For love of the ring

For Elmont resident Titus Williams, there is nothing quite like boxing. For him, it provides a wonderful escape and a natural high, and he’s been hooked from the beginning.

Williams was 17 when he entered the Westbury Boxing Club for his first training session, and he has trained nearly every day since. On Aug. 21, the 22-year-old won the Long Island Amateur Boxing Championships and Charities tournament, boosting his career record to 20-4. It was the second time that Williams has won the belt — he captured it in 2009, and didn’t fight in the tournament last year.

A Brooklyn native, Williams said that his family moved to Elmont in 2000 so that he and his sister, Jessica, could be raised in a better environment and receive a better education. He attended Elmont Memorial High School, where he was a sprinter on the track team and a guard on the basketball squad. “It’s a close-knit community; everyone knows each other,” Williams said of Elmont. “It’s a good support system.”

Williams began thinking about boxing in high school, he said, after watching famous fighters like Floyd Mayweather and Roy Jones Jr. on television. “They made boxing look like it was a lot more than fighting — it was a craft,” he recalled. “Mayweather showed me that it wasn’t just an offensive game, it was a defensive game as well. It wasn’t just the fighting for me, it was the skill and the technique behind it.”

A few months before he graduated from high school, Williams’s longtime friends Tyrone James and Herve Duroseau — an Elmont resident who recently won the 2011 New York Golden Gloves amateur tournament — took him to the Westbury Boxing Club. “Herve brought me to the gym, and I never left …,” Williams said. “I felt like it took me away from my personal life — I was in a different zone, and there was nothing else distracting me. I fell in love with the sport.”

Nearly every day for the past five years, Williams has been training to fight. He worked out at Westbury for more than three years until his trainer, Peter Brodsky, moved to Florida last year. Since then he has trained at the Freeport Police Athletic League gym under Joe Higgins, who helped train Duroseau.

At 5 feet 8 and 132 pounds, Williams is the maximum weight for a lightweight.

The semifinals of the Long Island Amateur tournament were held on Aug. 20. His opponent, Marlon Brown of Rockaway Ropes, who is nearly three inches taller than Williams, was picked to win. Brown has more than 50 fights under his belt, including the Daily News Golden Gloves, which he won as a lightweight in 2010. Williams had watched Brown fight.

To compensate for Brown’s height advantage and experience, Williams moved quickly and threw stick-and-move jabs. He won each round against Brown, and with a unanimous decision he advanced to the finals the following evening.

There Williams was matched against Dave Meloni, 23, a longtime acquaintance — the two had sparred several times in training — and three weeks before the Long Island tournament, Meloni defeated Williams in the New York Boxing Championship.

“I don’t want to say it was revenge,” Williams said about the Long Island Amateur final. “[Meloni] comes to my gym, and we have a really good relationship … but when you’re in the ring, when you’ve got to take care of business, it’s revenge.”

Williams said he focused on using his quickness and mentally beating Meloni, to compensate for Meloni’s longer reach. “I put it in my mind that it was going to be one of the toughest fights I would be in,” he said.

In the first round, Williams used his speed and fast footwork to throw off Meloni, and then established his jab. It was the perfect strategy. Meloni couldn’t throw his jabs quickly enough, and he couldn’t keep up with Williams — in any round.

With another unanimous decision, Williams captured the lightweight title, in front of a crowd that included Duroseau and other friends.

Williams’s family members, however, didn’t watch the fight. In fact, they haven’t seen any of his fights. “My mother can’t watch it — she can’t take it,” he explained, laughing. “My sister says she can take it, but she’s never come yet, so I don’t think she can. She’s very protective.”

And his family supports him in every other way, he said, whether it’s giving him rides to the gym or buying him equipment.

Winning the Long Island championship — which is open to boxers from throughout New York and surrounding states who have had at least 10 fights — was an incredible experience, Williams said. “When you finally see that all the hard work … didn’t go in vain and that hard work really does pay off, it’s overwhelming and it’s a beautiful feeling,” he said.

Along with his belt, Williams won a trip to the Dominican Republic to fight in an international tournament in October. He isn’t sure if he’ll attend, because he wants to train for the New York City Metros and the PAL nationals. Doing well at those tournaments would enable him to compete on the LIABC & C travel team, he added.

Williams trains for more than two hours almost every day. When he’s not working out, he works at a collection agency in Westbury and attends SUNY Old Westbury, where he is a full-time student majoring in finance. In about a year, he’ll receive an undergraduate degree, he said, and then he hopes to earn an MBA or a law degree.

His next fight is on Sept. 23 in New Rochelle. “My plan is to continue working hard and do my best to win each tournament, one by one,” he said. “Boxing is what I love to do. I’m going to ride it until the wheels fall off.”

Comments on this story? JNash@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 214.