Dancing Austin 'Ammo' Williams returns after a 'trying' year
In the ring, Austin “Ammo” Williams is movement and patience interspersed with fast flurries and a concussive southpaw left hand that has brought him 10 knockouts in 17 wins.
In conversation, the engaging Texan is an entirely different character, eager to discuss what is, for a boxer, a surprisingly catholic range of interests. Williams, who faces Montreal’s Patrice Volny in a middleweight contest atop a Matchroom card at the Caribe Royale in Orlando, Florida on Saturday night, is something of a polymath: a dancer, actor, and recording artist as well as a contender with eyes on a title shot.
Dancing, in particular, is a topic close to his heart.
“Dance is something that's been with me my entire life,” he told BS before the final pre-fight press conference on Thursday. “I decided to start learning the structure of dance when I was boxing as an amateur. That's when I went to my roots: hip hop. I learned the science, the steps, the numbers. And then as I matured in boxing, I realized that structure, balance, footwork, these things are what will make you be not only a great boxer, but a showman. I've always wanted to be the epitome of a show man boxer.”
To that end, he took his interest in dance into some surprising areas, leading some to question his level of dedication to boxing.
“I said, ‘You know what? Let me go master ballet.’ Sometimes people would think I wasn't focused. I'm like, ‘Do you know how hard ballet is?’ It can literally break your body,” he points out. "So, I said to myself, ‘Let me take the time, use my resources, use the money I get from fighting, and I’ll invest it into ballet’ - because it is not cheap at all. I've been blessed with a mentor, Spencer Hering from Houston Ballet, who took me under his wing. He saw that I had natural ability, but I just needed the structure. And he gave me that. He spent a year with me, just one on one training, and really balanced me, helped me align my spine and my body.”
All of which leads Williams seamlessly on to a related topic that is dear to his heart.
“How many people are suffering just from bad posture?” he asks rhetorically. “When we talk about my goals and what I really want to do with this platform, I do want to promote health. I'm talking about health from a posture standpoint, from a mental standpoint, not so much from the medicine side, but me just being educated in a sense of proper structure. I can look at people and tell you where they're having kinks or divots in their own body, and where they may feel stressed, because I've taken the time to break myself down. So, yeah, education has definitely been the thing that has driven me to expand myself much more than just a boxer, but to be smart enough to know that everything I choose to do underneath boxing had to aid me in the ring.”
To which end, the fight with Volny is his first of 2025 after a 2024 that he describes as “a trial year.”
Knockout wins against previously unbeaten Armel Mbumba-Yassa and 11-1 Gian Garrido sandwiched a first career defeat, an eleventh-round TKO loss to Hamzah Sheeraz in Riyadh that set the victorious Brit on a path to challenge Carlos Adames for the WBC middleweight belt. But when Williams says that last year “was testing me,” it is not just because of his loss but also what happened in his life in the build-up, when first his great-uncle and then his grandfather passed away.
“Grief was something I hadn’t dealt with that closely for a long time,” he says – although he is keen to downplay any perceived hint that that was the reason for his loss.
“That night with Hamzah Sheeraz, it wasn't my night to win,” he explains. “But it was my night to fight, because if I would have pulled out of that fight, that would have been something that would have been sitting with me until this night. So, I proved to myself who I am, and not only for it to be a fight, but it to be a fight where it's my first time ever on the B side, my first time ever going to the Middle East, my first time ever dealing with a fight of that magnitude, with TNT Sports involved and all of these things, and to have to embrace that with everything going on in my mind and spirit, it just elevated me. It catapulted me into this situation that we're in now.
“And with Eddie [Hearn, Williams’ promoter] knowing what was going on, I made it very, very clear to him, to [manager] Sam Katkovski, everybody in my corner: ‘Do not publicize!’ I didn't even want it to be publicized after the fight, months after the fight. Only now, now we’re in a totally new year and now that we're back on the winning side of things, and now I’m headlining my own show and I'm in the best space of my life, only now do I feel it’s OK to mention what was going on, because I didn't want to take anything away from Sheeraz’s victory. That is not something a true champion or a winner will ever do. You clap for the person that defeated you and yeah, who was better than you on that night. But you take the lessons you learn from that, and you get better, and you come back as a bigger champion.”
Williams’ path back to title contention goes through Volny, who brings to the ring a record of 19-1 (13 KOs) but not much by way of a reputation. That latter aspect, Williams suspects, makes the Quebecer potentially an even more dangerous foe.
“This is a big opportunity for him,” he notes. “So, if we just talk about the psychological side of things, he's later in his career, we have about the same amount of fights, but this can really blow him up. This is everything. This will be the biggest event of his life, and I'm expecting him to come in with that sort of energy, maximizing every stronghold that he has.”
Asked to describe his impressions of Volny, Williams offers that he’s “a slick guy. He's more catch and return-ish. He kind of works off his opponent's energy. And my thing with him is to make sure that I don't give him the opportunity to absorb and respond to what I do. It'll be me, me, me, me. If it's not me throwing punches, it'll be me taking angles. If it's not me taking angles, it'll be me applying pressure. If it's not me applying pressure and he does get shots off, it'll be me doing perfect defense and returning off that. It won’t turn into a “my turn, his turn” kind of fight.”
So, he’s expecting the kind of battle that will be mentally, as well as physically, challenging?
“A mental fight, but not my biggest mental fight,” he clarifies. “So, I can go into this with a freedom, a confidence, a level of fun that will allow everyone to enjoy the Ammo show and understand that they're seeing something that is here to stay.”
