Danny Williams: The man who tamed Tyson wins fight for his inner peace

Danny Williams was feeling a bit under the weather. "Not quite myself today," he admitted as he opened the door of his neat but modest three-bedroomed, end-of-terrace house in Peckham, South London. "Dunno why." Perhaps it was belated reaction to the month he had spent chilling out after his momentous conquest of Mike Tyson, a victory, he says, that was as much over himself as it was over the former world champion.

Danny Williams was feeling a bit under the weather. "Not quite myself today," he admitted as he opened the door of his neat but modest three-bedroomed, end-of-terrace house in Peckham, South London. "Dunno why." Perhaps it was belated reaction to the month he had spent chilling out after his momentous conquest of Mike Tyson, a victory, he says, that was as much over himself as it was over the former world champion.

If Williams had caught a cold, it was nothing to the one Tyson had caught that night in Louisville, when, against all expectations, a boxer largely scripted as a frozen stiff, a likely lamb to be sacrificed at the altar of a tarnished legend's rehabilitation, produced the perfect performance to leave Iron Mike looking more a heap of twisted scrap metal following a 26-punch fourth-round fusillade.

Quite a few fighters who have emerged from the corner to face Tyson have never been the same again. Neither, one suspects, will Williams, though for an altogether different reason. Tyson, in the past, took many men apart, but he has helped Williams put himself together again.

Nestling between his collection of around 500 kung fu films is the video of the brief and brutal encounter between the fighter who once called himself "the baddest man on the planet" and the one who everyone says is "the nicest guy in boxing". How many times has Williams watched it? "Oh, only about half a million," he smiles. Williams smiles a lot these days, and had a couple of good reasons to last week. On the day he finally collected the residue of his $250,000 (£140,000) purse for the Tyson fight it was confirmed that his next, and rather more profitable, engagement would be against the Ukrainian colossus Vitali Klitschko for the most authentic version of the world heavyweight championship on 11 December, most probably at New York's Madison Square Garden.

Both pieces of good news came courtesy of his manager, Frank Warren, with whom he has just signed a new three-year deal. Getting paid has proved a much harder fight than he had against Tyson. He came away from Louisville with $70,000 in a carrier bag, all that could be extracted from the local promoter, Chris Webb, a one-time male stripper, who claimed he had run out of money. These were the box-office takings. Warren has now paid Williams the remainder out of his own pocket, pending legal action against Webb.

Williams will be getting almost four times as much against Klitschko, who holds the World Boxing Council title. "There's no way I thought I'd be fighting him this soon, but it seems I made a bit of a name for myself in America by beating Tyson," he said. It is, quite literally, a tall order for the Brixton-born Williams, who at 6ft 2in is four inches shorter than Klitschko, whereas he was almost four inches taller than Tyson.

It means a totally different fight plan, which he has begun working on with trainer Jim McDonnell. "I've no more qualms about fighting Klitschko than I had about Tyson," he said. "We'll be looking to use a sort of Tyson style, coming in behind a good head movement, hands held high and throwing big body shots that will weaken him so I can take him out in the later rounds. He's good, but slow and robotic with suspect stamina, and he gets tagged, as we saw against Lennox [Lewis] and Corrie Sanders. As in the Tyson fight, the first three rounds will be the most dangerous for me. I've got to get inside those long arms."

These days Williams sounds like a man who has got his head screwed on, which he acknowledges has not always been the case. "It's been a strange year for me. I lost my British and Commonwealth titles which I'd held for five years, now I'm fighting for the world title."

He told his 30-year-old wife, Zoë, that he was on the brink of quitting. "I was putting myself under so much stress. I was giving poor performances against inferior opponents, even when I was winning. I was such a perfectionist. I would freeze in the ring, thinking, 'I've got to do this, I've got to do that'. Even against blokes my granny could beat I was nervous, and sometimes I've even cried before a fight. There was so much stuff going on in my head. Mentally, I couldn't handle it."

Then Warren called him to his office to tell him about the Tyson fight. "He told me straight they were looking at me as the fall guy, and the money wasn't that great considering what Tyson was getting ($7m). But that was all that was on offer. Frank, who knows a lot about Tyson, reckoned if I could get my head right I could beat him, and Zoë told me to go for it because it might do wonders for my career. They were dead right.

"I jumped at the chance, because I knew it would lead to a world title fight that could set me up for life. It wasn't just for me, but was for the wife and kids." Williams is very much the family man. He and Zoë, to whom he poignantly proposed after the Tyson fight, have two gorgeous daughters, Nubiah (an ancient Sudanese name) who is five, and 15-week-old Maliha, which means "the beautiful one" in Arabic.

Williams, 31, became a Muslim four years ago after studying a number of religions. But he doesn't wear his faith on his robe. "I don't believe in taking religion into the ring. That's not the place." He and Zoë are married under Islamic law, but now their civil ceremony remains on hold until he has taken care of business with Klitschko. Then, too, they will consider moving somewhere "bigger and better", though it won't be far from his south London roots.

His is not the archetypal boxing story of back-street bad lad made good. He has never run with the pack, never been in any kind of trouble. The only occasion he's been in court was on jury service. "A lot of my mates did get into bother, some were killed, some went to prison for murder, but I separated myself from all that." To help keep him away from those influences as a kid, his father, Augustus, who worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, installed a punchbag for him to use in their south London back garden, and sent him to a local boxing club.

At first Williams did not take to the sport. "My elder brothers used to drop me off at the club and as soon as they left I'd go off and play table tennis or snooker. Before they came back I'd splash a bit of water over my face and clothes to make it look as if I'd been sweating. I didn't really like it. But my dad pushed me into it because one night he had a dream that I would become the world heavyweight champion. Now there's nothing else I think about. My dad's dream has become my dream."

Inevitably, too, he has become the pride of Peckham. "Normally it took me an hour to get to the gym, but now I need another hour, because I keep getting stopped as soon as I get outside the house by people wanting autographs and to congratulate me.

"But the really great thing for me has been the reaction not only of the public, but my fellow pros, fighters I respect, like Ricky Hatton. He came over to me and gave me a great big hug and told me how proud he was of me. Coming from a guy I regard as one of my peers that gave me almost as much of a lift as beating Tyson."

OK, so what he beat may have been a shell of the fighter Tyson once was ("burgling a derelict house", as one critic put it), but it still required tremendous guile and guts. "Never in my life has anyone hit me harder than Tyson. It was a real shock to the system to think that a small man like that can unleash such power.

"But even when that first-round upper-cut almost lifted me off my feet I never doubted I was going to win. I'd prepared myself to be in a war, I was ready to get hurt. When you've been getting hit in the head for 23 years it doesn't bother you after a while. He thought it was going to be a one-round job, but I said to myself, 'There's no way you are going to take me out'.

"I've been a little bit disappointed in his reaction, though. I felt sympathy for him afterwards and would like to have offered him friendship, to be someone he could talk to who's not a leech, who wants nothing from him. But he hasn't given me any credit, blaming it all on an injured knee. He's been totally dissing me, so I'd like to do it to him all over again to show it was no fluke."

In destroying one demon, Williams banished the others that had been lodging in his head. Now, he says, there will be no more crying. After all, as another well-known resident of Peckham might say, this time next year he could be a millionaire.

BIOGRAPHY

Born: 13 July 1973 in Brixton.

Family: Wife Zoë, daughters Nubiah (five) and Maliha (four months). Parents Augustus, car-factory worker, and Beverley, a former nurse.

Career progression: England amateur (29-6 record). Turned pro October 1995: 35 fights, 32 wins (27 kos), three defeats. Won Commonwealth title 1999; held British and Commonwealth titles from 2000 until 2004. Lost to Samil Sam in European title challenge in 2003. Knocked out Mike Tyson in 2004.

Previous job: Doorman.

Other interests: "Half supports" Arsenal because his manager, Frank Warren, and trainer, Jim McDonnell, are keen Gooners.