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O’Shaquie Foster was just 12 years old when, alongside his brother in the family home, he watched his mother Christie Williams die of cancer.
“My biggest motivation when I started fighting – I wanted to bring the title belts to my mother,” he once said.
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Williams’ death at the tragically young age of 31 deprived him of the chance to ever do so.
Instead, on the day of her funeral, he fought not only grief but other amateur fighters in the process of winning one of his two Golden Gloves.
“It’s something my mother would have wanted me to do,” he also said. “It’s a path that I have to follow. I’m already making my mother proud, and after I win, hopefully, she’ll be happy.”
Williams had named her son O’Shanique, but when the master of ceremonies on his amateur debut announced him as O’Shaquie it stuck.
In the years since – he was later brought up with 10 other siblings in the home of his paternal grandmother Evelyn Foster – he has also come to be known as “Ice Water” or “Shock”, but, as he put it, one thing has remained consistent: “Boxing was my escape.”
Foster’s natural talents were such that, as an amateur, he came within three points of a victory that could have taken him to the 2012 Olympic Games, but those talents were also ultimately almost squandered.
Having turned professional in September 2012, he recorded eight successive victories before losing to Samuel Teah in November 2015 and, three fights later in July 2016, Rolando Chinea.
It was days before the defeat by Chinea that his cousin Jimmy Franks, with whom he had long been particularly close, was killed after being shot in the head in their hometown of Orange, east of Houston, Texas. Inside and outside of the ring, Foster was on the verge of losing his way.
In 2017 he was accused of attempted murder, and when that charge was reduced to aggravated assault he was imprisoned in Houston’s Harris County Jail, where he spent four months.
“I was in a 12-man unit, no security guards, just you, the walls and the other inmates,” he said in 2023. “You lose all control. That wasn’t my first time being locked up, but they wouldn’t bond me out, because they said I was a flight risk.”
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The area of the prison to which Foster was referring was known as “the block”. There were brick walls and no windows, and when in April 2017 Hurricane Harvey reached Houston, the prisoners there weren’t evacuated and were instead forced to endure being locked up without power for what Foster remembers as between one and two weeks.
Living in the dark for such a lengthy period affects the senses. The only light Foster and his fellow inmates saw came when the prison guards delivered meals via flaps in the door, presenting their sanity with an additional test.
“You’ve really got to be strong,” he once remembered. “Guys were kicking the ceiling like trying to get something open. They were banging on walls, just going crazy.”
Before Foster’s release from prison, the great Terence Crawford fought Julius Indongo for the undisputed super-lightweight title, won inside three rounds, and proved himself a fighter of the very highest calibre. Foster, while locked up, had managed to watch.
“I was sitting there and thinking about my options,” he recalled. “I knew I could be in and out of here for the rest of my life and burn my dreams. But I understand that boxing has a timespan and it ain’t something you can do forever, so being locked up changed my mindset. I knew I needed to give boxing all I had before it was too late.”
It was with a stoppage that December of Andrew Goodrich that Foster’s life, and career, started to be rebuilt. There followed a further eight victories before, in February 2023, he won the vacant WBC super-featherweight title by earning a unanimous decision over Rey Vargas. He then dramatically defended it that October by stopping Vargas’ fellow Mexican Eduardo Hernandez in Cancun, Mexico, when behind on the scorecards and with only 22 seconds remaining of the 12th and final round.
The statement Foster made vastly grew his profile, and yet it proved his last fight under Matchroom, who he then left to sign with Top Rank.
“Everything about that fight wasn’t genuine,” he said. “I was treated like the B-side. They did everything to get the advantage – which you’re supposed to do – but as a promoter, I think you’d be kind of, in between.
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“It was deeper than just me and him fighting. For sure. The ring was soft; the ring was small; there was all kinds of things going on with that fight. The judges – one judge got me down; the other judge gave him the first seven or eight rounds. It’s crazy.
“But it’s all good. That’s why we’re here now – I felt genuine love from Top Rank, and it just felt like the right choice.”
In his first fight under his new promoters, Foster narrowly outpointed Abraham Nova. In his second, he sacrificed his title when he saw it controversially awarded, via split decision, to Robson Conceicao.
On Saturday at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in Verona, New York, Foster and Conceicao fight for the second time.
“A lot of times, people get robbed, and they don’t get the rematch,” the 31-year-old said. “I’m fortunate to get that rematch, and I’m looking to let my hands go more.
“I want the biggest fights. We’ve got the Emanuel Navarrete-Oscar Valdez fight on December 7. So, I feel like it will line up.”