The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
In the ring with ‘Quiet Storm’ Williams
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a profile of West Haven boxer Jimmy Williams from the November edition of Connecticut Magazine, available on newsstands now and at connecticutmag.com.
“I coulda easily went left.”
The Quiet Storm can’t stop talking. Or smiling. He’s shadow boxing and talking to the two or three people who are there to listen in the dressing room, deep in the Twin River Casino in Lincoln, Rhode Island. The West Haven resident turns 31 today, undefeated with 14 wins (including six knockouts) and one draw, and he’s about to enter the ring and fight a 30-year-old southpaw from Union City, New Jersey, named Juan Rodriguez.
Maybe that’s what has the Quiet Storm talking in this calm moment before his fight. He’s also from New Jersey, about 40 minutes away from Union City in Plainfield, and he’s thinking about how far he’s come. Left means he might have turned cold after enduring the types of losses that come far away from the ring. “Especially after my mom.” Jimmy “Quiet Storm” Williams says this not in anger but with a serenity. He smiles easily, and his smile radiates calm. “I’m about to go out here and do what I do. I don’t get nervous. It’s whatever.” Whatever here is not a shrugging but a squaringup of the shoulders. It’s whatever.
As he throws punches, he throws glances, too: a glance through the open door into the hallway where fighters and workers and trainers and officials come and go, a glance toward the silent television that shows what’s going on in the ring. He takes time out to console a fighter who has just lost. “Keep ya head up, keep grinding,” he tells the defeated boxer.
There aren’t many other Connecticut fighters on the 10-fight undercard. Meriden middleweight David Wilson was the victim of some strange scoring by the judges in six of the more exciting rounds of the evening, in which he emerged disappointed, but upbeat. Most of the fighters on the evening’s undercard are from the small, rumbletumble cities that dot southeastern New England: New Bedford, Worcester, Fall River, Providence — the usual catchment for the Providence-based CES Boxing promoters who are putting on the show.
Williams lives in West Haven and fights out of New Haven, which is not in the typical Rhode Island-southeastern Massachusetts wheelhouse. Tough as anywhere, though. That the main event of the night is two Jersey fighters in a Rhode Island casino is an accident. Williams only took the fight on two weeks’ notice, stepping in as the replacement in the main event, after Worcester’s Khiary Gray sustained an injury in training. There are a few people outside with T-shirts that read “Westies for Williams,” but there aren’t many.
Earlier, Williams’ head trainer Brian Clark was talking about what can happen when you go into another fighter’s turf and beat him in front of his friends and family, in front of his community. He saw this happen when one of his fighters, who was a black New Havener, beat an Irish-American fighter in South Boston. There was a less-than-enlightened discourse about race in America from the crowd. Williams and Rodriguez should have no such trouble here, though. Neither are hometown guys.
There are other annoyances. For the $47 fans paid for a general-admission ticket, there were 10 fights to watch before Williams and Rodriguez in the main event. Some fights were better than others and all the locals have already fought. For local interest, chief among them was big Juiseppe Cusumano, the Italian heavyweight from Providence who deconstructed36-year old Matt McKinney from California. The Californian had spent more time fighting journeymen in Tijuana than on the East Coast.