The Truth About Austin “Ammo” Williams, Houston’s Gifted Up-and-Comer

There’s no shortage of fighters working out at local boxing gyms who are eager to share with you their plans for world domination. But there really aren’t that many capable of actually pulling it off. Austin “Ammo” Williams is a notable exception. One of the top junior middleweight prospects in the world today, Williams lives and trains in Houston.

“I love to fight,” said Williams. “That’s my whole plan and plot for the world. I want the world to see that side of me right now.”

It’s no wonder the 23-year-old was quickly scooped up by promoter Eddie Hearn last year, and alongside six other stalwart hopefuls, seems to figure heavily in the race to become DAZN’s first homegrown boxing star.

If you’ve already seen him fight before, you know two things about Williams. First, he’s an incredibly gifted athlete, the kind that’s pretty much always going to be faster, stronger and better equipped than just about any person he’ll ever see in an opposing corner.

Second, Williams is a hard-punching and aggressive southpaw who is eager to concuss people.  Despite getting a late start in the sport at age 19 and having just 47 amateur bouts under his belt when he decided to turn pro, Williams doesn’t really appear to be just learning on the job as he moves up the professional ranks. I mean sure, the kid has to learn to be a professional boxer the same way every fighter who enters the paid ranks has to do. But Williams looks way more like a longtime amateur stalwart with Olympic pedigree than he does some random guy off the street with less than 50 fights.

So whenever Williams, 22, who trains at Main Street Boxing & Muay Thai Gym in Houston, enters a boxing ring on fight night, he isn’t just trying to scrape by and win fights. Williams wants to knock his opponent out, and he wants to look good doing it.

“I love to fight people, and it’s not because I’m angry or something,” said Williams. “I just really just enjoy it. There’s nothing that gives me the same kind of thrill as fighting.”

Williams attended high school at Fort Bend Hightower in suburban Houston where he played football, basketball, and several other sports. He said he was a “natural athlete” and also that he could dunk a basketball which is something one might easily assume about the fighter just from seeing how well he moves inside a boxing ring.

But Williams also said he got into a little bit of trouble growing up, mostly because he always ended up getting into fistfights.

“I just got in a lot of trouble, and it wasn’t bad trouble as far as like being in a gang or anything, but it was all fighting,” said Williams. “Nothing gave me the thrill that actually fighting and testing it out did. So at the age of 19, I realized, this is what I was passionate about. So I said let’s go into it formally and legally and let’s see what I can do.”

Williams is trained by Dwight Pratchett, a former boxer and longtime training fixture at Main Street. During his own fighting days, Pratchett twice won the NABF junior lightweight title and was the first to go the 12-round distance with Hall of Fame legend Julio Cesar Chavez.

“He works really hard,” said Pratchett about his young protégé. “He has a really good work ethic.”

Pratchett said his job, along with the fighter’s California-based management team of Peter Berg and Sam Katkovski, was to keep Williams moving in the right direction. He said for all Williams’ talent and natural fighting ability, fighters like him are best moved up the ranks slowly because they usually want to do too much too soon. The learning curve for a professional fighter, after all, is very steep.

That evident in Williams’ last fight, a scheduled four-rounder against Quadeer Jenkins on the undercard of the Anthony Joshua vs. Andy Ruiz heavyweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden in New York on June 1.

In that fight, Williams was tagged with a hard right hand in the opening seconds.

“Right out the gate!” said Williams.

But Williams isn’t just a blunt instrument. He’s an intelligent and affable fighter who could easily have gone to college to become an engineer or scientist or something. He also seems wise for his age, saying that getting hit clean like that was just one of many experiences he’ll have in boxing that will help mold him into a future world champion.

In fact, I could tell Williams had been thinking about the experience a lot because he was happy to share with me what he learned from it.

“That was a great experience for me actually, something that I had been warned about,” said Williams. “But it’s another one of those things that you just get as you go through it. You fight guys like that who have pretty much nothing to lose and they come out blazing.”

Williams said the remedy for the onslaught was a left hook to the body, a hard one given with serious force and optimal precision, to keep Jenkins from rushing forward again. From that point forward, Williams dominated and ultimately stopped Jenkins just two minutes later for his second knockout in as many fights.

“The goal in my mind now is to make sure that I never get tagged that fast coming out again,” said Williams. “And we’re also coming up with some new strategies to make sure that never happens. It’s that simple.”

The best part about Williams is probably his candor. It’s one thing to suffer a small kind of humiliation as he did against Jenkins. After all, so long as Williams achieves his full potential or close to it, most people probably won’t remember anything about that moment someday.

Heck, I suppose most people wouldn’t have even asked him about it.

But it’s another to openly talk about the experience, to share the truth of the feeling with a complete stranger, and to talk about how even this one little, seemingly meaningless thing in his second pro fight might become part of the larger fabric that becomes his personal legacy.

Yes, Williams plans to take over the boxing world someday, and being an amazing athlete with natural fighting ability will certainly help him in that endeavor. But the bigger thing to me, and the one that sets him apart in my mind as a likely future world champion is that he doesn’t try to hide any little thing about himself.

He sees the truth. He accepts the truth. He becomes the truth.

“I cringe every time I look at it because I know I’m better than that,” said Williams. “But, as I said before, that’s just one of those experiences I get from going in there, and some things can only be learned in the ring.”

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