The Storyteller

Daniel Herbert remembers his friend Beau Williford, who made a bigger impression out of the ring than in it.

BEAU Williford is the man who once fought a bear – and that’s not the best story he had to tell.

A half-century occupying every role in boxing left the American with many tales worth regaling; a conversation with Beau was like a well-informed insider reading you the chapter of a well-written, informative book.

Williford will tell no more stories after dying of cancer and renal disease in his adopted Lafayette, Louisiana hometown on July 31. Some sources gave his age as 69, others 72 – which would fit better with the established facts about this Southern gentleman.

I first met him in the early 1990s, when he was bringing good Louisiana pros like Chad Broussard to the UK. At first our friendship was limited to long phone conversations, before I eventually visited him at his home in Lafayette. He was a genial host, great company and a mine of information.

Fans on the Eastern side of the Atlantic will know him for training Deirdre Gogarty, the Irishwoman he took to world champion status when the female sport was ignored and derided; Colin McMillan, the future world featherweight champion; and Glenn McCrory, the IBF cruiserweight king.

He also worked with just about every fighter of note in Lafayette, a surprising hotbed of boxing roughly halfway between Houston and New Orleans. When Beau showed me around Lafayette we could never go far without encountering someone he knew through boxing; a fighter he’d trained, or promoted, or a businessman he’d persuaded to sponsor one of his shows.