Homeless man with golden voice becomes new US hero

LOS ANGELES - The US has a new rags-to-riches hero - a homeless man who has been inundated with job offers after a video of him went viral this week.

Even by the warp-speed standards of the internet age, the transformation of Ted Williams has been incredible. At the beginning of the week he was begging for change at a busy junction in Columbus, Ohio, when a local journalist persuaded him to show off his deep-toned radio voice on a video clip for a local news site.

The video quickly became an internet and TV hit and the offers started rolling in immediately for the 53-year-old hobo. He signed a contract with US food conglomerate Kraft Wednesday, and his commercial for the company aired Friday.

Homeless since 1996 after battling drug and alcohol addictions, Williams has also nabbed a dream job with a two-year contract to be the announcer for the local NBA basketball team the Cleveland Cavaliers. Other job offers came from cable news site MSNBC and the National Football League.

But it was not his sudden fame and the chance to leave the streets for good that had Williams in tears of joy Friday morning. Instead it was his reunification after more than a decade apart with his 90-year-old mother Julia.

“I was just gone,” he said of the reunion on the Today Show. “We didn’t even say anything. Man, it was like a dream finally came true.”