Sonny Bill Williams, the contender

WHETHER it's on the field or in the boxing ring, sparks always fly with Sonny Bill Williams. So why all the heat?

AS darkness descends on the Brisbane River below, a dozen men crowd into the apartment, each taking turns to wash his hands, face and feet.

The muscular, possum-eyed Wallaby Quade Cooper is the last to emerge from the bathroom, looking confused as he stands next to his mate, boxer Anthony Mundine. The Man is still licking his wounded pride after his world-title loss to Daniel Geale a few days before, but is otherwise uninjured. There's a smattering of thick-set Islanders and other assorted Aussies of Arab and Pakistani descent.

One man towers over them all, his chest barely covered by a loose-fitting singlet. A copperplate W and an S, the start and finish of a tattoo inked like a billboard across his enormous shoulders, poke out either side of the singlet. An elaborate Samoan tattoo is woven down his right arm. His hair is neatly slicked. He wears the face of James Dean with the menace of Marlon Brando and was christened with a name to compliment the looks - Sonny Bill Williams.

GALLERY: See more pictures from Magazine photographer Adam Knott's photoshoot with Williams

"Are we ready boys?" asks boxing coach Mick Akkawy has he turns to face Mecca. The "boys" are a collection of friends and relatives of Williams, boxing folk and others who have followed Mundine's fights for years, like businessman Mick Shehadie, son of the Wallaby great Nick Shehadie and the NSW Governor, Marie Bashir. Shehadie and I watch as the men - including Cooper, who hasn't converted to Islam but joins in nonetheless - line up in two rows behind the coach. With his hands crossed and his head bowed, Akkawy begins to chant a holy surah in deep, poetic Arabic. "The truth is: Allah is One. Allah is Besought of all, needing none ... I seek refuge with the Lord of the daybreak from the evil of everything He has created ... " In unison the men kneel and press their heads to the carpet and then rise, and from the back of their throats comes a guttural call: "Alluah-o Akbar. Alluah-o Akbar ... "

With their duties to Allah over, the men shake hands and slap backs. Chairs are moved into the corridor and a couch is lifted upright in a corner. Williams removes his shirt to reveal the body of an Adonis, 193cm tall and 107kg. He carries barely any body fat and his muscles ripple and dance as he warms up, punching at shadows. His nutritionist, who has worked with footballers, Olympians and other elite athletes, tells me that Sonny Bill is a cut above them all. "He has pretty much the perfect body for an athlete - nothing is wasted, nothing is where it shouldn't be."

His hands are now strapped and gloved and Williams sets off in pursuit of Akkawy. "Keep your chin down," Akkawy instructs. "Now. Jab! Jab!" Williams snaps two powerful jabs into the training mitts, punches that would break the jaw of an average man. "Lookin' sharp Sonny," says an onlooker. "Lookin' sharp." I ask one of the men if he will win. "He'll bust his arse," he replies. "God willing."

The fury continues for six rounds before Akkawy calls a halt. I ask Williams how he's feeling. "Yeah pretty good, bro'. I am pretty pleased with my preparation. We'll see ... " he trails off. His delivery is tentative. Sonny Bill Williams is just days away from stepping into the ring with Francois Botha, who has fought some of the great heavyweights of all time - Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and the terrifying Mike Tyson - but is now past his prime. Williams is not certain what shape he'll be in when the final bell tolls, and has no idea of the mayhem that will follow.

So why does he want to box, to risk damage to that body, that face? Why too is he returning to the Sydney Roosters to play rugby league, a game played in a couple of provinces in New Zealand, Britain and Australia, when he could earn millions more on the international stage playing for one of the world's great sporting brands, the all-powerful All Blacks? And why did he turn to Islam?

It's a few days before the fight and Khoder Nasser, Williams' controversial manager, sits chatting in the crew's Brisbane apartment complex while the West Indies and Australian cricket teams battle it out on the television. I glance over and the camera zooms in on the giant scoreboard to show a picture of Sonny with his shirt off. "SBW" screams the advertisement for the coming rugby league season. "OMG".

"I wish the whole f..king deal had fallen over," Nasser says of Williams' return to rugby league. "I really do. Rugby league is a limited game whereas with rugby [union] Sonny had a chance to showcase his unique talents to the world - he is known and loved in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Japan. Sonny has the ability to switch from here to there and do it in a graceful way - people love him because he is so big, yet he is so graceful."

Williams is indeed an outstanding athlete. He was described in the Irish Times as having the skills of a Lionel Messi with the marketability of David Beckham. "Sonny Bill Williams is the greatest rugby union talent operating at the moment," wrote the UK Telegraph's Paul Ackford, lamenting his departure to rugby league. "Why the greatest? Because after just 19 tests for the Blacks he combines the impact of Jonah Lomu, the incisive running lines of Ma'a Nonu, the defensive excellence of Mike Tindall, the subtle intelligent distribution of Brian O'Driscoll, and the all-round intelligence of Richie McCaw. There is no one out there who can influence a game in the way that Sonny Bill can."

This sporting genius was born into a working class family living in a government house in the Auckland suburb of Mt Albert in August 1985. His father, John Snr, is Samoan, raised in New Zealand; he is a painter and works at Sydney's Garden Island, swabbing naval vessels. His mother, Lee Woolsey, is a Kiwi of European lineage and is a carer in an aged care home. "It was a fairly normal happy upbringing," Sonny Bill says. "Not a lot of money, but a lot of love."

At an early age he was a freakish sporting talent, a competitive sprinter, a champion high jumper and cross country runner and the kid who played footy in teams a couple of age divisions above, to make things fairer. "He was a very determined boy, probably more driven than most children if he wanted to do something," his mum says from Auckland. She was secretly pleased when her son was occasionally beaten. "It got beyond a joke - it was hard for the other children when they all tried but never won anything. But he was brought up to be a good sport; there's nothing worse than a cry-baby who doesn't like losing."

Despite this sporting prowess Williams lacked confidence and as a child was painfully shy. "I grew up as a Polynesian kid in the Polynesian community and I was this skinny white kid," he says. "I didn't feel that I really fit in anywhere. So when I was young I always had to prove myself through my sporting ability."

In his early teens his parents separated and his younger twin sisters and his older brother stayed with their mum. Sonny, feeling sorry for his dad, went to live with him. He doesn't recall it as a traumatic event. "My old man never used to cook so we lived on takeaway. The others were always jealous."

Then, aged 15, he was spotted playing league by a Sydney Bulldogs' talent scout, who signed him almost on the spot - the youngest player ever contracted to the club. He moved to Sydney and, according to a friend, cried himself to sleep for six months because he missed his family. When I tell his mother this story she concedes he would've been sad. "But he wouldn't have cried," she insists. "No way. Not my boy."

In 2004, aged 18, he ran onto the field as a replacement in the NRL grand final, where the Bulldogs triumphed over the Roosters, the youngest player in the club's history to play in a grand final. He was then also the youngest player to be picked for the New Zealand national side, the Kiwis. In 2005 rugby league commentator Phil Gould wrote: "I was recently asked, if I could sign one player who would it be and how much would I pay him? I replied Sonny Bill Williams and he is worth $1 million a season."

But he wasn't getting paid a million a season and, looking back, he wasn't all that happy. In the following seasons he suffered some terrible injuries and was charged for drink driving and for urinating in public. And then he was captured in "a compromising position" in the toilets of Sydney's Clovelly Hotel with the ironwoman and model Candice Falzon - someone took a photo under the dunny door and the tabloids did the rest. "The whole culture of the club was appalling," Khoder Nasser says. "The ethos was: you get picked in first grade, you go out and get pissed, you win you get pissed, you lose you get pissed, you get injured you get pissed ... this was the culture that he found himself in as a 16-year-old kid."

Reflecting on those events now, in his crew's Brisbane digs as his father prepares a low-fat stir-fry to the nutritionist's precise instructions, Williams says it was all just part of growing up. "Everyone makes mistakes as a kid, but all my mistakes ended up as a headline." He still bristles at the fact that the club forced him to attend a press conference to admit he had a drinking problem. "I didn't have a drinking problem," he says curtly. "I was a kid making the mistakes that kids make." And then he adds: "I wish I'd found religion a little bit earlier, you know. Some of the things that happened may have turned out differently, but you can't change what you've done."

Williams was raised a Christian but his interest in Islam was sparked by his friendship with Muslims Anthony Mundine and Khoder Nasser, who became his manager in 2008. He'd read of Muhammad Ali's conversion and was heavily influenced by Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book he's read many times. So when he moved to France that year to play rugby union he converted after becoming friends with a Tunisian family. "They were Muslims and I learnt a lot from them and then one day I just decided that I was going to convert," he reveals.

His faith, he says, has brought him a contentment he's not experienced before. He prays five times a day when he's not travelling, he doesn't drink, he eats only halal food and he is planning, one day, to take the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. He fasts during Ramadan, although says he will drink water when he's training. "I feel like I am on the right path now. It has helped me with my confidence on the sporting field and with my self-belief, but outside of sport my life is a lot smoother too. Like everyone, I have my faults and I veer off the path sometimes, but my faith helps me get back on it and to stay being a good person. I am a lot happier now in my own skin." It suits his life as a sportsman, which is punctuated by intense training sessions and moments of prayer and introspection. It helps too that the fridges are stocked full with nothing heavier than sparkling mineral water.

Williams also credits his manager for helping him turn his fortunes around. "Khoder has helped me to just concentrate on my sport," he says. "I love that we are not out there always selling ourselves, looking for sponsors. Let my performance on the field do the talking, he says, and you won't need to work off it, things will happen. And that's how it's been."

The two men were together in 2008 when Williams sensationally walked away from his $400,000-a-season contract with the Bulldogs. He says he was deeply unhappy with the club and the way he was being treated. Nasser says the young star was being "misused and abused", leading to a string of injuries. "They would send him in as a battering ram. They had a Ferrari in the garage and they drove him like a Mack Truck." The club always insisted it bent over backwards to accommodate Williams. Its CEO, Todd Greenberg, says Nasser misled him "time and again".

Nasser once told me that in any deal you always need one card up your sleeve - the option to tell the other party to "go f..k yourself". They exercised this option and Williams, without telling his teammates, secretly left the country to play rugby in France with four years left on his contract. The Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson later negotiated a settlement of $750,000 with the Bulldogs - which included a five-year NRL ban. Anthony Mundine stumped up the money. Nasser's influence over his client, wrote the Daily Telegraph's Paul Kent, "was a shameful bid to exploit Sonny Bill, a deliberate kick in the guts to rugby league ... and high treason." He was dubbed Money Bill and $ Bill Williams and, by columnist Rebecca Wilson, "a man with no basic values".

After a couple of $1.5 million-a-season years for the French team Toulon, where he was one of the highest paid rugby players in the world, Williams rejected a $2 million offer to stay. Nasser negotiated a pay cut for his client to play club rugby in New Zealand, and for the All Blacks in the 2011 World Cup for "less than 400,000 Kiwi dollars a season".

I met up with Williams in August 2011 in Auckland where the All Blacks had just defeated Australia, again, to retain the Bledisloe Cup, but Williams was furious. He'd been given just a few minutes of game time and while his team celebrated, Williams absconded to the Auckland hotel where his friends Quade Cooper and Anthony Mundine, and Khoder Nasser, were staying. Williams stood outside the hotel, still dressed in his footy shorts and socks, glowering. "F..k him bro'," Mundine was urging, referring to the All Blacks coach Graham Henry. "Let's get on a plane. Let's go shopping in LA. You need some new clothes. He's got the world's best player in his team and he leaves him on the bench! Who the f..k does he think he is?" Mundine waved around his mobile phone and said, "I'll book the tickets now bro', we can be on a plane in the morning." None of the crew seemed to want to calm the situation, including Nasser. Fuel was heaped on the smouldering Williams and he very seriously considered walking out on the All Blacks in the weeks leading up to the World Cup. It seemed like the "go f..k yourself" clause was about to be invoked again.

It wasn't. He stayed. As Nasser puts it, "almost isn't walking - the fact of the matter is he stayed and played". But the World Cup was not a happy experience for Williams under coach Graham Henry. He had been in blistering form for his club, the Crusaders, and he says the deal he struck with the All Blacks was that he would be picked if his form warranted it. "I didn't want to be picked for my name, but I was in form. I was playing some pretty good rugby, hey, and I felt I had been lied to," Williams says. "Before I signed up I said, 'I don't want to come back if you've already got your team picked and you just want me there to motivate the guys already in the side'." Henry obviously saw it another way, and the All Blacks were good enough to win without him.

The rugby writer Spiro Zavos tells me there was a view within the NZ camp that, while Williams was an unbelievable talent and was likely to go on to be one of the great All Black players, there were doubts about his technical skills against some of the cleverer sides, such as the Wallabies and the French. As a result, Williams played just a few minutes of the thrilling World Cup final, in which New Zealand defeated France. To be part of a winning World Cup side would be the pinnacle for most players. Williams says the entire experience left him feeling empty.

He played another domestic season in New Zealand with the Chiefs, his third NZ club in three years, and it was under the All Blacks' new coach, Steve Hansen, that he played some of his best international rugby. He helped lift the Chiefs from near the bottom in 2011 to premiers in 2012. In between coming to Sydney this year for a one-year contract of $550,000 with the Roosters, he was made an offer he says he couldn't refuse - $1.2 million to play just a dozen games for Panasonic Wild Knights in Japan. He also had a clause in his contract with the Roosters that allowed him to box. Why boxing, I ask? "Why not," he says. "I want to achieve things. I'm not doing this to be remembered in 50 years' time. I am doing it for myself, so that I can say to myself I have done everything I can with the talents I have."

The way Williams tells it, he made a handshake deal years ago with the chairman of the Sydney Roosters, Nick Politis, to play with his team once his five-year ban had expired. But there may be more to it than that - his mum explains that he is a "leaguie" at heart. His dad says the same thing: "It took me four years just to learn the rules of rugby, now he's leaving," he jokes. Sonny Bill is from the rugby league clan and he has something to prove to them.

The boss of Channel Nine, David Gyngell, says the return of Williams is one of the best things to happen to the game for many years. Gyngell says there's a lot of "f..kin' noise and heat" around him, and "no noise is worse than bad noise". He predicts the viewing audience for games involving Williams will be up by 20-30 per cent, maybe more. He dismisses claims there may be some backlash because of his earlier disloyalty to the game. "Clubs aren't loyal. I have been around clubs since I was six years old and let me tell you, they aren't loyal. Why should the players not look out for what's in their best interest?"

The move back to Sydney is also about family for Williams - he will have most of his family around him again for the first time since he left home at 16. He has bought a big house in Oatley, an unpretentious southern Sydney suburb, and will live there with his father and his father's partner, his brother and one of his sisters. "I am really looking forward to it," says Sonny Bill. "We all lead pretty busy lives but there'll be a rule where we'll have a big cook-up meal together once a week. There'll be strictly no alcohol, too," he adds, looking at his father. "That's OK," says John Sr, "there's a pub up the road."

He's bought his mum a house and is saving to buy one for his dad, too. He's setting himself up with safe investments, real estate, for when his playing days are over. And, after getting into trouble with a house loan early in his career, Williams pays only cash for every property he buys. "Money doesn't motivate me," he says. "I know people think it does, but it doesn't. I could have earned many millions more if I'd just pursued the best deals and the biggest sponsors. My sister is an amazing athlete, captain of the NZ women's touch footy side. She's got no money and it makes me so happy to be able to pay for her flights and hotel when she goes overseas. I enjoy helping out my family and friends more than spending it on myself."

His one indulgence is beautiful clothes, and when he's finished with sport he'd like to design his own range, "with sizes that fit boys like me". Nasser says Williams will be financially secure for the rest of his life - what matters now is what he achieves. "A man can only live in one house," he says.

Upstairs, in the crew's apartment building, Sonny Bill is preparing for the fight, slowly and meticulously putting on his clothes. His brother, Johnny, puts on some music. It's the rap singer Drake. "Started from the bottom, now we're here / Started from the bottom now my whole team f..king here." No one says a word; everyone is lost in their own thoughts. Khoder Nasser has been nervous all week and now he's pacing up and down the pavement out the front. He has only two clients, Williams and Quade Cooper, and his fate is chained to theirs.

Williams' father and brother take the front seat of the Kia Carnival van for the drive to the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. Nasser and I sit in the rear seats while Sonny gets in the middle. He lies down and falls asleep, waking only when we pull into the venue. Gyngell is waiting with an ailing John "Strop" Cornell as we enter through a back entrance. They all stop and shake hands and Nasser says: "Now, it's show time."

The crew all gathers in the dressing room to pray and then the room is cleared. Sonny is nervous, and asking his coach about various moves. And then it really is show time. Both men step into the ring and for the first few rounds it appears Williams has it all over Botha; but the old fighter has tricks up his sleeve. He belts Williams after the referee has called "hold" and treads on his feet. At times Williams appears to have him in trouble, but is unable to finish him off. At the end of the eighth round Botha smacks him with a right jab, after the bell. The guy sitting next to me is a boxing writer and has Williams winning seven of the eight. In the ninth, however, Botha comes at him and lands several punishing blows. At the start of the 10th the ring announcer pronounces "Last Round". There is confusion - the television commentators say they had it marked "as a 12-rounder".

Williams is in trouble; for the first half of the round he fights for survival and then, with less than a minute to go, Botha lands a massive overhand right to his face. People wince at the pain of it. Williams is concussed. He's one good punch from being knocked out but somehow he manages to clutch and evade until the bell tolls. He survives to win, but only by a thread. "This is bullshit," Botha says, egging on the crowd. "You saw who won this."

In the dressing room after the fight, Williams is still groggy - a neurosurgeon on hand confirms he's concussed. His friends gather around. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry." He's the victor, but in these moments after the battle he feels he's let the crew down.

The controversy starts almost immediately. There is a claim the final round was cut short by 15 seconds (it wasn't). Then Botha claims the fight was cut from 12 to 10 rounds and he wasn't told. The two were meant to fight late last year and the original contract was for a 10-round fight. Botha's camp claims that because it was a WBA-sanctioned fight it automatically should move to 12 rounds. Botha's promoter, Thinus Strydom, tells me they were informed before the fight that it was 10 rounds, but only "five or 10 minutes before". Bizarrely, Strydom did not tell Botha.

Then, a few days later, a story appears that Botha has failed a drug test from a sample taken a few days before the fight. In 1995, Botha was stripped of the IBF title after testing positive to steroids. Botha claims the samples were collected by one of Nasser's relatives and tampered with. Nasser says this is "bullshit" and that the sample was done in a doctor's surgery.

Then, sensationally, Botha claims Khoder Nasser had offered him a $150,000 bribe to throw the fight. Nasser vehemently denies this. Even Botha's promoter says he has some "very big questions marks" about this claim; Strydom tells me that he and his fighter have a close relationship but Botha never mentioned anything about the alleged bribe on the night of the fight, or the following day or on the plane trip back to South Africa. Is it something you'd have expected him to reveal, I ask? "If it happened, yes." A week after the fight, Botha's camp claimed that a rematch had been agreed to. "All this stuff just pissed me off," Williams tells me a week later. "I gave it my all and I am really proud of what I achieved - I was spent after three rounds and I made it to the end."

In this sport of rogues and shysters, one man is universally admired: the boxing trainer Johnny Lewis. "There's one great pity in all this controversy, and that is that Sonny Bill fought an unbelievably brave fight," Lewis says. "It was only his sixth fight. It was a great performance against a tough, experienced opponent, and not a word has been written about it." Can he make it as a fighter? "Maybe, but only if he concentrates on it full time. Boxing's not a part-time pursuit."

A few days later, Sonny is training with the Roosters. Gyngell's got his heat, white hot.