOL. His, what third or fourth wife? The one he was cheating on his previous wife with? The one who left him because he cheated on her, probably fathering one of the estimated 29 children (his words) he fathered, most of them outside his numerous marriages?? If she rescued him from the streets why was he was he still a drunk after that? You dont know half as much about Williams as you think you do which is probably twice as much as Swag thinks he does.

I dont even think you understand what you are arguing about. You act like it was cruel that he had to pay his debts. Then make some point about him actually getting paid some of his purse after it was attached. He got paid a little over $12,000. He ended up having to pay his debts. Ya know why? Because they were his responsibility. That twelve thousand dollars was less than 10% of his purse, it wasnt some moral victory that he won over Adams because Adams ended up getting his money, despite Williams and his then wife trying to come up with all sorts of ways to cheat him out of it.

Why people come up with all of these sob stories for fighters blowing their money is beyond me. Its rarely ever anyones fault that these guys go broke but the fighters themselves. And everyone single one of these fighters who blows through his money like water has a million excuses and a million people to blame for it. "It was my manager, it was my wife, it was my business advisor, blah blah blah." It was never the sports cars, expensive clothes, big houses, drugs, booze, or anything else. Thats what this is all about, Williams, who wasnt the sharpest knife in the drawer, made a LOT of bad choices and incurred a lot of debts as a result. He was never going to be a millionaire but the reason he ended up broke was entirely his fault. Benbow and Adams were both millionaires and you know what? They didnt make their millions stealing it from Cleveland Williams no matter what hed have you believe.

 

Going to have to address this in separate post to satisfy character limit.

 

@RockyValdez

Your entire Benbow argument has undergone a rather convenient transformation. Originally, the story was that Benbow was this extraordinarily generous benefactor who paid Williams' medical expenses, covered his legal fees, supported him financially, built him a gym, etc. Now that I point out the inconvenient fact that Benbow wouldn't even bail Williams out of jail, suddenly it's "Williams was an investment" and "they weren't going to coddle him."

Those are two very different presentations of the relationship. If your argument from the beginning was simply that Benbow was a businessman who had invested money in Williams and expected a return, then say that. But don't portray every expense Benbow incurred as evidence of his extraordinary generosity and then, when an inconvenient fact comes up, retreat to "he was an investment" as though that was your original argument.

And your explanation about the bail is particularly weak. Bail isn't some unrecoverable investment in Williams. Assuming conditions of the bond is met, bail money is returned. So your claim that Benbow needed Williams "healthy and walking free" to protect his investment doesn't explain why he wouldn't simply post bail. If anything, getting Williams out of jail would have been the obvious way to protect the fighter he supposedly regarded as an investment.

As for your claim about Ned Warner Jr., you say he stated that the two of them had been drinking in bars around Tomball since noon. Fine. Produce the source. I'm not interested in your paraphrase of what you say Warner supposedly said. Show the actual source and the exact statement. You're demanding that I distinguish between evidence and interpretation, so apply the same standard to yourself.

The no-contest plea is another example of you treating a legal technicality as though it were a factual confession. A no-contest plea isn't an admission of guilt. That's basic law. A defendant can plead no contest without admitting the allegations against him. And the circumstances here matter enormously. We're talking about a Black man in the South in the 1960s, facing the word of a police officer, with boxing being his livelihood and a potential title opportunity at stake. Taking that case to trial could have jeopardized his career regardless of what actually happened. So no, his decision to plead no contest doesn't establish every detail of the officer's version, much less prove your entire reconstruction of the shooting.

There's also a glaring contradiction in your argument that you don't seem to notice. You say Williams's account is "riddled with lies," yet you selectively rely on Williams's own statements whenever they happen to support your version of events. His statements are worthless when they contradict you, but they're reliable when you can use one to argue that he panicked over Benbow or the title shot. You can't simultaneously dismiss the source as fundamentally dishonest and cherry-pick the portions of that same source that happen to be useful to you.

And the same problem runs through your treatment of his career. Literally nobody is arguing that Williams was an all-time great before he was shot, so I'm not sure why you keep manufacturing that argument. This isn't even the first time you've done it. You've repeatedly taken "the shooting affected Williams as a fighter" and transformed it into "Williams would have beaten everyone who ever lived if he hadn't been shot."

You did the same thing before with the absurd caricature:

"Ah another daily Williams post. Yes, we all know if Williams hadnt been shot, 187 years old, missing miles of intestines, half a kidney, a liver, and most of his colon as well as having the referee and judges against him he would have easily beaten Ali and anyone else who ever stepped in the ring with him. The breeze from his punches alone would have stopped most heavyweights and some say you could feel it in parts of Australia."

That's not an argument anyone's made. It's a straw man you've invented so you can attack a position nobody is actually defending.

The question is whether the shooting affected his physical condition and his ability to perform afterward. Those are completely different propositions. The medical evidence shows that his recovery was considerably more complicated than the initial prognosis suggested.

And then there's your description of the Machen fight. You claim that the Houston writers thought Machen won, that most of the crowd thought Machen won, and that Machen said he was robbed. Where are your sources for those specific claims?

The contemporary report I have says:

"Williams the no. 5 contender felt he had turned in an upset. Most of the crowd of 10,000 partial perhaps to the hometown favorite and one judge agreed."

Article clipped from The Bulletin - Newspapers.com™

That does not say that most of the crowd thought Machen won. In fact, it says the opposite: most of the crowd thought Williams won, and one judge agreed with him. So if you're going to make the categorical claim that most of the crowd thought Machen won, produce the source. Likewise, produce the contemporary source for your assertion that Machen said he was robbed.

And in that same source, Machen's own manager, Flaherty, said, "I'm happy with the draw." So again, I'd like to see the source for Machen's supposed "robbed" claim rather than another unsupported assertion (your specialty) Machen was hardly incapable of finding explanations for defeats after the fact. His later claim that Liston blinded him is another example of that tendency, despite the absence of that complaint immediately after their earlier meeting.

This is becoming a pretty serious problem for your credibility. You repeatedly insist that your superior knowledge of obscure material makes your conclusions authoritative, but when I actually examine the sources, your characterizations don't necessarily match what the sources say.

And that brings us to Foster, because this is where your claim that Williams was essentially the same fighter before and after the shooting becomes particularly embarrassing. You describe the Foster-Williams fights as slow, cautious affairs in which Williams was "robotic and slow" and immediately became unstable whenever Foster landed. Yet contemporary accounts describe the 1969 rematch very differently. The Ring described the third round as a "thrill-packed session" in which Williams came out aggressively, landed a left hook that buckled Foster's knees, and appeared to have the edge during the furious exchange before Foster ultimately turned the fight around.

Another contemporary account described Williams charging from his corner with hooks and rights, momentarily stunning Foster with a hook, and the two slugging it out before Foster eventually stopped him.

Sports Illustrated

http://archive.boxing.media/careful_with_that_cleaver_cleve.html

So I don't doubt that you have footage that isn't readily available to everyone else. What I question is your ability to analyze it. And that makes your assertion that the shooting didn't materially change Williams all the more embarrassing. This isn't some obscure technical distinction that only an experienced boxing historian could be expected to notice. The difference in Williams' physical condition and overall manner as a fighter is plainly apparent. You don't need decades of experience collecting fight footage to notice that he wasn't the same fighter he had been before he was shot.

In fact, that's precisely why your claim is so difficult to take seriously coming from someone who supposedly has decades of experience studying this material. You're supposedly the guy with the enormous archive and the expertise to educate everyone else. If you've watched enough Williams footage to arrive at the conclusion that the shooting had essentially no effect on him, then either you've somehow failed to recognize an extremely obvious change, or you've recognized it and are determined to explain it away because it doesn't fit your preferred narrative. Neither possibility reflects particularly well on your analytical ability.

And we've seen the same issue with your analysis of Lyle-Ali. Saying Lyle was "outboxing" Ali is an extremely generous description of what happened. Lyle was ahead because Ali was doing virtually nothing for extended stretches and Lyle was marginally busier. That's not the same thing as Lyle systematically outboxing Ali. A person can have access to obscure footage and still draw questionable conclusions from what they're watching.

So no, having a large archive doesn't magically settle these questions. I don't doubt that you possess the footage you claim to possess. I question your interpretation of it when your conclusions repeatedly conflict with contemporary accounts and the actual wording of the sources.

And that's the larger problem here. You're constantly presenting your interpretation as "the simple facts," while demanding that everyone else treat their sources with a level of skepticism you don't seem willing to apply to your own. If you're going to make claims about what Warner said, what the Machen crowd thought, what Machen said afterward, or what the footage supposedly proves, then produce the evidence and let it stand on its own.

Because "I've got footage you haven't seen lolz" isn't an argument. It's an appeal to authority. And if the authority's conclusions don't survive comparison with the contemporary evidence, the size of the archive doesn't change that.

 

@RockyValdez
This was apparently your very first exchange with Andre on the subject of Williams, and yet he immediately identified what he saw as a predisposition in the way you were approaching the subject. This wasn't someone who had spent months arguing with you about Williams and subsequently developed a grievance against you. He encountered your presentation of the subject and apparently recognized the same pattern I'm pointing out now: the tendency to begin with a conclusion about Williams and then interpret the evidence through that conclusion.

What's particularly telling is that Andre's criticism isn't simply "I disagree with your opinion of Williams." He's pointing to specific instances where you've characterized sources selectively, changed the framing of your argument when challenged, or treated disputed interpretations as established facts. You can disagree with his conclusions, obviously, but dismissing the entire criticism as the product of "fanboyism" doesn't actually address any of it.

In other words, when someone who has just encountered your Williams arguments for the first time independently notices the same underlying bias that I've been pointing out, it's probably worth considering whether the common denominator might actually be your presentation of the subject rather than everyone else's supposed obsession with Williams.

And that's worth keeping in mind when you repeatedly accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being a "fanboy" or having some predetermined position. If someone encountering your arguments for the first time independently comes away with the impression that you have a pronounced bias against Williams, perhaps the problem isn't that everyone else is mysteriously predisposed in Williams' favor.