Willie de Wit
| Personal information | ||||||||||||||||
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| Born |
June 13, 1961 Three Hills, Alberta, Canada |
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| Height | 6 ft 2 1⁄2 in (1.89 m) | |||||||||||||||
| Weight | 210–215 lb (95–98 kg) | |||||||||||||||
| Achievements and titles | ||||||||||||||||
| World finals | World Amateur Heavyweight Champion | |||||||||||||||
| National finals | Canadian Heavyweight Champion | |||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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William Theodore "Willie" deWit, Q.C. (born June 13, 1961) is a judge on the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta sitting in Calgary since 2017. Previously, he was a criminal defence lawyer and a professional boxer. He represented Canada at the 1984 Summer Olympics and won a silver medal in the heavyweight division. DeWit and teammate Shawn O'Sullivan were heavily touted going into the Games, as both had won the world championship.
DeWit played football in high school and was an all-star quarterback. He was offered a scholarship to the University of Alberta, but decided to quit football after growing tired of team sports after losing patience with his high school teammates. He began going to a Grande Prairie health club, which was run by a man named Jim Murrie. At the time, deWit's father Len was terminally ill with a brain tumor so Willie started hitting the heavy bags to stay out of the house and to stay in shape. Impressed with his dedication and size, Murrie introduced deWit to Dr. Harry Snatic, a dentist and rancher who had been a youth boxing coach in Louisiana before moving his family in 1971 to Beaverlodge, a small town near Grande Prairie. He worked out with deWit three times a week, first in the health club, until it went out of business a short time later, and then in the deWit's unheated garage where temperatures would often get to 10 or 20 degrees below zero.
DeWit's first fight came at the Alberta provincial championships, in March 1979 in Medicine Hat. Snatic entered deWit in the light heavyweight intermediate novice division for boxers age 17 to 20 with less than 10 fights. DeWit knocked out his first opponent in 20 seconds—which caused the coaches of the six other fighters in the division to pull their fighters. DeWit had won his first championship. Snatic then entered Willie in the British Columbia Golden Glove championships. where he fought 18-year-old Shane Anderson who was the western Canadian 178-pound champion and a veteran of about 40 fights. DeWit lost by decision. But he did beat Anderson in two of three return matches. In the last of those bouts, deWit knocked out Anderson, who never fought again.
Snatic then took Willie to fight at the Washington State Penitentiary where he knocked out his opponent in the opening minute of the first round, nearly causing a prison riot. Afterwards in April 1982 Snatic decided to sell his ranch and moved to Calgary. deWit went with him in order to find sparring partners, and to train with a Ugandan exile named Mansoor Esmail, who was Calgary's top boxing coach, and was considered a physical-conditioning genius.
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