Born: 1942, in Cumnock, Ayrshire.
Died: 21 June, 2008, in Cumnock, Ayrshire, aged 65. FREDDIE Williams was something of a dinosaur as far as the modern world of bookmaking is concerned, and for that, punters everywhere should
give thanks.
In an age when most of the major firms appear to be run by accountants hell-bent on balancing the books, "Fearless Freddie", as he became known, was a graduate of the old school.
He had opinions; he stuck to them. He put his money where his mouth was and if you wanted a bet, no matter how big or small, he would take it.
Occasionally, he would also throw in some free advice, as on the day I had an investment on what seemed a sure thing at Musselburgh.
"You're betting that?" he asked incredulously as he relieved me of my cash. Needless to say, he was right and I was wrong.
It was Williams's skirmishes with gambler J P McManus, the pair first being introduced to each other by another illustrious Scottish bookie, John Banks, that established him as a man with nerves of steel.
Mr McManus is known to bet in the sort of amounts the rest of us could retire on, and having waited years to go head-to-head with the legendary Irish punter, Williams wasn't about to let the opportunity slip, even if he had undergone a quadruple heart bypass just three months earlier.
The pair first crossed swords at the 1999 Cheltenham Festival, when Williams put his surgeon's handiwork to a severe test by accepting three bets from Mr McManus of £40,000, £50,000 and then another £50,000.
None of the trio could race as fast as Williams's repaired heart, though, and they all lost.
Mr McManus was just one of many who have paid tribute to his old adversary in the past few days.
"It was with great sadness that I heard of his death," he said.
"We had some jousts at Cheltenham and racing has lost a very colourful and loving character."
Had it not been for a change in the rules, which for years decreed that bookmakers' pitches at racecourses were allocated on a "dead man's shoes" basis, passed down from generation to generation of the same family, the set-to between the two big hitters would never have materialised.
"I first put my name down for Cheltenham in 1976," Williams once said.
"It was almost impossible to get a pitch there in those days, and 22 years later, I think I was still only 45th on the list. At that rate, I'd have been about 150 years old before I got one."
He didn't have to wait quite that long, and after he paid £90,000 at public auction, the prestigious number two slot at Cheltenham was his.
"If I'd bought myself a yacht with the money, I couldn't have had more fun," he said.
Given the huge figures at stake, it wasn't always a barrel of laughs, the sheer physical exertion of standing on a box for six or seven hours at a time merely adding to the mental exhaustion.
"Go into the back garden and try it some time," was his advice to any doubting Thomas.
Not that hard graft was an unknown phenomenon for "Fearless", a 90-hour week overseeing his soft drinks and mineral water company, his three shops, his Glasgow restaurant and his pitches at race courses and greyhound stadia being commonplace at one time.
It was still a better life than he would probably have had if he had followed the family tradition of becoming a miner in the Ayrshire coalfields.
Having contracted polio as a youngster, however, he was left with one leg shorter than the other, so he failed the medical and was therefore considered unfit to go down the pit.
His working-class upbringing was perhaps one of the reasons Williams was renowned for treating triumph and disaster in exactly the same way.
Win, lose, or draw, Freddie Williams never changed. "You'll never see me jumping up and down when I win because I always feel that if you go overboard about winning, you'll feel like cutting your wrists when you lose," he said. "Anyway, you can't get too excited or emotional when you've got a heart like mine."
Even a car-jacking in 2006, when eight hooded men attacked his Jaguar with crowbars as he travelled back to his hotel from Cheltenham, was turned into a joke.
"They couldn't have known anything about racing because I only had about a hundred grand on me as I'd lost 800,000 to JP earlier in the day," he said.
Right until the end, Freddie Williams kept on working and was in his usual pitch at Musselburgh on Friday afternoon before being flown by helicopter to the evening meeting at Ayr and then heading to Shawfield greyhounds on Saturday night.
He is survived by daughters Julie and Shirley.
The full article contains 835 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
