Down, but Not Out: The Story of Paralyzed Former Boxing Champion Paul Williams

It was after first light just outside Atlanta, and middleweight boxer Paul 'The Punisher" Williams was en route to his brother Leon's wedding. It was May 27, 2012 and Paul, the best man, had hopped on his bike to meet up with the wedding party and prepare for the day's events.

Big things were happening for Paul Williams, who only a week earlier had signed to fight in his first pay-per-view main event, against an up-and-coming Mexican slugger named Saul "Canelo" Alvarez. The bout was to be his biggest payday. It would help put a knockout loss at the hands of middleweight kingpin Sergio Martinez in his rear-view. It would erase the frustration of top fighters—Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and all the others—giving him the runaround.

Riding east down South Marietta Parkway on his modified Suzuki 1300 Hayabusa—a recent gift to himself, indulging his inner speed freak—he sensed the car to his right drifting toward him, into the passing lane. He swerved left to avoid being clipped, but another vehicle from oncoming traffic suddenly bore down on him. Williams had a choice: crash his crotch rocket into almost two tons of metal at a combined speed of well over 100 mph or take his chances navigating a steep road-side embankment.

Police said Williams was driving too fast—the consensus estimate was 75 mph—and Williams claimed the driver he had initially veered to avoid was fiddling on his cell phone at the time, oblivious. In the moment, the details didn't matter, save possibly for one: Williams was, in accordance with Georgia law, wearing his helmet. Even that would have been irrelevant if his body's trajectory had sent him toward the embankment's brick wall, but instead he careened into the more forgiving earth, was launched some 60 feet away, and came to rest flat on his back, motionless.

"I don't know if I was unconscious," Williams says of his first thoughts lying there on the asphalt. "I heard the ambulance, I hear them telling me to open my eyes. You know in an accident like that when they always tell you to wiggle your toes? It felt like, for some reason, I was still on my bike. I don't know why I feel like I'm still on my bike.

"I had dirt in my eyes, ears, for weeks after the accident. They were still pulling dirt out of my eyes. My head, when it hit the dirt, they said it was like somebody took a bowling ball and dropped it out of a plane and it hit to make that hole in the ground."

When Williams arrived by ambulance at Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, doctors stabilized him and assessed the damage. The diagnosis was grim: Paul was paralyzed below the waist. His spinal cord had been severely damaged and in all likelihood he would never walk again.

Williams says he was told by hospital workers that his was one of three motorcycle crashes in the Atlanta metro area that weekend, and that he was the only rider among them who survived.

"They were like, 'We do't know how you made it.'"

A stroke of luck landed Williams his first title fight. It was 2007, and Mexico's Antonio Margarito— tall, prolific, and seemingly unbreakable—was having all kinds of trouble convincing credible opponents to challenge him for the WBO welterweight title. Williams needed no convincing. He might have been a Plan B opponent facing a violent menace, but he eagerly accepted the opportunity.

Williams entered the ring under the lights of the Home Depot Center in Carson, California wrapped in an emerald satin robe and flashing an ear-to-ear smile that had been cranked to full wattage throughout fight week.

A lanky, 6-foot-1 southpaw with the reach of a heavyweight and the rapid-fire punch volume of a lightweight, Paul "The Punisher" Williams was a boxing unicorn—a beautiful anomaly. He wasn't a knockout artist in the traditional sense, and his technique wasn't the stuff training videos are made of, but his length—for a man who could comfortably dip to 147 pounds, Williams' height and reach defied belief—combined with his lefty stance and withering work rate made him a frustrating, fearsome puzzle for opponents.

From the opening bell, he was a coil of loose barbed wire wreaking havoc in a windstorm. His jabs set up angular combinations, followed by quick turns to dodge return fire. Pap-pap-papapapap. Turn. Pap-pap-thump. Turn. Margarito, an even more prolific volume puncher than Williams, could scarcely get blows off. In his first headline fight, the 25-year-old from Aiken, South Carolina was putting on a signature performance.

In the 11th round—the deepest waters Williams had ever waded into—the challenger's edge dulled. He was clutching more, and his left eye was messy from catching Margarito right hands. But in the 12th, Williams was transformed, back on the balls of his feet, his jab slicing through the night, and Margarito again unable to find more than a sliver of space to squeeze in his own assault. Williams threw 125 punches in the final round—more than in any round of any of his fights—to sway the judges for a unanimous decision.

Paul Williams, the new welterweight champion, had beaten the man many believed to be the most feared boxer alive.

With sweat still beading on Williams' brow as he stood in the center of the ring, HBO's Larry Merchant asked, "Who are you gonna call out tonight?"

"Well," Paul said, "I want [Miguel] Cotto. If I can't get Cotto, I want a shot at Mayweather."

The career Williams lost is on his mind as rides shotgun one unseasonably warm October evening last fall, en route to speak to a gathering of young fighters at a local Charleston, South Carolina gym. The conversation drifts before landing on his sensational rivalry with Argentina's Sergio Martinez.

The rematch of their first fight—which went to Williams via controversial majority decision—came off in November 2010, almost two years to the day after their first meeting, in the same venue: Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall. It was a stunner.

After a first round that saw Martinez tie up and score effectively inside, Williams appeared to find a suitable range in the second. And that's when, without warning, Martinez landed a career-defining punch, a stealth bomb that instantly separated Williams from his senses, dropping him face-first to the canvas, eyes still open but otherwise rendered hauntingly still.

An oversized, framed picture of the moment when Martinez "put me to sleep," as a smiling Williams describes it, today hangs in his home in Augusta. (The kicker: Martinez's eyes are shut.) And although, in retrospect, Williams says he would have been wise to alter his approach earlier in the bout, he doesn't lament the loss. Instead, he's philosophical about it.

"He wasn't looking at that punch," Williams says, recalling the left hook that rattled his jaw a fraction of a second before his own left hand was set to come crashing down on Martinez's right cheek. But Williams is different than most fighters—always has been, and certainly is now—he can meet some of his lowest professional moments with humor and candor.

"That's how it was supposed to have been," Williams says, matter-of-factly. He imagines what path a win over Martinez would have sent him down, an alternate future with more blockbuster fights and the lure of more lucrative paydays.

"Ain't no telling what would've happened."

No one will confuse Aiken with South Central Los Angeles or Chicago's West Side, but even in small-town South Carolina, boys who lack means and guidance can be swallowed up by circumstances all the same. Williams remembers making some trouble as a kid, but mostly it was just that—kid stuff.

On the school bus, when Williams would jaw with the other boys and duck under the seats to grab at girls' legs, Lee Wells saw a kid in need of a firm hand. Wells, who trained as an amateur boxer in Harlem in the 1950s, later founded the Aiken Boxing Club. He also drove Paul's bus to school. And because Nancy Williams, Paul's mother, worried about her boys and was close with Wells' wife, when Lee approached her to ask if Paul could start putting in time at the gym, she said yes.

Paul was only 8 years old, but it wasn't long before Wells was putting him in with boys literally twice his age. Williams admits those tests could be brutally difficult, but he also credits Wells for forging his iron chin and ferocity in the ring. His earliest boxing memories are fond ones, and Wells is a big reason why.

When Wells suffered a heart attack on a trip while taking Williams and his brother to the fights, Williams was devastated.

"After he passed," Williams says, "boxing just wasn't the same."

For a while after Wells was gone, Williams put down the sport. But there's that old proverb about the devil and idle hands, and when those hands are wrapped with tape and covered in leather, the saying goes double. Williams was in trouble more often now, and not just for running his mouth or flirting with the girls. But it turned out to be his good fortune that he also ran with a friend who was in over at Aiken's other fight gym, a joint called Final Round, run by a boxing lifer named George Peterson.

Williams, now a teenager, would pop into the Final Round with his buddy, who was a couple of years older and already a pro fighter. After a year of hanging around the gym watching others sweat and spar, Williams finally approached Peterson with a thought that had been eating at him.

"He came to me and said, 'You know, I used to do that. Maybe I could try it again,'" Peterson says. "So I said, 'Well, just try and we'll see what happens.'"

Before long, Williams was back in shape, honing his instincts, and building on the foundation Wells had helped construct. But although Paul was an excellent student in the ring, he was still running around outside of the gym, as he says, "playing both sides of the fence."

"The average kid, 15- or 16-year-old black kid, they get in their group, they hang out in their own little old cubby holes," Peterson says. "They do various things just to keep busy. Mischievous? OK, I'll say that."

But Peterson, who has worked for three police departments and spent plenty of time around at-risk boys, knows that mischief lingers only a stone's throw from menace. Williams, with the benefit of hindsight, knows it, too. He can recall selling weed toted in a purple Crown Royal bag, leading a policeman on a chase through the woods, and, separately, assault and battery charges. Williams, whom Peterson says "didn't have a father in his life," needed a stabilizing presence.

"With his mindset, the way he was going, he wouldn't have lasted long out there on the street," Peterson says.

So Peterson's mentorship began to expand outside the walls of the Final Round, ranging from the practical to the philosophical. He owned properties that he hired Williams to help maintain, taught him to fix the buildings' plumbing, discussed the value of budgets and investments, and lectured him on the importance of personal responsibility. Williams' progress didn't always follow a straight line, but he was always listening, quietly filing away Peterson's lessons.

And the boxing? Paul was a natural. His aggressiveness—"straight beasting," he calls it—saw him through any initial shortcomings against more experienced fighters in those early days, and in short order he'd processed and begun refining the technical and strategic sides of the game as well. The trainer-fighter team began branching out to find more work, more sparring and fights against better competition—first around Atlanta and the Carolinas, later in Washington, D.C. and New York, and other outposts along the upper East Coast. Even after Williams turned pro in 2000, Peterson's protégé was a model student in the ring.

"When I'd go to training camps, that day when I'd get in the car with Mr. Peterson, that's when my training camp would start," Williams says. "All the little crazy stuff I was doing outside of boxing? From that day we'd leave, all the way up to the fight, I was strictly going by the book. I'm doing my running, my road work—everything—by the book."

Williams was still pliable then, impressionable, and hadn't fully grown into his own man. It was a good thing, too, because although he had goals—Peterson says he tried, when he could, to expose his young fighter to "the finer things"—Williams wasn't the type to seek out hard work for hard work's sake. But as long as Peterson was around, pointing the way and, as he says, "cracking the whip," the fighter stayed on task. Williams' gratitude for that patience is palpable.

"This man, he believed in me," Williams says of the trainer, manager, mentor, and father figure he still calls "Mr. Peterson."

"I was lost before I met him."

In the day and weeks following Williams' motorcycle crash, family and friends lived in a state of desperate fear. Fans and the rest of the fight community sent prayers. Sergio Martinez, Williams' old foil, was shaken enough to reach out to the media to express his concern.

And then there was Williams himself. His reaction? Pure Paul: If he couldn't fight again, he'd become a stand-up comic.

You have to admit, the material was pretty good. (C'mon, a stand-up comic?) And even for the fun-loving, eager-to-please Williams—the guy who had ordered up a mohawk at the barbershop before a title fight and hid it under a hat until he stepped into the ring, all as a goof on his buddies—his spirit in the aftermath of the accident was a marvel.

But neither did he seem to be dealing with his new circumstances head-on. Peterson claimed Williams was in denial. Doctors conceded that a full recovery was possible—Williams' spinal cord had been bruised and not severed, as was first reported—but they warned that only a fraction of paralysis victims regain sensation in affected areas, and far fewer ever walk again. Still, from his hospital bed, Williams apologized to Peterson for delaying the Canelo fight, then promised he'd be back in camp soon. He sniffed that he was just "sitting down for a while." It wasn't clear whether he was putting on a brave face or refusing to acknowledge the truth of his circumstances.

After surgery to stabilize his upper spine, Williams landed at Shepherd Center, a spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation facility in Atlanta. At Shepherd, Paul was to learn how to take on his new life—getting in and out of a wheelchair, climbing into a car, getting around the house—while working to reclaim as much of his old life as fate and his own work ethic would allow.

On its website, the Shepherd Center describes rehabilitation as "a lifelong process," but estimates a typical patient stay at four to six weeks. Williams lasted one week.

"I gave Shepherd some new laws down there," he says with a laugh. "They kicked me out—they kicked me out of the program."

He went AWOL early one morning during his stay at Shepherd, and he says the facility's staff, concerned for his safety, were ready to call police. They needn't have worried. Williams and his brother had just stepped out on a 4 a.m. McDonald's run.

Williams wasn't much interested in therapy at Shepherd, and despite all the obvious and unknown obstacles the center might have helped him navigate, he was looking for the exit almost from the moment he arrived.

Moving from his bed to his wheelchair, and vice versa, required the assistance of a sliding board; Williams wasn't yet strong enough to lug his oversized frame back and forth on his own. But after staff showed him and his brother how the transfer was done from chair to car, he'd seen all he needed to. "Man, as soon as they showed me that," Williams says, "I was gone."

The days after leaving Shepherd were a series of trials and errors. Williams' house hadn't yet been retrofitted to accommodate his new body, and his bedroom was up a flight of stairs. When his cousin suggested an air mattress on the living room floor, Williams wasn't having it. "I'm sleeping in my own bed," he said. The solution? He remembered an old training staple: the human wheelbarrow. So his cousin lifted up Williams' lower half, propping him on his hands in the old familiar position. Williams started climbing, a Herculean task so soon after he'd been injured.

"Fourteen steps," he says, shaking his head.

And getting back down?

"I did like when I was a kid," he explains. He grabbed a pillow and scooted down each step on his backside. "I thought, 'I'm gonna find me a way.'"

And he did, for the most part. Months later, when Saul Alvarez fought Josesito Lopez—on September 15, 2009, the date Williams had been scheduled to fight "Canelo"—Williams appeared in an interview with Jim Gray on Showtime's broadcast of the fight card. He vowed to walk again, and even talked of a comeback.

"My game ain't over," he told Gray. "Whether I am walking or not walking, my game ain't over until the Lord takes my life."

The lasting impression for viewers: Williams was alright.

What the boxing community didn't see—what almost no one saw—were his low moments. This was by design. He didn't want those close to him—especially his fiancée, Shishanda, and three children—to worry. "I had to let them know that I'm good, to make sure that everybody else would be good," Williams says. "Because if I lay down, that'd take everybody down."

It wasn't always easy. Williams' most trying experience was something he can make light of now—something he makes a point of joking about. Paralysis victims frequently lose control over more than motor functions. Spinal cord injuries can disrupt multiple bodily systems, including bladder and bowel management, which then require careful regulation and scheduling. This can be especially tough early on.

By now, you can probably tell where this is going. Williams, finally settled at home after the accident and ready to enjoy a night out, had washed up, put on some fresh clothes, and rolled toward the door headed for the club. Then it happened: "I messed myself," he says. OK, fine, Paul thought. So he started the whole process over, cleaning himself up and laying out a new outfit. Good to go. Dressed and ready.

And then … another mess.

He had handled the trauma of being thrown from his bike, the surgery, the hours in the hospital and rehab facility, and the stark uncertainty of his future. He did it all with a smile on his face, and with a joke always at the ready. But this? This was a sucker punch. Sometimes, it's the small things that get you.

"That was the point where I was like, 'Man, I don't want to do nothing,'" he says. "'It can't be like this. I just want to end it all. Why not just take me out? Why is life like this?'"

One day not long after he'd been injured, Williams noticed that someone had left the gate open to the backyard fence that kept his two pit bulls from tearing off around the neighborhood. So he steered his chair outside to corral the dogs and close the gate. The animals went all bull-in-a-China-shop on him, and he wound up sprawled in a heap on the grass. It would have been no big deal, but he had bolted from Shepherd before mastering how to maneuver himself into his chair in the event of a fall. With the dogs pawing around him in the yard, occasionally leaning over to lick his face, Williams wriggled for 20 minutes on the ground to get himself seated again.

"And I'm laying by a pile of dookie!" he says, smiling ear to ear. The running theme of some of his best stories isn't lost on him. Truth is, it's his wisecracking and willingness to share what some might consider to be delicate personal experiences that have led him to a better place since the accident.

This brings the story back to Williams and Corey Robinson—Shishanda's uncle—visiting a pair of South Carolina gyms on that warm day in late October. The Paul Williams Foundation, established last June, has seen Williams and Robinson—essentially Williams' co-pilot in the venture—pack up Robinson's Yukon SLT and hit the road every few weeks on micro-speaking tours. The events are ostensibly for the kids, but they have become vital components in Williams' recovery, a form of therapy in and of themselves.

Across from Ellen Bright Hall in Charleston, where Simons Street ends at King, stands the Charleston Boxing Club. In the sweltering second-story room where Williams once trained and sparred as a young amateur, he now works to meet the eyes and catch the ears of boys who remind him so much of himself at that age.

"I was one of you guys," he tells them. In no time, he's dealing: firing off one-liners, delivering anecdotes about the old days, and applying hard pressure with life lessons that you'd swear were pulled straight from the playbook of George Peterson. The boys and teenagers and young men drift in and out in waves over the course of several hours, and Williams never runs out of steam. He spots one young fighter, maybe 11 or 12 years old, wearing a familiar item. He calls over to Al "Hollywood" Meggett, the gym's owner, and soon it's confirmed: the boy is wearing the first pair of trunks—the very same—that Williams trained in.

After the place begins to clear out, Williams is assisted down the steep stairwell and trailed by a few stragglers. He and Robinson had arrived at the gym by early evening. It's dark now. Williams is perched in the Yukon's passenger seat with the door opened wide, and he isn't going anywhere. He's still got the boy in the trunks in his tractor beam, preaching consistency, respect, and understanding the value of a dollar.

"Ever since our first event," Robinson says, "I see that he takes time, looks at those kids, talks to them. If they ask questions, he'll go into detail and he'll sit there and he'll talk and he'll talk."

A day later, the tour takes Williams to another of his old stomping grounds. Tucked behind the Tastee Freeze on Route 17 in Summerville, the School of Hard Knox is a weathered but proud building containing every manner of boxing gear and workout equipment, but no ring. That's because it's out in the parking lot, a structure whose plywood base claps loudly with every footfall and where Williams once thudded and thumped himself. He first reconnects with John Lewellen, the gym's proprietor, then poses for photos and autographs T-shirts. Williams is asked if he'd do the honor of watching members of the Summerville boxing team take their turns in sparring sessions. Of course he would.

A single floodlight illuminates the action. Williams looks out on the fighters, but he also gets acquainted with a local police officer, who as it turns out, fought in the same 1999 National PAL Tournament as Williams. A shaggy, chatty kid probably not yet in high school then sidles up, making time with Williams. The old fighter leans in, analyzing the action. No lecture this time. Just a quiet, easy conversation between what seem like old friends. He has a knack for this.

"I just try to help anybody any way I can," Williams says. "Maybe one out of all them kids gets that spark and knows what I'm talking about, all that sacrifice I was speaking about."Like so many of us, though, Williams is far from perfect when it comes to putting into practice what he preaches. He admits to slacking on his physical therapy, bowed by all that hard work leading to nothing—no feeling, no movement—below the waist. It has been more than two years since the accident, and research and technology can't advance fast enough. With no Mr. Peterson around to keep him on task, Williams must rely on whatever motivation he's able to muster on his own—a previously alien concept.

Robinson says Williams believes "he cheated his fans," although he seems to have made peace with the end of his fighting career. He wants to walk again, sure—wants to walk down the aisle with Shishanda, which is why he has delayed setting a date for their marriage. Doesn't want to cheat her, either. And for himself, he wants to feel. He wants to be with his wife, just as any other husband does. Must he be cheated, too? Williams still has misgivings, dark moments that he keeps cloaked, mostly for the sake of others. But if he can hide them from his own sight, maybe that's just as well.

Still, ask him if he had it to do all over again, whether he'd take anything back, whether he'd stay off that bike.

"There's nothing like being on a bike and it's just you and the road," Williams says. "Peaceful. That was some of the best times, clearing my head. The fun. It's a whole different world.

"Of course you've got people who say, 'Oh, he's stupid. He should've never got on that bike.' Hey, you know me. I don't have no regrets.

"I don't mean to be selfish. But if I had my legs again? I'd bike to the house right now."

Twenty million: that's how much money Williams says was on the table for him to fight Canelo. And he thinks he could've finagled it up to $25 or $30 million. Not only that, he claims he would've mopped the floor with the lad. He's prone to optimistic visions of what could have been, and who can blame him.

"But then I think about, what if I would've got in there, got hit with a punch, and ended up brain dead, been all messed up?" Williams says. "That's why I look at my situation as a blessing, in a way. Maybe it saved me from getting hurt in the ring. It gave me another path."

Regrets? The accident? The end of his career? Hell, even those "sharts," which he and his oldest son now giggle and hoot over like boys in the locker room? All worth it.

And here's why: back in September, Williams was easing back into life in the public eye when he attended a boxing expo in Las Vegas—"As a fan," he says, "not to be part of the show." He was approached by a woman in a wheelchair who had been paralyzed in a skiing accident and, for a time, was inconsolable. But she happened to see one of Williams' post-accident interviews and was struck by his strength in the face of what should have been unthinkable anguish. She wasn't a boxing fan, she told him. Had never heard of Williams, actually. Still, she was moved by his resolve. Little did the woman know that Williams harbored doubts of his own. But he was inspired by the inspiration she found in him. She believed that his will was unbreakable, and suddenly it was.

"For the first time, I was so pumped," Williams says. "I'm not fighting no more, so what do I have to offer?"

As much as the world has to offer him, it seems. Williams owns multiple properties, part of a careful plan he and Mr. Peterson orchestrated while climbing the professional ranks. Robinson says Williams is even working out more often these days. He owns a machine that props him upright, into a standing position. He straps in and plays Xbox until his legs are quivering and damp with sweat. He bought dumbbells to rebuild his upper-body strength, preparing for the day when stem cell research, or some other revelation, provides the breakthrough he's waiting on.

Those doubts, though, they don't go away easy. The breakthrough, what if it never comes? What if The Punisher doesn't get the final say? What happens if Paul Williams never walks again?

"If you see me, you're gonna see me smiling," he says. "Guys see me, wonder why I'm smiling. 'What does that guy have going on?'"

Simple.

"Life, man. I'm breathing."