Early Life
Williams was born on 3 August 1985, in Auckland, New Zealand, the son of John and Lee (née Woolsey). He is of Samoan descent on his father's side. He has an older brother, John Arthur, and younger twin sisters, Niall and Denise. Williams grew up in a working class family in a government house in the Auckland suburb of Mount Albert and attended Owairaka Primary School, Wesley Intermediate and Mount Albert Grammar School. As a child, he has been described as being "painfully shy" as well as “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.” Despite being tipped to have a promising future in athletics, Williams abandoned it when he was about 12 years old. Though his father was an accomplished rugby league player, Williams has said it was his mother who introduced him to the game.
Read more about this topic: Sonny Bill Williams
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)